Party time!

Last year I made the mistake of telling Emily (the big granddaughter, aged four) that I was going to a little boy's birthday party. She was devastated that she couldn't come too, so I decided then that when and if they came to New Zealand I'd have a children's party for her to go to.

Luckily the weather was just perfect the whole time they were here, so both girls could wear the dresses I'd made them a wee while ago to the party. Em calls them variously the "rosy dresses" or the "princess dresses" and needs to put hers on when her Daddy plays the piano so she can dance properly! It's something to do with having exposed shoulders apparently. And pink.


The party started off with all the children (15 of them, some of my friends' kids) decorating their own party hats with pens and stickers and self-adhesive "jewels" and other bits and bobs. That was a good ice-breaker; quite a few of the kids didn't know each other, and Emily and Caitlin didn't know any of them.

After hats I gave them each bubble blowing gear and sent them outside to blow bubbles:


The parents were mingling and drinking beer and supervising, it was all good fun.


Then we had the food. We had all the traditional New Zealand kids' party food: cheerios (small cocktail sausages) with tomato sauce; rolled up luncheon sausage held together by toothpicks, toothpicks with cherry tomatoes and cheese cubes impaled on them; fairy pikelets (in America these would be called pancakes, in England, drop scones, and the "fairy" part is hundreds and thousands sprinkled on top); butterfly cakes; and last but definitely not least, ice cream and jelly!


They all seemed to have a good time, as did the Mummies and Daddies. They went through a good few bottles of beer, several loaves of bread, and all of my home made salamis and cheese anyway.

Breads

A couple of days after I returned from Ian's wedding, my son and his family came to stay. I did some baking in preparation:


A sandwich loaf for the kids, nice crusty sourdough bread for the grownups, and sultana and dried apricot fruit buns for everyone. The bread went down a treat, and I ended up getting up at ridiculous o'clock every morning while they were here to bake more. It's nice having someone to spoil.

The Wedding

My friend (and long-time-ago ex boyfriend) Ian, is eccentric to say the least. He grew up on a farm which, as the only son, he was expected to take over when his father retired. As a young man however, he became fascinated with old motorcycles. He started collecting motorbike wrecks that he found in farm sheds all over the place and could pick up for a few shillings. In time he became known as the guy to go to when you wanted some rare part for an old British bike, and he started making more money from selling bike parts than he did from milking cows. The cows soon went out the window, the milking shed filled up with bikes and parts and tools, soon to be followed by the pig shed and the tractor shed, and some railway carriages he somehow acquired, and some more sheds he built from scrap. His parents slowly sold off parts of the farm to neighbours until all that's left now is the home paddock, his Mum's house (she's 94, his Dad died a long time ago), and Ian's house (which used to be the "married couple's cottage" back in the milking days).

Ian makes friends easily, he knows people all over the country whom he pops in to visit when he's travelling around the place. He has no concept of time, and if he says he'll be somewhere at such and such a time you can generally add a couple of hours, or even days to that. He sees no need to be well dressed; when I was going out with him he wore clothes that were riddled with holes, but had a large stack of brand new things he'd been given for birthdays and Christmases going back ten years or more that he was "saving". You can only tell when he's dressed up because he's wearing shoes that match. He never wears socks. He was never a tall man, but he's shrunk a good six inches since I first met him, partly from the normal compaction of the spine you get with age, but also from the three vertebrae that got crushed in a bad motorbike accident he had when he was racing in a classic scramble (old fashioned motocross) a few years ago. He's been racing all his life, and I don't think he'll ever stop. If you've ever seen "The World's Fastest Indian", Burt Munro and Ian James are birds of a feather.

So, when Ian met Sandie, and all of a sudden started turning up on time and wearing clothes that were intact, we all knew she must be someone pretty special. I was sure of it when he was perfectly open with her about meeting up with me at race meetings. Not that there's any reason not to be, anything romantic between us was over decades ago, but this is the first girlfriend he's had that he has trusted not to jump to wrong conclusions. She's perfect for him. And marriage is important to her, so he finally, at the age of 67, decided to get married.

And didn't he look swish?:


He's wearing an old dress suit with brocade lapels that he's had since school, an old waistcoat with gold fleurs-de-lis handed down from his diplomat 6'4" brother-in-law, wing-collar shirt ditto, bow tie from goodness knows where (maybe leftover fabric from Sandie's frock?), matching black shoes, and socks. Somehow or other it all came together really well and he looked so distinguished that his mother couldn't believe he was him.

Despite having requested no gifts, they got several quite substantial ones. Ian's friend Pete is in a band, so he gave the entertainment for the wedding. Here they are setting up and doing sound-checks in the morning:


Ian's friend Malcolm carpeted the house.

Sandie's brother and his workers catered the wedding with a superb barbecue, here they are setting up:


My gift was less substantial than these; I designed and printed the invitations for the stag night, for the wedding, and for the after-wedding party; and I organised and catered the stag night.

The best gift though, was from Ian's old farmer friends Alan and Jenny, who provided the wedding venue; their magnificent property "Kinsale" just outside Palmerston North. Here are a few photos I took in the morning before the wedding:

This is where the ceremony was held, the bridal party walked over the bridge to get there:


The food was served here:


Covered seating:


Jenny doing a bit of last minute weeding:





This little wooden house on the old tree stump is actually a dove-cot:










And the weather was absolutely perfect.

New boots

The motorcycle race meeting I went to a couple of weeks ago is quite a casual affair, it's run by what you might call an "outlaw biker gang" (the members of which include, however, two past New Zealand champion teams in speedway sidechair racing and several keen competitors in drag- and road-racing) who hire Manfield for an informal race meeting which is attended by riders of British, European and American motorcycles from all over New Zealand. They've been doing this annually for over thirty years, and have always had a women's race in the programme. The young lady who came third this year wore the most stunning pair of shoes to the prize-giving, so of course I had to find out where she got them. The answer was an English website: www.schuh.co.uk, and that they were not terribly expensive.

So I had to go and have a look, didn't I? And then I had to buy these boots, which were reduced from £99.99 to £45.


When you add the amazingly cheap £10 postage to get them half way around the world, that came to just NZ$120. It only took a week for them to get here too.

They're suede, lined with leather and fabric (quite cosy), made in Spain, have excellent pirate-type tops and three inch sort of triangular semi-wedge heels, neither of which you can see in this photo. Maybe this link will stay working so you can get a good look though - even though they've sold out.

Carpet

Well, what felt like the busiest three weeks of my life are now over, and I can catch up with this blog.

I've just had a couple of weeks away in Palmerston North going to a motorcycle race meeting and attending an old (we split up 30 years ago) boyfriend's wedding. Ian (the groom) was not having a best man because he has so many friends that he couldn't choose one without hurting the feelings of several others. It therefore fell to me, as a person who has known him a very long time, and also knows all of his various groups of friends, to organise his stag night (1st April) and the logisitics for carpeting his house the day before the wedding.

Ian's friend Malcolm, from Rotorua, has a floor covering business and wanted to carpet Ian's house as a surprise wedding present. He needed the carpet picked up and stored for a couple of weeks, a bunch of guys to empty the furniture from the house so he and his worker could do the carpeting, and he also needed to get Ian out of the house while all this was going on - and this was happening on Good Friday!

I arranged for Ian to have to go and erect marquees for the wedding, got our friend Baz to pick up and store the carpet as well as deliver it on the morning of the carpeting, and coerced a couple of other friends into turning up early on Good Friday to shift furniture and rip up old carpet. Unfortunately the plans for secrecy all went awry when Malcolm couldn't get in touch with Baz and had to ring Ian up and tell him what the plan was so he could get the phone number of where I was staying.

MEN! I'd been trying to get the various parties together the weekend before so they all knew what each other was expected to do, but they all just said "she'll be right, you're too organised, don't worry so much". Huh.

Anyway, we got it done. Here's the paddock behind the house, with about half the furniture:



This is Zot, Kim, AJ, and AJ's son Angus inspecting the moth-eaten (literally) old carpet in the master bedroom before shifting the furniture out of it:


Rob, Malcolm's worker, ripping up the old carpet in the living room:


Malcolm measuring the floor in the hallway beside the kitchen:

Meanwhile, I was baking the hot-cross buns I'd had proofing overnight and washing skirting boards. Baz was late getting there with the carpet so there was a bit of nail-biting going on, but eventually it came (he'd had to go and borrow a fork-lift) and we left Malcolm and Rob to it.

We got back at 2pm to find this:


That monster plant in the corner of the bedroom couldn't be shifted, so Malc had carpeted around it. He did a wonderful job. And what a wedding present! Now they just need to get the place painted.

I bashed my hand quite badly shifting the furniture back, I got it stuck between a sofa and the door jamb. It swelled hugely so Sandie (the bride-to-be) wrapped my hand up in ice. Next day it was turning a beautiful shade of purple, and it's still painful now, ten days later.

Hanging with guys in sheds

A Rocket Three in the process of being restored …

… drag bike in progress …

… it's taken about three years so far, and got as far as dyno testing. Then it blew a piston. The guys designed and built it themselves, and have made it too powerful for the pistons they originally bought. New super-duper ones have been ordered, but are at present "lost in transit".

These photos were taken the day before race day, here's Rob welding up a clutch part for Zot's Harley:

Zot turning another clutch part:

Putting the clutch together:

Beer is a necessity …

… but not advisable when racing. Ice cream is better:

Beer was required again after this happened:

Top of piston

Close-up of piston

Inside of head

A very expensive race.