Oscar's Third

"Look, a number 3! Have a really good look... a little closer... head down a bit..."

As promised, the pics from Oscar's party are up as a new album on the LosNemo gallery. Not as many as there might have been; for some reason I completely forgot to pick up the camera until it was nearly cake time. Too much jelly and crisps, too early in the day, I suppose. Actually, there were just too many things going on at once for this bear of very little brain. I put it all down to a combination of a mis-spent youth and having kids late in life. I realise that would appear to amount to the same thing; the fact is, they're very different things indeed...

Too much going on seems to have become a permanent state of affairs. You might expect, what with two posts appearing in a single week, that there's not a lot to write about: far from it. On the day of the birthday party, Matt and Antonia arrived from Auckland around the time it all kicked off, just as I was fully committed to woking up a venison vindaloo and tarka dhal, round about the time the lady from the Department of Statistics knocked on the door hoping to conduct a 2-hour interview. It's been non-stop ever since. School holidays don't help either. It boils down to a basic parental fact: when term ends, very little of a serious nature gets done unless you get serious about multi-tasking. Saturday was an inspiration: you basically need to do everything at once to get anything done at all.

Yesterday, for example, it was the Music Fairy that did the job. The brainchild of Nicky and Joseph down the street (the people we stayed with when we first got here) and an extension of her music school, once a year they get the troupe together and do some stage shows. Not only is it great fun for the kids, it was also the perfect opportunity to snap the photographs I've been promising to do them and a good chance to arrange a bike ride with Joseph for later in the week... plus it gave me a chance to drop everyone off in town afterwards while I scooted back to Lyttelton to sort out solicitors, planning officers and elusive landowners.

That side of things is putting up very little resistance. People at the council continue to be really helpful and it's looking like our wacky ideas about building mud huts might have a sympathetic reception there. Plus I finally spoke with the vendor today and he seems right into the idea, even going so far as to "wish everyone buying there had the sort of approach" that we do. Which was nice. We sign for the land on Friday, following an overnighter in Christchurch and a late night torchlit search of the Museum, just before we go to see The New Adventures of Auntie McDuff's Magical Trunk at the Arts Centre.

Roll on the weekend? Aye, those were the days :)