Week in Wellington

Here are some photos from our lovely week in Wellington. We averaged about 15km walking a day according to my phone - interspersed with stops for a coffee and a cheese scone. I went on a personal cheese scone tour of NZ; all were excellent but the Aro Cafe does one with a touch of spinach that I can highly recommend. Our airbnb apartment had a very Wellington view (and the weather was like that nearly every day, outstanding (and unusual)).

We went up the cable car and took an old person selfie with the view.

Then we walked back down through the Botanic Gardens to where we used to live and took an old person selfie of the front of our little townhouse. We thought it was very fancy at the time.

We went for a walk up Mt Vic with a friend and sat and had a chat at the top. With no wind, clear skies and sunshine. It was one of those four days every year that Wellington uses to tempt visitors and homesick Australians. Stunning. 

We went to Zealandia for some nature, did a Parliament tour for laughs, my husband went to Weta Workshop to see the models, and bought a print to hang on our walls. And we did a lot of shopping, a lot of eating, caught up with old friends and spent a lot of time looking forward to retirement, when we can do this kind of thing Every Day.

Holiday in New Zealand

We have spent the last two weeks having a lovely holiday in NZ - the delayed July adventure for my Dad's 80th. The kids couldn't make the rescheduled trip (they will go separately in January) so just the two of us, and we had a fabulous time. Lots of family, lots of food, lots of talking and then a nice touristy week in Wellington walking about and catching up with friends.

I won't share photos of the family as they might not like being plastered across the internet. But here are my Dad's tangelos. The citrus is crazy, we stuffed ourselves.

We snuck off for a night mid-family to a coastal resort - beautiful and felt very isolated. It wasn't really (just an hour out of Auckland) but lots of sky and sea and not many people.

Black sand beach on the west coast - the picture above - the one below is on the east coast so white sand. It is less than an hour from where I grew up but I'd never been there! It was wild, apparently someone got taken by a shark there last year and I can totally believe it. 

We had lovely weather but apparently they have had truckloads of rain. This is the Waikato River running behind the Hamilton Botanical Gardens ... looks full and dangerous. The gardens were amazing though, well worth an explore.

Different again

So this is more Diane Antone that is different again - not delicate watercolour but mixed media with a bit more oomph. At some point she said that if you’re not sure about a painting just keep going adding things, which is very different from the more intellectual angle that many watercolour painters take. They like to call it the ‘thinker’s medium’ because you have to preplan, and plot out your whites and lights right at the beginning, and plop your water on then your paint and leave it alone … none of this touching up you can do with acrylics or oils. Apparently. Not my forte, pre-thinking, but I like the plopping and leaving alone. 

Anyway, these pumpkins were the effort of ten minutes at a time each evening for about a week. More orange! More paint! A bit of coloured pencil. And some pen. Then more paint. It’s still not great (they look like large orange pouffes) but a different way of attacking it.

This was straight mixed media - a sort of landscape. Maybe. Diane also says that if you put a wiggly kind of border around it then people know you don’t mean it seriously, and it takes all the pressure off. Makes no difference to the picture at all, but suddenly nobody is under the illusion that this is Art, and you can do whatever you want. Just by putting in a wiggly border. Genius.

And here we have a mushroom forest scene. Probably more from life if you do live in northern France and not eastern Australia… although with the rain we are having I expect mushrooms to start sprouting from the carpet soon. Such a tremendous wet - I know it’s terrible climate change but it’s hard to just not be grateful for rain after the bad dry.  And lastly we have a colourful sunflower, paint, white gouache and watercolour pencils and marker pen too.

Kuretake paints

I bought a completely unnecessary set of 36 Kuretake watercolour paints - but gee they’re nice. They can be used as normal watercolour with lots of water but are thick enough to have almost a gouache effect if you don’t use much water. And the gold is LOVELY. I was having a tiresome day at work and weakened for online shopping. This is absolutely my weakness - distraction at work! When I retire I will be much richer. 

Part of the charm is the box, talk about marketing genius, they suggest the first thing you should do is fill in the colour chart on the inside of the box. Brilliant - because obviously all you want to do is try out ALL the colours - and they make it sound like you are doing a sensible and useful thing! And give you a series of little boxes to colour in! Honestly painting in those 36 boxes was one of the happiest half hours I had this week. 

I also got a watercolour brush that has the water in the handle. I thought I was buying one but it turned out it was three of different sizes, and that’s fine too. The instructions are in Japanese but I figured it out. I thought that it would be like a normal brush, just not dipping it into the water, but it’s not, it’s quite different. You use the paint dark at first then brush it out with the wet brush. I think it will be very useful but might take some time to get used to. 

I thought it would be good for roses (dark in the middle, lighter at the outside) so practised with a sheet of flowers. 

And then, when I was downstairs, the avocado-shaped assassin jumped up on my desk and flicked out half a dozen watercolour pans, one by one, off the desk and onto the carpet. Why???? Vengeance????? Now I have to leave the lid on the box. Monster.

Labour Day weekend

We had a long weekend so of course I headed down to the beach for a slightly longer than usual getaway. It was the middle of the school holidays so heaps of people around - it is always such a shock after the emptiness of winter. Saturday it rained but Sunday and Monday were beautiful days with lots of keen beans in the water. Not me, I thought about it but went for a long walk and didn't take my sweatshirt off - a cold breeze. I did paddle though. Water is absolutely freezing.

Here is a log that had floated up. Massive thing, and covered in tiny little shellfish. Every dog and child under the age of about seven was absolutely fascinated, and would bury it in sand that would get washed off in the next tide. I haven't seen anything like it. I wonder how long it was in the water for? Does it take years to get covered in little shells or is it something that happens in a few days?

I made three pairs of very boring elastic-waisted trousers of varying lengths and widths; made a zucchini bake on Friday night that I ate for three dinners; read an excellent science fiction book; poked around the shops in Mogo and bought nothing I didn't need (amazing) and gave the place a good scrub when I left.  We shifted to daylight savings time too, which is always a bit disconcerting for the first few days. 

The new chair pads I bought from Ikea are manifestly way too small for the cane dining chairs. However the old ones have basically squashed out of existence by now - they are literally 3mm thick - so the new ones are more comfortable even though they only cover two thirds of the butt space. I swapped them over and if anyone objects they can swap them back, and I will keep an eye out for large butt chair pads. Not as easy as you might think.