Births and deaths

Today is New Zealand's birthday, Waitangi Day, which celebrates the signing of our nation's founding document on 6 February, 1840. So happy birthday to my favourite country in the world.

Sadly, today is also about death. Later I will walk down the road to attend the wake of a former colleague and good mate of mine, Allen, who died of cancer yesterday.

Allen had been ill for a while, had been receiving experimental treatment and was well enough to text me as recently as last Friday to set up a coffee date. We've being doing these every few months since we both left the horrid organisation where we'd been in the comms team (Allen as a permanent, me as a three-day-a-week contractor).

We'd take turns to buy the coffee and I'd always scold  Allen for his need for something sweet ("You watch your weight and leave mine alone," he liked to say). And then we'd settle in to gossip and bitch and laugh like drains. Allen had the wickedest sense of humour, he was super intelligent and had a calm way about him which I always envied.

He leaves behind a wife, two small children and a huge hole in all our lives.

Rest in peace, my friend.

          

What we did this (long) weekend

Happy belated birthday, Aoteaora, and thank you for the three-day weekend.

We spent it at the bach/beach house, painting up a storm. But the 50 shades of peach are slowly disappearing and the cool beach-house kind of vibe we're after is starting to emerge.

This is my favourite corner of the kitchen/dining area, with the cool-as workbench we found in the garden and all the crockery and cutlery left to us by the previous owners (including the fab Agee jars that now hold flatware and ingredients - score).

I spent most of Saturday arvo applying layer upon layer of white paint to this kitchen unit.

And here's a couple of the living room, including the blow fish we found on the beach a few months ago and bleached to get rid of the nasty inner bits and the fishy smell. Our friend's greyhound took a particular shine to it on Sunday when she visited.