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!