For the last few months Maaike has been studying for CELTA, a pretty rigorous English language certification. It was at least 20 hours a week of work on top of a normal job.. she didn’t get out much (and I had to cook a lot, to the point that we’re now both sick of broccoli soup ;). Anyway, she finished, and we headed off for a slightly lazy weekend, twas good. Just over to a bach on the banks peninsula. We had a quick look around birdlings flat and went to the http://www.gemstoneandfossilmuseum.co.nz/ (link currently broken). This very enthusiastic amateur had collected a lot of rocks – very beautiful and well worth a visit if you’re passing (it’s free!)

Anyway, congratulations to Maaike for finishing, and I must say, it’s very nice having her back (and not having to cook all the time ;)

As a final word, Maaike got an “A”, which only 3-5% of students get – excellent effort!

This weekend it was off up to Thames to play backgammon. I do love the game, though I really haven’t played it in a long while, at least, not with any consistency. We ran the “National Competition” (very loose definition if ever there was one) as a part of the mindsports festival, which is an initiative the Thames county council is trying to get going, with some success. Anyway 17 players turned up, and we had a good competition, it was great to be playing again. I ended up coming third overall, but it was a very close competition.

Oh, the other picture was of the police station which was finally demolished. There is still a huge amount of rebuild left to go.. my heart goes out to the people of Nepal who are going through hell at the moment, no doubt about it, even though it has faded from front page news.

May disappeared in a blur. Some of which was spent playing with my Raspberry Pi mini computer. I was attempting to make the pi talk over a 3G modem so that it could take pictures (from anywhere within cellphone reception) and upload them to a website. Basically worked too!, wrote a small ruby gem for interfacing with the modem. All in all a satisfactorily geeky time was had.

Other than that, went to a tiki-tane music evening, visited the graffiti exhibition which has taken over the rock climbing wall at the YMCA.

Decent exhibition, but, once you’ve seen it once that’s it. I really think that the new leadership at the YMCA has done a massive disservice to the climbing community here by halving the number of walls available. I do not see how having an exhibition is furthering their mission in any significant way. Hey ho.

What else… not too much really… work has become properly busy again, and I’m certainly enjoying the projects I’m working on at the moment. Helped encourage one of our clients to upgrade their version of Rails from 2.3 (very very old) to 3.2 (still quite “old” as these things go, but still under warranty so to speak). That was satisfactory!

Anyway, no major adventures to report, it’s sort of shoulder season while the ski season approaches.

For a solid year and a half, or so, I played scrabble with Katrina. I went so far as dictating the 2 letter words into an mp3 so I could study while biking around ;) Did help, but not enough… I was mercilessly thrashed week in week out. Anyway, she moved away to Melbourne, mostly to be closer to family (why would anyone want to do that ;) ehehheheeh. ehem. kidding Mum) and she ended up meeting a most excellent Kiwi (Aaron), and this weekend they got married.

It was a lovely ceremony, and then great food and dancing. (un)Fortunately no time for scrabble.. I’m completely out of practice it would have been murder.

Anyway, a hearty congratulations to Katrina & Aaron :)

For the long weekend Steve & Michelle were heading away to Lake Tennyson and I went along with them (because, someone, who shall remain nameless, is working super hard on a course and doesn’t come out to play ;) heh,

Aaaanyway, it was a lovely weekend away. The highlights were: being somewhat lazy on the Saturday and reading lots of Hornblower (excellent books, highly recommend), and then going for a walk up to “Princess Bath”, a very nice corrie. Personally I think the princess could have chosen a warmer bath, but there you go.

This blob here is actually a mass of bees:

We had left a couple of beer bottles at the camp and when we came back, the (dark!) beer bottle had about 2cm of bees at the bottom of it. Steve, being the kind entomologist he is, warmed them up by the fire (but not too close) until they could fly away.

All in all a very nice Easter. Thanks Michelle & Steve :)