The Byrchen Twigges

Cruising...hmpf. Not so sure about this. The infrastructure of it is flawless, but it's like being inside a television show. An Australian television show. An extremely mainstream idea of The Good Life is socially constructed around us, nothing is intellectually taxing, the staff resemble the cast of a Bollywood movie, and shipboard magazine yesterday was emblazoned with the headline "The Fine Art Of Doing Nothing." If I ever do this again, I'm bringing along as many of my fellow freaks as I possibly can.

That said, I'm enjoying spending copious amounts of time with my roommate/friend Jan, I've got a new friend named Kikka from Melbourne, and today I've enjoyed rambling around Port Vila, Vanuatu. It's...a second-and-a-half world country? With the half due to its copious cellphone company sponsorship, probably. Went to some trouble to go to the Michoutouchkine & Pilioko Foundation Art Gallery, which was a vivid dream in the forest, and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, where they spoiled me during an hour when I was the only visitor. In the marketplace, a vendor chased us down to say, "You're from New Zealand - the All Blacks won last night!" The ni-Vanuatu are very happy that the French, their former colonial occupiers, didn't win.

I'm at the Yacht Club's internet cafe. The bulletin board just outside, with its flyers about boats and small businesses for sale, is the stuff idle dreams are made of. In half an hour, I get to go see if I can get a friend's birthday present, a mask from the island of Efate, back through Customs...

I went to Auckland this weekend, and it was a bit creepy how perfect it all went. There were three missions: Cirque du Soleil with some friends, spending the night with more friends, and a volunteer meeting the next day.

First, I wandered around briefly, on my way to meeting mundens and seraphs_folly. When did downtown Auckland get turned into someplace mildly interesting? Like they looked at Cuba Street in Wellington and said, "Well, that works, let's do that." Auckland was much warmer - all the young'ins had read the style blogs, then cracked out the summer dresses and transparent chiffon pants. Melon-colored transparent chiffon pants. I met my more sanely dressed friends quickly, they knew the perfect cafe for lunch, and then we walked to the arena.

Cirque du Soleil's Saltimbanco show is at least 15 years old, and the first part of it did feel very 90s. The guy sitting next to me kept exclaiming, "Far out!", which added to my back-in-time sensation. The second part of the show was magnificent and timeless - perhaps it had been tweaked, naughtified, and bespangled more over time.

After the show, I took the bus up to the Ponsonby neighborhood and was catapulted back in time further. I was crashing with a friend who was living on a street I remembered, near cafes I used to go to. (Later that evening, I'd find out that my friend was going to the same doctor I used to go to, at the top of the street.) The smells of spring, the plants crawling up the privacy walls, the villas mixed with 80s townhouses, the very slant of the sidewalks took me back to an earlier time in my life. Auckland's climate is so much gentler than Wellington's, and the place has a lazier feel overall. I felt like I could step right back into living there, and that I'd be just as bored as I was before...still, it's amazing the difference that the presence of a great and good friend made to the gravitational pull of the area.

My friend and I, reunited, talked about art all evening, and then all morning over breakfast. She went to art school in Florence for 3 years and came back producing troublingly perfect classical works. Even within her art school's strictures, her work occasionally shows a Leyendecker flair, and she hadn't even heard of Leyendecker. Her new partner, who she met at the program, produces works of similarly eerie perfection. Those classical Florentine art schools seem to encourage the artistic equivalent of making the trains run on time. Away from the school, they're applying their own personalities and quirks to their work at last. They're both very "saleable," have business plans in place to back up their talent, and are confident that they'll get gallery representation soon.

My planned journal entry is canceled on account of snow.

As I was driving home from downtown Wellington, big feathery flakes of snow began falling, as forecast. This is as if it was snowing in, say, Atlanta. Snow of this kind is so unusual here that these good folk have no knowledge of the French Toast Index. The friend in the car with me began screaming. "Snow! I've never seen snow in my LIFE! SNOOOOOW!" This wasn't what I needed on a road tilted at a vertical 45-degree-angle, but it worked out all right, since every other driver slowed to a crawl in horrified amazement.

I dashed home, judiciously. Snow increased along the way, winnowing out the other drivers. Soon, driving in the snow felt very serene. At home, I ripped inside and threw on a little L.L. Bean jacket with a hood, and grabbed my camera. If ever a jacket could cackle in vindication, this one did, as it cocooned me perfectly. "You thought you didn't need me...but look at you now! My hour is come!" chortled the jacket.

Meanwhile, quivering with excitement, I took terrible pictures. This one, of my backyard, is the best of the bunch.



Then, it got dark and I came inside.

Half an hour later, it's still snowing, but I don't know if we'll get more ground coverage due to the wet ground. It's clinging to roofs and balustrades, though.

Excuse me. I have some fresh pure snow to eat...

I woke up this morning, somewhat sulky. It was Monday; I have a coldlet; and I knew there wouldn't be snow on the ground outside my house, despite the promises of the meteorologists and my recurring snow dreams. My car had slush on it, but no snow. Of course not; it's too wet. But then! The hills! The hills ringing my valley had a visible dusting of the white stuff!

Snow on the hills of Stokes Valley!



Not very impressive, but it's the first time since 1952.

The streets were peppered with locals holding up their own cameras, immortalizing the moment.

Hmmm. My fandom mail has had a steady trickle of correspondence lately. Then there's The Broship of the Ring, followed by today's XCKD. And apparently UVic in Wellington is having a Quenya course.

And we're still 18 months out from the movie release! I thought they were coming out at the end of 2011, but this was just wishful thinking clouding my brain.

I started giving my cat some raw cat food this week. Here in NZ, one can buy tidy plastic containers of chopped bloody meat especially for your cat. The supermarket ones tend to be lamb, beef, steak and kidney, and horse. Specialist suppliers allow you to get rabbit, hare, and just-right fowl, too. I'm not doing this because of the hype around letting pets eat raw; for whatever reason, she's suddenly not eating as much as she should of the dry food she's loved for most of her 13 years. Dealing with gobbets of raw meat is easier for me than suppressing my gag reflex as I handle canned cat food. We just went to the vet to check her teeth, so I know it's not that, and she got weighed at the time. Hm. I'll see how she's doing in a week.

Northey thinks this is great. She eats her 1/4 cup of meat gobbets quickly and cleanly, as if she's been reading the online pages about how she's supposed to eat her raw food.

Meanwhile, I'm getting older, too. Tonight's discovery; the platform heels I caught the subway in 15 years ago, exhumed from their storage box for a burlesque event tomorrow night, are suddenly a challenge to wear. I used to walk blocks in these.

And, I've been rereading Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. To my horror it's coming across as pretentious sexist tripe, albeit hung on some great characters in a great setting. And yet, these books were such a part of my late adolescence. I guess liking them was my equivalent of an Ayn Rand/Objectivism phase.

My LOL, in her new state of increased sedentariness, has become a film buff.

My loan of Cold Comfort Farm last week was such a success that she asked me to choose another film for her. I Capture The Castle is this week's selection.

Except that I am coming to the end of my shallow film knowledge and I need recommendations!

She's already seen most Jane Austen films, Annie Get Your Gun, etc. And Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day. She likes gentle period romances/dramas, especially British-flavored (excuse me, flavOURed) ones. Things with wide-eyed child protagonists would also be good. No subtitles, because she can't read them with her old-eyes vision on her small TV; no animation (a pity when I think of Studio Ghibli, but I did ask). I may try her on E.T., come to think of it.

Eeeeeesh, time for another post, since my last one says "Christchurch Report". After yesterday's 6.3 quake repeat, my friends down there, cool and stoic previously, are now losing it, in tears, confronting more damage, etc. The latest may be the straw that breaks lots of backs.

I saw my Little Old Lady on Sunday; she's looking rosier, but isn't getting any of that lost lung capacity back. So she's rather trapped, at the moment. I lent her the DVD of Cold Comfort Farm, which I watched with a friend on Saturday night. Mmmmmm, Seth Starkadder. My friend was looking after her grandbaby, who took a dislike to me. Put in my arms for the obligatory visitor's cuddle, she looked at me aghast and began to wail. And didn't stop for two hours. I didn't know you weren't supposed to wear perfume around babies.

This week so far has been about freelancing and dealing with a sudden uptick in burlesque event developments. I also stopped by the art school to snap some shots of my flatmate's art installation, which is three and a half meters tall, two meters deep, and involves depictions of whale sharks and jellyfish. It looks great, but I have no idea where it's going after the show. And neither does he. If anybody with a very spacious house wants an art installation...

I had an extraordinarily pleasant weekend, seeing all kinds of people, going to the Mineral Show (they have prospecting field trips!) working on a freelance web site, and eating carefully. When I let my vigilance down at a friend's house for a beef stir-fry on Sunday, I had to go home and repeat my self-dentistry of Friday night, finishing off by stunning myself with painkillers once more. I'd had a hard time BELIEVING that my jaw had hurt That Much on Friday night. Surely I was tired - I was burned out after my week - something else had to be wrong. But no, Sunday's reprise showed that I hadn't been hallucinating.

Today, and tomorrow, I am back on tender things (scrambled eggs, pumpkin ravioli) with antibiotics for dessert. There is No Time for dental care tomorrow, since I'm off to Christchurch to give a talk. I'm packing a meal (pumpkin ravioli reheats just fine) and painkillers.

I have just barely gotten the hang of running two additional blogs. I'm trying for two posts a week in each one.