Stephen Witherden’s Website

I hit the bed with a muted thud. It had been a long day and an even longer night. My parents were up from Hamilton and, along with other family and friends, we’d celebrated being together with food, drink and Singstar.

I rolled over and checked my phone. It was about 3:30am, we’d just seen the extended family to their car after a prolonged karaoke-off between myself and my cousin Jenny. Arth had passed out on the sofa/bed, beer in his hand, and mom was on the balcony having a cigarette. I turned over again, closed my eyes and sighed.

Mom was on the balcony having a cigarette.

I tossed again. Mom and I don’t often get a chance to talk.

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As some of you may know, I recently turned 30. It was an unremarkable milestone as milestones go. Last year I threw a nice big party and invited a whole lot of people. This year, I just had a small group, we drank, ate and talked a little. The next day Sam made me a birthday cake complete with 30 candles, a nice gesture on his part.
 
30 seems so old, objectively so. When I was younger 30 seemed to be so very far away. I had this vague notion that I should be retired by 30, or that I should at least have my life sorted out. In many ways it is.

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In order to celebrate Sarah’s imminent PhD graduation and International Speak like a Pirate Day, a bunch of us got dressed up as pirates and had a bit of a party at our place.

Not much to say except that we all had a great time. More pics are available by clicking the link: International Talk like a Pirate Day pics.

Friday 18th September was Loud Shirt Day. To contribute, I bought a cheap white shirt from the Warehouse along with some fabric paint from Spotlight. I then spent about 4 hours on Thursday night making my own tribute to Loud Shirt Day.

You can see a time lapse video of how I made the shirt by clicking on the link: Loud Shirt Day time lapse.

This past Saturday Daniel (we call him “Step” for reasons I don’t really understand) along with Sebastian were celebrating their simultaneous birthdays. Step wanted a formal cocktail evening, all dressed up with a proper bar, finger food and a cocktail menu of his own devising. I’d like to think it was somewhat my influence because he knows how much I like to mix cocktails.

We were all under strict instructions to dress up and I was asked to man the bar. I was a little apprehensive at the possibility that I might bump into Spaz, since we haven’t spoken in some time. That said, I was excited about the prospect of bartending.

I arrived early, at around 3pm to help make the cocktail food. They’d built a bar for me! When I say “built a bar” one of the guys (an engineer) had literally constructed a free-standing bar out of spare wood, rustic, but sturdy and functional. They had even bought all new glassware. There may not have been more than one and a half teaspoons in the whole place, but they had more than enough martini glasses for a formal function.

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I know, I know, I haven’t written anything. I could use the excuse that “I’m busy” but it doesn’t seem to be a very satisfying one. I hope to write more soon. In the meantime, avid reader, I have been playing with time lapse photography from my balcony. Behold, this is what I see every evening, if I look through the sliding doors towards the harbour:

Ports of Auckland Sunset

I’m always on the lookout for a new cocktail recipe. New tastes come up in the most unlikely contexts. For example, after choir on Monday evenings I usually go to a bar called “The Grange” in Ponsonby for a drink with the other choir members. This bar has a drink I’m really fond of called a “Coco Spice”. It involves Chilli infused Vodka and Creme de Cacao.

I have to admit that after trying Chilly Vodka, I have become kind of obsessed with this idea of infusing alcohol with all sorts of interesting flavours. This picture shows three of my recent experiments (from left to right): Vanilla Vodka, Fruit Whiskey and Cinnamon Vodka.

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“You should come to the Beca Ball” Sam insisted in that demanding, almost pleading way he has about him. I rolled my eyes. “It will be fun, and you can have us over for drinks beforehand”.

“Oh, all right.” I conceded reluctantly. “I suppose I could convince a guy to dress up in drag…”

“Or you could invite Theresa, I’m sure she’d love to come”.

Thus began many weeks’ worth of cajoling before Sam could convince me not only to buy tickets to my work ball, but to ask Theresa (a mutual friend) to come along as my “date” and to have everyone over to my place for drinks beforehand.

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Wow, I haven’t written anything in quite some time. Isn’t it always the way that when life is most interesting you don’t have time to reflect!

Anyway, last week I had a fantastic little holiday to the South Island for a week. This is the first time I spent more than a few hours in the South Island, so I made the most of it!

I plan on writing a whole lot of words about it, but for now, I am just excited to get my pictures out. Here is a link to the collection of pictures for my Southland Holiday.

I’ll post detail later. In the meantime, I have a number of panoramic photos I am rather proud of: (more…)

I was keeping it under my hat for a while, but now that it’s official I’m pleased to report that one of my photos is being used for a stamp!

Details of the stamp issue are available here: Auckland Harbour Bridge 50th Anniversary stamp issue. Mine is the $1.00 stamp. I didn’t get paid for it, but the idea that in 100 years time someone will still be collecting these stamps, maybe even the first day cover with my name on it, well, you can’t put a price on that.

It started at a bar in downtown Auckland called Traffic. I looked at a glass bottle of dark orange murky substance behind the bar. “What’s that” I enquired with inebriated exuberance “Skittles Vodka” the barman announced proudly “special recipe”.

Making Skittles Vodka, as the name would suggest, involves dissolving skittles in Vodka. I tried sorting the Skittles into their colours.

The hard thing is knowing what ratio of different kinds of skittles to use. My current theory is 4 bags worth of one colour to 500ml of Vodka.

Method: dump the Skittles into the Vodka and leave it overnight. As the Skittles dissolve, give the bottle a vigorous shake, dislodging the melting skittles at the bottom. After about 2 days, the skittles will be dissolved and you’ll see white stuff suspended in the Vodka, so you’ll need to strain it. What seems to work best is filtering it through a clean tea towel (coffee filters are too fine).

In the end, you have very colourful sweet Vodka which tastes like something between paint thinners and cough syrup

Sarah & I have long been fans of Top Gear. Well, to be honest, Sarah likes Top Gear and go with the flow. The TV show involves a bunch of middle-aged men behaving like a bunch of kids, playing with fast cars, burning lots of petrol. On Friday the 13th of February, a group of us went to see Top Gear Live.

Ever since my break up with Sebastian and moving into the new apartment I’ve been experiencing a profound sense of listlessness. In Afrikaans, we would use the term “is nie lus nie”. There’s no direct translation but it speaks of a general lack of desire. It’s a nasty sense of boredom. Not that there’s nothing to do, just that you don’t feel like doing anything. It’s the first rung on the ladder to depression and I’m not about to let that happen. 

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Last weekend was a long weekend for those of us in Auckland: Auckland Anniversary weekend, to be precise. Now usually I don’t plan my holidays very well in advance and this one was no exception. In fact, it turned out that I planned my holiday so poorly that I didn’t actually have one.

I had, instead, agreed (in collaboration with my friend Alastair) to prepare the church service for that Sunday.

Now, it’s a great honour to be asked to do something like this and so I do take it seriously. It does mean a great deal of work, though, particularly around choosing the songs. If you choose a song that’s too old, then you scare away the young people (we have far too few of them at our church as it is). If you choose songs with too much “he”, “him” and “father” business, you upset the Lesbians (and we have too few of those as well). If you change the words to someone’s favourite song, however, you’re going to have a grumpy old man on your hands. Frankly though, we have quite a few of those at our church, so we can afford to ruffle a few feathers from time to time.

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Well, this is a particularly distressing story to tell, so soon after I related the previous one about my car being whole again.

Last night, I drove up from Hamilton, my car in tact, hoping to make it to a friend’s place for a late Christmas party they were throwing. I made it in time (just before midnight). Socialised and had a few drinks. I then took a little nap to sober up before the short drive home. When I got back to my car (at around 4am), this sight greeted me:

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As I mentioned in a previous blog post. I was rear-ended by an intoxicated chap over a month ago. What I didn’t elaborate on was the painful insurance-saga that ensued.

When the accident happened, I called my insurer: AMI (also the insurer for the other two people involved) the phone-lady told me that they would email me a claim form in the morning. They didn’t. Ok, well, people forget, so the next day I printed a claim form myself, diligently filled it out and took it in to the AMI office personally, my long-suffering colleague Richard in tow for moral support.

It didn’t take long for me to realise that the advertisements are something of an embellishment and not a true reflection of the AMI business model. There was no leggy singing brunette weaving between the computer terminals, handing out smiles and wads of cash to all and sundry. Rather, I sat down with a confused young lady who appeared to be a recent ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) graduate.

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It was soon after my birthday in October when I started suspecting that something was awry in my relationship with Sebastian. He declined a road trip with me, he didn’t come over to my place anymore, and when I visited him, he was reluctant, even begrudging with his affection.

After struggling with him for over a month, trying to figure out what I had done, or how things had changed in his mind, I decided to call it off.

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Well, as I am sure everyone who has ever lived in more than one place knows: moving sucks. Moving sucks big time. As of this very moment, everything has been transferred over from my old place to the new place, the lounge in the new place is strewn with belongings in boxes, bags and suitcases and a fine layer of dust has been disturbed such that it sets off my hay-fever; that said, it’s done.

We bought new furniture: I got a large screen TV & a couch, Sarah a couch and a dining room suite. Before we bought the furniture, however, we had to do analysis as to whether things would fit.

What better way than to use Visio to map out the apartment and move the furniture around? That’s what we did. This image shows the layout of the apartment, to scale, as well as where we decided to put things.

Click on the image for the full layout.

Click on the image for the full layout.

Just a quick post to draw your attention to some photos I took while travelling around the North Island of New Zealand.

One trip was to Northland, where I went as far as Whangarei. The second trip involves a sojurn as far South as I have ever been in a car: to Palmerston North.

Both trips rewarded me with exquisite scenery, something I will have to do more of in future. Please click the images for more images of the trips.

Some of you may already know that I am moving out of my pokey little apartment and into a new one. Some may also know that I am moving in with none other than Sarah.

Yes, as my gay friends are always so pleased to point out: she is my ex-girlfriend.

Don’t anyone get your hopes up, this is seriously a Will & Grace situation, I assure you.

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