It's Alive

I'm not exactly a frequent poster here, but I'm going to try a few posts. This is purely for the benefit of susandennis, who mistakenly thinks nobody could possibly live a life crammed with less incident than her. Ha! Compared to me, she is a rock star, which the banality of my posts will prove beyond doubt. So let's start at the bottom, by talking about the weather.

I recently returned to New Zealand after a month in the Pacific Northwest, and to my disgruntlement I discovered that spring instead of springing had retreated so far backwards that the weather was exactly the same as when I left. Considering that Auckland broke the August rain record this year with 29 rainy days out of 31, I was not impressed. However, my damson tree wasn't fooled:



It knew it's spring, and it did its thing. With that amount of blossom, there's going to be a fairly splendid batch of damson jam emerging from my kitchen later this summer. Fortunately, the blossoming part was pretty much over before this week, as whoa, is it windy here. It was quite a nice day yesterday and I was wondering if I could get away with lunch outside on the waterfront on Friday. On looking at the forecast, the first thing I saw was the headline "Nine Metre Waves, Gale Force Winds, Snow". Okay, then. Admittedly the snow was a lot further south than here, but the winds, we got. We'll be lunching inside.