Was good weekend

even though, as usual, it seemed short.

I went down to Wellington on Friday night.  H and her boyfriend wanted to see his brother ‘debuting’ at a wrestling event in Petone.  So, left work early, picked up kids and headed down to Wellington.  Got there with 15 minutes to spare.  The hall was freezing, full of wrestling fans.  I’m not into wrestling at all, I have to say, but I thought I’d make an exception and watch a local event and meet H’s boyfriend’s brother at the same time.

Well, it was entertaining.  The comments coming from the audience were just as entertaining as the antics of the wrestlers.  One young chap kept proclaiming how good he was while ‘beating up’ his opponent.  Naturally, the opponent got the upper hand and gave him back the treatment.  A woman in the audience said “that’s what you get for being mouthy”.  A couple of the wrestlers were women (there were about 8 matches in total I think) – it was quite good watching the ‘bitch fight’.  The big Maori chick won over the shorter blonde chick, of course. 

I saw the family resemblance between the brothers (or actually half-brothers).  They’ve both got an engaging smile.  H’s boyfriend’s brother’s “debut” was simply him acting the part of a bodyguard to pull apart wrestlers who’d ‘got out of hand’.  He’s still training so is not ready for a public match.

Stayed overnight at older daughter’s place and the next day went on the hunt for a belly dancing shop which had a huge sale on, according to my belly dancing teacher.  Traipsed down Cuba Street and there it was – Lola’s.  She had umpteen belly dancing costumes and dresses all for the very discounted price of $120 each (they’re normally close to $400).  I tried on a few but I don’t have the right figure for a figure-hugging dress.  I ended up buying a four-piece costume – bra, belt, skirt and veil.  Good value.  I’ll have to adjust the straps on the bra though.  I won’t be wearing it to any events this year – it will take me ages before I’ve gotten round to adjusting the costume to fit properly.  But at least I’ve got it now.

Headed home in the afternoon, so we still had Sunday.  Excellent.

Sunday I headed to Levin with fellow belly dancers to practise our dances for the public event on 4th July.  Starting to feel nervous.  The Levin women liked our cane dance.  Although both groups have learned the same two dances (and they’ll join us for one of them) they dance completely differently to us – their timing is different.  I’m glad we won’t be dancing one of the dances with them – they’re doing that one on their own.  So, from initially 3 or 4 dances, we’ll only be doing 2, as we lost one of our belly dancers who moved down south and the other dance we’ll leave to the Levin girls to do.  I showed off my new costume to some of the other dancers and they vowed to visit Wellington soon.  Sunday was a nice sunny day too.

Monday came again all too soon.  Still two more days of the week to go and I finished Spanish classes tonight, for this semester anyway.  I wasn’t going to go to Spanish next semester but the tutor tonight said I was the best at the oral ‘interview’ and should continue and that after next semester I probably wouldn’t be able to learn Spanish so cheaply (because of government funding cuts).  So, I’ll brave another cold dark evening during the week to continue Spanish.

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The weekend that was, or “the search for food”

Another weekend flew by, most of it spent in Wellington.  My daughter had just come back from Fiji so we headed to her place to return her pet budgie (we had been looking after it while she was away and spent a lot of time trying to distract the kitten from taking too great an interest in it).  On the way down I was informed that there was a birthday party on for the daughter of one of the girls’ cousins who was turning three.  My first reaction was ‘well, no-one told me, I’m not prepared for it, I’m not going’.  The trip south had only meant to be a day trip.

Naturally, I ended up going to the party which didn’t actually start until 6pm, food at about 7.30pm.  That meant I didn’t get away before 9.30pm.  So much for the day trip.  I ended up staying the night and headed back home the next day about 12.30.  We hadn’t had any breakfast or lunch so we thought we’d stop at Paraparaumu for a bite to eat.  We’d spotted a new Mediterranean place there on the way down. 

Well, we got there and had a look at the shop part of the Mediterranean place.  In a word expensive.  Had a look at the food on offer – seemingly no different to any other cafe food and expensive.  We’ll pop over to the supermarket, I suggested.  Under the “Food to Go” sign was packets of ham.  Ok.  Headed over to the bakery.  Nothing particularly appealing – basically just loaves of bread and buns.  Thought then we’d head into the mall to the food court.  Big queue at Mcdonalds which I didn’t want anyway.  The cafe opposite had expensive food on offer but didn’t look appealing either.  The Indian takeaway next door advertised chicken and chips and samosas.  No samosas were available and the chicken looked like it had been cooked 3 days ago.  Another cafe offered equally expensive cafe food which I didn’t want (huge cakes or paninis) but they looked stale.  The pies in the warming oven looked several days old as well.  Meanwhile, my daughter’s boyfriend got himself a couple of “snack” burgers for $2 each from Mcdonalds.  My daughter and I then headed over to Wendy’s to buy a couple of “snack dogs” mini hotdogs (way overpriced but by now we didn’t care).  However, the service was appalling.  A young girl was standing at the cash register slowly counting dollar notes in her hand obviously incompetent.  The queue didn’t lessen.  My daughter and I gave up and headed back to the car.  The burgers were eaten by boyfriend and announced to be disgusting with stale buns.  What was wrong with Paraparaumu?  To say we were not impressed was an understatement.  

Got home about 3pm with a mere few hours until another week of work.  I felt cheated of my weekend.

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Peeves

It’s been a day of them – things that annoy or just make me think “what b.s”.

First it was following a slow driver, a woman, who insisted on brushing her hair and at one point actually took both hands off the wheel to fluff her hair.  What is it with these women?  I followed another woman just last week who did the same thing.  I mean, come on.  How absolutely stupid is that and why couldn’t they have done their hair BEFORE driving?  It gets me so pissed off.

Then it was another report about swine flu – how the WHO are going to upgrade the pandemic.  Come on – they say there have been just over 100 deaths worldwide – weren’t most of those in Mexico (where the virulent strain was probably released)?  This came on top of another report of some people being quarantined after arriving in New Zealand because one woman had flu symptoms.  She’s recovered already but they have to make a big thing about it.  Last week a “news” report mentioned how schools received letters about what to do in the event of an outbreak at school.  Hasn’t everyone at work or school had similar shit?  I mean really – news?  I don’t think so.

In the same newspaper in the miniscule world section – an article about how Nancy Reagan still talks to her dead husband.  THIS IS NOT NEWS!!!!!  Arrrrgggghhhh!  It makes me want to scream!

As well, in the news, mention of how the government plans to stop funding night classes.  How short-sighted is that?  Not all classes are for things like embroidery – there are many courses that are relevant to work or upskilling – and even if they were for cooking or tapestry or whatever, isn’t that just as important for people to occupy themselves especially in times of financial difficulties?  I thought then that I’d better continue Spanish next semester while it’s still cheap, but then had a look at the time of the class.  The next level of Spanish is at 7pm.  I already have to fill in two hours after work before going to belly dancing classes.  I don’t think I could cope with two such nights, especially in winter.  (It’s a total waste of time and petrol to go home after work – I’d be there one hour and have to head back into town again.)  Nope, think I’ll give it a miss.  It’s not like I’m planning to go to Spain or South America.

Another thing that peeved me was some mention I read somewhere of Australia using nuclear power and I thought why the hell don’t they use solar power???

The world is just so idiotic and I’m not in the mood for stupidity and ignorance and short-sightedness – not this week anyway!

Yep, must be the hormones.  I feel so aggravated.

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Too cold to do anything

So a three-day weekend went by without me having achieved much at all.  One day was a write-off as I stupidly got drunk.  The ‘kids’ had bought some mixed drinks and that stuff is like drinking lolly water so I drank far too much and suffered the consequences the next day.  What a waste.  The ‘kids’ on the other hand seemed right as rain.  I just can’t do it anymore – too old.

The rest of the weekend saw me hovering near the electric bar heater trying to keep warm.  It was the coldest weekend of the year so far.  My room, where I could have de-cluttered or found the costume piece I wanted to cut up, was freezing.  I had no incentive to go in there at all.  I should have practised belly dancing, as I have a performance coming up in a month’s time, but I didn’t.  I did do some Spanish and the usual washing, etc, but that was about it.  I played Grand Theft Auto 4 or Sims 2 or browsed the web – all near the heater.  Not at all productive.  My list was forgotten.

This week is going very slowly already and it’s only the second day of work this week.  Every day seems to drag and I feel very tired.  It’s the weather and the season.  I just want to hibernate at this time of year.  What a shame we can’t.

Right, I might do some Spanish homework while it’s fresh on my mind.  Tonight we learned how to say how old we were and on what date our birthday is.  For some bizarre reason I didn’t give my true age and chopped 6 years off, so I then had to add six years to the date of my birth.  How silly.  Then I felt stupid because one woman said she was 40 (cuarenta años) and didn’t look it and another said she was 52 (cincuenta y dos años) and didn’t look it either, so I figured I probably looked old for my artificial age.  The teacher did say we could lie about our age if we wanted to though.  He just wanted us to say it properly, whatever it was.  I’m still undecided whether I will continue Spanish for the next half of the year.  I feel I need a break and want another evening at home to do something like genealogy, but will I?

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