Stephen's Den

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: Continue reading Southland Holiday

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. 

Continue reading My first flight

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.

Continue reading Happy Clappy

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:

Continue reading Break in

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.

Continue reading Christmas Miracle

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.

Continue reading Break up

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.