Exploring the Land of the Long White Cloud

As many of you know (and likely grew tired of!), I was obsessed with The Simpsons for a good few of my teenage years. And no obsessed isn't used lightly. I watched them over and over, tirelessly quoted episodes when the situation was right (or seemed right to me!) and even had some episode guide books with extra information about the show. Sadly, I somehow just couldn't keep up but still hold the show dear to me and can still pull out a great quote every now and then or I occasionally stream some of the best episodes (or if I'm lucky catch them on TV but once per day at like 7pm just doesn't cut it... what happened to 1-2 hours straight if you knew each channel's schedules well). But I definitely don't get enough Simpsons in my life anymore. Luckily, our good friend T-Conn is as big a fan as I am and she sent me the best link today so I wanted to share with you - who I know are also some very big simpsons fans too: http://www.buzzfeed.com/robinedds/billy-and...

Way back in the land where when we played video games on the computer, I used to be quite into it. Of course NES and SNES were great too. That's why I was so excited to come across this amazing archive of so many old school games . I've already played a round of Carmen Sandiego (and caught the criminal but missed my promotion). There are so many games I grew up with either playing in the computer lab at Frost Road on those old Macs that were grey rectangles, or at arcades and on our Nintendo systems. I miss the simplicity of those games. I can't even play any Playstation or Xbox games anymore because they are all so complex (and I don't have the interest to learn) or you need to actually keep your balance! Or they are mostly war shooting games. What happened to building bridges so one hundred lemmings made it safely home? Or all of the movie-based games that came in over the years (I mean Wayne's World and Beethoven's 2nd spawned games?!)? I guess some of th...

Whenever there are fresh flowers in the house, they always end up plunked into one of our drinking glasses (if they are lucky and don't end up in a beer bottle). This is because we have no vases as there's also not a ton of fresh flowers in the house - which I blame on Dustin's allergies. I finally remembered to look for a glass vase when I was at the op shop last week (translation: thrift store). This one was really not too bad as it was but I had been itching to try some of the new crafty painting ideas I had been seeing online for ages. After learning that a lot of the "dipped" in paint stuff is done with spraypaint - and because we only have silver, neon green and neon pink in spraypaint - I chose to paint the inside of the vase. Because I didn't thin the paint, it was nearly an entire day with the vase upside-down waiting for the paint to smoothly settle down the sides. My impatience got the best of me and I used my finger to dr...

My Christmas holidays are still going so I have been keeping busy this week as Dustin went back to work before me. It ended up being more lonely than I expected because most others were already back at work too! Sheesh. So I split my time with working on the house and doing some of my hobbies. The week has already evaporated but I do have a few things to show for it. Well, you can't really tell but I did paint the skirts and arcs in the hallway. Only with one coat so far because Dustin doesn't trust me to do a perfect job on the final coat... Once the paint is done we can finally put in the flooring! (The paint colour that won is the grey on the far left of the test patches on the wall.) It was too nice to just do inside stuff so I mowed the lawn which made a lunch time picnic in the shade the perfect break before more work. The secret is the iced coffee and the fact that I grated the egg for the egg sandwich and put fresh-from-the-garden dill i...

Summer has definitely arrived and has reminded us daily for the last week (at least) with its bright sunshine, clear skies and hot temperatures. You know what that means. Beach day! Last Saturday, we met some friends up the coast at White Cliffs. They brought the kayaks and Dustin brought the bait but we didn't take any fish home. We last visited this beach on our very first stint in New Plymouth and oddly we hadn't made the trek north since.  Sometimes it just takes a little encouragement from friends. And the promise of beach cricket. It was a lovely hot day so we brought umbrellas and snacks. I didn't really swim because I'm not really an ocean swimmer but Dustin was so far out in the kayak with Andy and his brother-in-law that I couldn't see them anymore. So, I amused myself by building a sand dog with Andy's niece. Her friend's dog just had ten puppies (nine if you take away the one the dog sat on) so we made a model of that dog...

Just a note to send wishes that you create good things in your lives in 2015!! All the best from us in NZ. We spent new year's day resting mostly (unless you count the first 4.5 hours of the year, that was spent watching fireworks, and dancing and laughing.) But more of the day was spent resting. Now we're going to wake ourselves up and go to the festival of lights at the park to see a friend's band play, an excellent way for our day to wind up if I do say so myself.