Miscellaneous ramblings

It's been a bit of an uneventful week, really.

As Iain spent quite a bit of time chopping wood last weekend, and it was also a bit chilly, we tried out our log burner for the first time last Sunday night. We were impressed with the amount of heat it gave off, but somewhat alarmed by the large amount of wood we managed to burn through in only a few hours. We've put in an order for a couple of trailer loads of firewood, so hopefully we'll have enough to last the winter. Also on Sunday night was the strongest gale we've experienced since we arrived in New Zealand. It was a real humdinger, and I became so worried about what might happen if the huge tree on the slope above the bedroom were to lose a branch or two during the night, we dragged the mattress into the sitting room and spent the night there.

We went for our first proper Maori lesson on Tuesday night, and the three hours whizzed past. It was good fun, and we learned lots (or 'heaps' as they say here.)

On Wednesday we won the quiz night at Rosie O'Grady's for the first time. This was only because we joined forces with another team, who were seriously short of members. Fortunately, our various areas of expertise* complemented each other. We won a fifty dollar bar tab, so we'll have to go again this week - what a blow! ;-)

We didn't get a very good night's sleep on Friday because we were woken repeatedly between about 1 am and 8 am by a series of five earthquakes. They weren't as strong as the one we had a few weeks ago, but they were much nearer, with their epicentres all in the same place - out in the Tasman Sea about 30 kilometres southwest of Wanganui.

So far we've had a very lazy weekend, apart from our run this morning. In an effort to get fitter, we started on the Runner's World beginners' running schedule last month, and tomorrow is the start of Week 6 - run for twelve minutes, walk for two minutes, run for twelve minutes. We've managed to keep to the schedule so far, which is great. This is yet another case of different skills complementing each other. I find the running itself a bit of a challenge, so Iain is able to support me in that department, whereas Iain finds getting out of bed in the first place the biggest hurdle to overcome, so I help him with that! If we manage to survive Week 8 (run for 30 minutes continuously) I'm going to enter the 'Round The Bridges' fun run in May. It'll be just the incentive I need to work on my speed. At the moment I'm being overtaken by old ladies on zimmer frames.

*or areas of ignorance