Various bits and bobs

The social scene

 In the interests of finding a suitable time for David and I, Jim and Judy to go and visit John and Adair, given John is very poorly, I've been identifying days that we need to be at home here in Waikanae. Bloody hell, the social calendar is quite full! What with drinks on Fridays, Quiz night and Bingo each once a month on Fridays (contemporaneous with drinks where I am occasionally on serving food, bar duty or just socialising), Monthly dinners, Sector 10 meetings and monthly Residents' Association committee meetings, plus podiatrist and osteopath appointments, it looks like we have no spare time at all!

That's not true by any stretch, as can be seen by the days of empty spaces in the calendar. So rest easy, because I am! David, on the other hand, continues to be pretty fully occupied with his Weaving Memories work. And he does such a good job on it.

Yesterday morning we had Bruce, Gary, David R, John and Leith here for breakfast. We generally go out for breakfast together but the choice of places has palled on me a bit. So as we finished up last Saturday at a place which was pretty disappointing for us as vegetarians, I resolved to have everyone come here yesterday. David brought in our additional tabletop to increase the size of the table so we could easily fit 7 of us plus multiple serving dishes.

If I do say so myself, the brekkie was very good:

• scrambled eggs, bacon, chilli beans, potato roasties (not rostis), cooked tomato/capsicum/onion/garlic spicy mix, guacamole, sauces, tortillas and sourdough toast.

The kitchen and dining table did look like a tip after the guys left, but while David ferried stuff from the table to the kitchen, I rinsed dishes and pans and loaded the dishwasher and washed the stuff that wouldn't fit. Didn't take long at all for us to have the place shipshape - complete with the tabletop being taken off and put back in the garage, and the tablecloth and sertviettes being processed through the washing machine. We make a good efficient team!

Dinner tonight

There were some leftovers: chilli beans and roasties, plus a goodly amount of the tomato spicy mixture. David finished the beans and roasties for dinner last night and I have prepared a sort of lasagne (SOL, made with fusilli - no lasagne in the pantry...) for tonight's dinner. I had deliberately cooked extra of the tomato mixture expressly for this  purpose. The other ingredient of the SOL is my mushroom sauce. And David is currently making one of our favourite salads to go with it: beetroot and carrot.

Potential new resident

A friend of ours has been phoned by Parkwood to come and look at villas, so on Friday I joined her on the sightseeing. Two things:

• I realised just how small our villa is in comparison to others here - and that I wouldn't change to a larger one even if it was offered: we are fabulously sited for sun, privacy and external spaciousness, we have wonderful neighbours, and our place is small but perfectly formed and suits us very well
• our friend saw a villa that she really liked, and she has an option on it - we looked at 3 that are available but one stood out as being just right for her - a bit like Goldilocks ...

The Great Escapers

 Have you seen the movie The Great Escapers with Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson? If not, find out where you can see it and get on to it. It's wonderful. One day last week, Janet and I saw it at the Shoreline Cinema. Two amazing actors and an excellent supporting cast, and a true story of an 89 year old WWII veteran who travelled alone to France for the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings that he had been part of as an Able Seaman on one of the barges back in 1944.

NYT puzzles

Other things that have been occupying my mind, at least for 15 - 30 minutes or so each day are 3 New York Times puzzles: Wordle, Connections and the Mini Crossword; the latter two were recommended to me by Olek, our lovely 19 year old grandson.

Wordle is more or less challenging each day, depending on the results of my starting word, so sometimes I get it in 3 or 4 (most often), occasionally I get it in 2, sometimes 5, less frequently 6 and even less frequently I get an x/6. I console myself with the thought that it really is just a guessing game and chance plays a big part. Well, that's what I tell myself and others...

Connections can be simple/obvious, but other times and more often than not, it can be diabolical in its fatuous, obscure, tenuous, and/or American links among the sets of four words. I often give up, just choose random sets of 4 words so that it tells me I have run out of allowable mistakes and tells me the answers which gobsmack me with their idiocy.

A fail - I only got two sets of four connected words...

Success!! All four with no mistakes - this doesn't happen for me very often. But yay when it does!!

The Mini Crossword is achievable although sometimes I have to google stuff to find answers that are USA specific. I don't consider it cheating - I consider it adding to my body of knowledge.

New words...

For instance, this morning while reading a JD Kirk Scottish detective novel (no, not highbrow at all) I came across the word philtrum - go ahead, look it up. 

The beauty of reading on a Kindle is that you can press on the word and the dictionary function comes in to play and tells you the meaning. I found this particularly useful when reading Christopher Hitchens! 

The other fab thing is that the Vocabulary Builder function records all the words you've looked up and you can got back and check them out - and see the flashcard behind each word. How bloody cool is that?

Kiwi Drip Stand

Adair has constructed this for the distilled water required for John's AirVo machine - to keep moisture mixed in with the oxygen. Ingenious, eh? I'm surprised that the hospital didn't discharge him with this piece of equipment, but Adair found a solution!

Important information
 

My lovely nephew (son of my little big sister Dee) yellow carded me for that fb post. But read on ... His wife is a gem!

This is not something I want coming towards me at speed. You?

I have grown this abutalon from a cutting that was nurtured by Denny Meyer, from a tree now removed from the section beside theirs in Whanganui. It makes me happy!

The husband, aka ACP and TB, is in the clear

 Readers of the previous post, in the spirit of being adherents to the misinformed view that David has a hard life and should be known as Poor David, will be pleased to know that punitive measures have ceased. The howls have died down.

This morning at about 2.51 (approximately or thereabouts...) an email from IRD came in. When I saw it at 5am I forwarded it to the TB (I'm not ignoring those emails again!), and thoughtfully waited until 6.30am before informing said TB. He immediately got up and logged in, as the email required. 

And yay, he is so very lucky: the GST balance is $0.00, including penalties.

And why is he lucky, you ask? Well, punitive measures have ceased and, as he is now the only income earner, he would have had to pay the penalty if it hadn't been wiped. So yes, he is lucky.

In other news: 

Yesterday morning before I was properly awake, David yelped that he had cramp in his foot. Off he hobbled to the bathroom to get his foot on the cold floor, which apart from my wrenching his foot back to break the cramp's hold, is the only way we know how to fix it. And then later, before we got up and while I was typing something in my phone, he yelped even more loudly and said it was back. He got out of bed and said he couldn't walk. Well, I was busy composing, so clearly I wasn't available to help. So I suggested he crawl. And then I couldn't help, because I was laughing so much.

Because I already had my phone out, I was able to take a photo:

I sent this to Olek, as any good grandmother would...

Tamarillos are back in season! Pond accoutrements and my GST bill...

 Tamarillos:

If you aren't an NZer you may not understand my excitement or even what I am excited about.

Tamarillos are one of my two favourite fruits and they are strictly seasonal. And fortunately each one is available at a slightly different time of year.

Feijoas are Favourite A and Tamarillos are Favourite 1, and they are both wonderful. I don't think I could grow tamarillos here in Parkwood, but I'm happy to give it a go. And we now have 3 small feijoa trees planted along the west wall of the house. All we have to do is keep the damn pukekos away.

But I digress, as usual.

Earlier this week I was in the fruit and veg section of the supermarket and saw tamarillos, looking luscious and delicious and a beautiful deep ruby/crimson colour. The price was $24.99 a kilo, so I bought 10 of them and to hell with the expense... which I didn't look at, by the way. That is a strategy I adopted a long time ago, and I know it's a strategy of privilege and good income. I first took it up when we were having a bathroom fitted in the moonporch (sunporch that got no sun) of Cherswud, our Johnsonville home. It had windows on the two outside walls and needed an imposing windowsill to cover the 10" deep stone walls. I had the choice between a piece of 1" dressed rimu or 2" dressed rimu. I chose the 2" and said to the builder not to tell me how much it cost.

So for the last two days I have had tamarillos, yoghurt and muesli for brekkie - delicious! And today I bought online two boxes of tamarillos at slightly less than I paid per kg in the supermarket. Yay!!!

Accoutrements for the ponds:

And we are getting a pump and fountain in the ponds outside our place and Janet's. The two ponds are a lovely feature however ours has always had clear water that is full of algae and Janet's water is cloudy but the algae, if present, doesn't clump. A pump and fountain will keep the water circulating and clear and limit algae growth. So we can get fish in our pond, just as Janet has in hers. We do have really lovely waterlilies in their season and we had a frog earlier this year. Maybe with clearer water we will have more frogs - that will be cool.

My GST bill:

Almost since I started contracting way way back in the 90s, ACP has completed my tax returns, both withholding payments and GST (VAT to you UK people). He took it on when I had a grief-stricken tantrum over my GST return and stabbed the paper form with the pen, having made a couple of rookie mistakes. The problem was that the form was on the Winnie-ther-Pooh mousemat, and I stabbed Piglet...multiple times, as I have just been reminded. 👿👿👿😓😓😓

And he has always done a sterling job, apart from once when he was late filing his own return and used my tax return to pay his overdue fee!

But he has now badly blotted his copybook and I may have to punish him severely. When I get emails from IRD I confidently ignore them because my TB (Tax B*tch - his name for himself, not mine!) has it all in hand. In fact it's something he is religious about, nay - almost obsessive about - akin to his obsession with USA politics and podcasts on that subject, but that's another story.

I have recently had a couple of emails from IRD which, as I said, I confidently ignored. But yesterday the TB informed me that I owed IRD $2000 in late fees and interest because I hadn't filed a GST return for the six months ending March 31 this year. Considering I haven't earned anything since December 22 and my last payment came through in January 23, the GST return for Oct 23 - Mar24 would have been a NIL return.

But had my TB filed it? Had he heck. And of course, it's no longer possible to phone IRD up, speak to a person and explain. So after much gnashing of teeth and no success at getting through the phone system using voice recognition, we sent IRD an email on their contact form. I had to apologise for overlooking the return. And it somehow didn't seem appropriate to say in the email that my TB was undergoing punitive measures for his oversight.

Naturally the NIL return was filed last night, so now we await a decision on clemency or no clemency. Punitive measures could be increased if clemency is not forthcoming. Listen for the howls...