This week was a reasonably busy one, but in a good way. There are a whole lot of things that I managed to get done, I saw a whole lot of people, went to a party and also took a trip to Twizel. It started off pretty well with Martini Monday with my father, which is a tradition that I hope to continue for a long time. I don’t know how well I’ll be able to do that in Japan, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out. ^^

So, this week’s work involved doing some concepts, going to meetings, investigating random problems and of course doing some actual coding. I even spent a bit of time on my business site writing the code that went with the design I made last week. All in all I’m quite happy with how things are going work-wise as it seems to be pretty manageable.

I got the guitar fixed this week (after having it randomly snap a string while I was sitting next to it the other day) … just went in and got the strings replaced. I’m pretty sure that hadn’t been done just about since Siobhan got the thing in the first place, so it was in pretty dire need of it. While I was getting this done I had what I refer to as “a Christchurch moment” – New Zealand is a pretty small place (only 4 million people, total) and so the odds of New Zealanders knowing each other seems to be somewhat higher than other countries – I refer to it as the world’s biggest small town on a pretty regular basis. Christchurch is more than somewhat microcosmic of this phenomenon. Anyway, the relevant moment was running into my ex-girlfriend Jess, who works at the Rockshop, where I got the guitar restrung. Jess was more than amiable and we had a bit of a catch up. Turns out she’s just back from her honeymoon and monstrously busy with her post-wedding stuff. Hopefully I’ll have a bit more of a catch-up with her while I’m still in New Zealand, although it may be similar to another of my previous ex-girlfriends in that she was just being polite to me because I happened to show up at her place of work. Odd occurrence, that. I didn’t think I was really that bad a guy, but hey, I’ve never dated me. After all of this, I managed to get some good playing time out of the guitar this week, which was fun. ^^

I managed to talk with a bunch of people online again this week, which has been great. I finished beating Nik at chess (again) and even talked to Robert in Argentina, which was cool. I’m always thankful that I’m able to keep in touch (in real-time) to all the people I know around the world, particularly when I’m in that weird tired-but-not-tired space late at night (which is usually just right for the other time zones that people are in)… although the converse is also true – I’m really shitty when I have no internet and can’t keep in touch with people like I’m used to!

This week was my grandfather’s 80th birthday celebration and once again it was held at my Aunty Katherine’s house. It was a good gathering of the family, I got to see some great old photos and see some relatives who came down from up north as well. My grandfather’s pearl of wisdom for this birthday (he gives out some good ones) was that the age that you’re at is the right age for you to be, and it’s a great age to be at. Very Grandad, that. ^^

Anyway, I got to see some people this week, had the pizza and cartoons night on Thursday this week with Dan and Ian. It’s getting to be a bit of a thing, which is kinda nice. Ruby also showed me a couple of things which were amusing – a show called QI (“Quite Interesting”) and some live stand up by Bill Bailey.

On Friday after pottering around doing odds and ends, Mum picked me up and we drove down to Twizel for the Canterbury Rowing Championships to see my brother race. We stopped in Geraldine for dinner – mine was pretty good, Mum said hers was pretty average verging on not good at all. Anyway, we checked into the motel in Twizel and had a bit of a quiet evening in. I watched Lord of War, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I don’t know why people bag on Nicolas Cage so much, I think he’s a good actor.

Yesterday we were down at the reach, watching the rowing, talking with Dace and so on. Breffni, Dave and Megan dropped through, it was good to see them. A friend of Mum’s and her daughter (who rows) passed through as well. Apparently the daughter and my brother keep having a series of near-misses where they don’t quite meet each other. After a long day in the sun it was back to the motel… I managed to get some quite heavy sunburn, but luckily for me it hadn’t quite reached the “painful to shower” stage. Anyway, Dace came over to the motel and we sat down and watched Old School with Mum. Dace’s friend Jen came over to the motel as well and chilled out watching tv and talking smack for a while, which was pretty cool. After they left I stayed up and read the rest of my book (the one I got for Christmas) – I couldn’t sleep. Eventually I crashed.

This morning it was up after three or four hours of sleep to shower and pack all of our things up to check out and then head to the reach. I tried not to burn again today, although I did get a couple of little new ones… mostly I was just trying not to make the ones from yesterday worse. I got to see Dace row some more and took a whole lot of pictures, but mostly I just lay down dozing and trying not to burn. The culmination of the racing was the big eights race against the New Zealand four, which was pretty awesome to watch. ^^ After that we grabbed Dace and headed back to Christchurch. We stopped in Geraldine to pick up a pie, and I half-talked, half-dozed the rest of the way back. After I got back to Dad’s I set up my computer and did emails and online stuff for a while, then had pizza for dinner and Ruby over for some movies.

Phew! Long week.