Signs around town

Signmakers of Canterbury, take a bow.

Le France

OK OK already! Lots of people have been asking for news of our trip to France and I have to admit I've been reluctant to post a blog on this....mainly because it meant trawling through our holiday snaps to find some good pics to put up. Turns out this wasn't so hard as I only took 48 holiday snaps over two weeks. However I did take 146 photos of French dogs on French streets and I had to pull them out in the process which made things a little harder.

Anyway, we had a great time, it was quite cold but not as bad as we were expecting and not as dreary as Christchurch in winter by any means. In Paris we avoided getting too close to the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe and the Moulin Rouge. And down in Provence we spent a lot of time at markets (ah, savon de Marseilles) and drinking red wine. And that's about it.

Here's a couple of photographic highlights though:

The Citroen showroom on the Champs Elysees - our beloved DS:


The Vasarely art gallery/museum in Aix en Provence - this place was nuts - from above it was set out like a beehive made up of 8 hexagonals and each hexagonal was a giant artspace with ceiling height artworks by Vasarely - he designed the building especially.


The best bit though was that it was so unpopular and run down they couldn't afford to have the heating on and there was just this one guy in the whole building listening to an iPod and doing some uni study (not the guy in the photo - that's Ollie who was with us). It was freezing and we were the only ones there.

But this is one of my fav photos, taken in Paris:


And that's it. Any questions?

The last post featuring one of our animals for a while...promise.

A couple of months ago I tried to buy some new film for my Polaroid JoyCam camera only to discover it was no longer being produced. Sigh. However, I had a film rattling around somewhere and dug it out and starting taking pictures round the house. It has been slightly damaged with time and all of the pictures look particularly 'old' - for example, this one of Boo:


Then, I was reading a Hollywood gossip blog (which I will leave unnamed) and saw the announcement that Polaroid are actually ceasing production of all instant cameras. Oh dear. It's not all bad though - I got my hands on a Polaroid camera that takes 600 film so I'll get another couple of years worth of photos from that.

Pot

It's been a while since the last post and we intended to write the next one about our trip to France,, but it's just not happening, so I thought I'd continue the theme that has developed of publishing posts about the animal members of our family. So this one's for Pot. She's awesome - she loves living out here where there is so much space it makes her head hurt, and she is quite happy just sitting outside listening to all the birds she will never catch. Recently, we discovered that of an evening, Potty likes a bit of a spanking. Seriously. Don't even bother asking how we figured this out. But here's a video with the proof:


She just keeps coming back for more... Such entertainment.

Boo's Kitchen

We got a dog. She turned up at work as she had been found roaming and nobody came to collect her from the pound. She was pretty cute and I took a liking to her and now she lives with us. Her name is Colonel Boo Boo, or Boo for short.

She seems to be settling in well. She keeps up with Matt while he's training (and is much less exhausted than him when they get home), and she has taken a real liking to the DS:


She is a New Zealand Huntaway - Heading dog cross, which means she needs loads of exercise. I think she's quite good looking, so I have made her the face of my Beetroot Relish (which I made with my own beetroot from my own garden):

We are off to France next week so she is going to stay with friends, hopefully she remembers us when she gets back.

Someone though she got her name from this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u04KEg_rDHk

But she didn't, even though it's a cracker of a ditty.

Merry Christmas.

Possum.

I first met Possum while living in Auckland in 1997. She turned up at my flat, but she permanently squatted at a flat up the road. The following year I coincidentally moved into this flat, and when this household dissolved I took her with me. She was riddled with scabs from a flea allergy, and would curl up into a tight tight ball on my bed and wouldn't budge when poked. I took her to the vet to get cleared up and she was a different cat. She spent the next four years moving around Auckland, sleeping on the end of my bed (I trained her to only sleep on a blanket on the end - I forgot to mention I was severely allergic to her). In 2002 she moved south to Christchurch where she retired with my parents. Here she really thrived. But, she got gradually stiffer and slower, and skinnier. Mum and Dad decided last week that the time was right for her to go to the "cattery in the sky", so took her in to their local vet. They offered me the privilege, but I just don't think I could have done it.


Now she's in the vege patch, where she used to sit and watch the day pass.

Rest in peace Possum. The queen of the silent meow.

Crap, a leopard!

At work we're having our annual charity art auction. It goes like this: everyone in the company, from the managing director all the way down to me, creates an 'art' piece. The stuff is then auctioned for a local charity and everyone's happy.
Problem is, we're not artists. We work in an office. With computers and Bluetooth devices. Anyway, mine's called Books I never wrote. This guy would really tear me to pieces, "Ding Ding! Here comes the shit-mobile".