Basket case

Four mornings a week I drop the kids at school, while Rach walks/buses to work. Being lazy, I am almost always rushing about, doing stuff I should've probably done the night before or something.

One day last week I had to chip some of the concrete-hard mud off my bike (I should've cleaned it the minute I got home from my ride, of course), so I left the kids to their own devices inside while I got to work with the jackhammer in the garage (I don't really have a jackhammer).

The eerie quiet that greeted me as I went back inside is normally the precursor of something stereotypically bad, e.g. indelible drawings on the walls, the entire contents of the knife drawer all over the kitchen floor.

Instead, I find the stereotypically cute:


(click for big)

Ella looks slightly guilty here, but once I persuaded her that putting Betty inside the laundry basket (where she was completely happy, as well as being unable to interfere with Ella's dollhouse) was one of her better ideas, she posed with more of a smile:


(click for big)

Kids darn the sayest things.

More like Awesome Hutt am i rite?

Thanks to Eion for sending me a photo of a smashing stencil, somewhere near where he lives:



What more can be said really, apart from here's where it is:


View Larger Map

Cheesy musician

We went to the Hamilton Farters' Marker today, haven't been for a while.

Actually, we went into town so Ella could spend the $5 voucher that Hamilton Toyworld sent her. She had a bit of other cash in one of her 18 wallets/purses, and was looking to put that together with her voucher.

However, we went to the market before Toyworld, and what did Ella decide she wanted to spend $9 of her hard-earned on?



That's right, a round of wax-sealed, handmade Ayrshire Cream cheese from Pirongia's Cloudy Mountain Cheese. Very nice it is too, from the small amount Ella's let us have.

We also did a bit more of the guitar lessons tonight, here's what it looks like:



Just so you know, she asked for it for her (fifth) birthday, completely out of the blue, this is not some helicopter parent (OK, so it doesn't quite fit here, I just love the term) thing. I got the guitar off a workmate whose daughter has outgrown it, it came with a DVD teaching a few things.

Ella is amazingly into this, she doesn't seem to get bored too quickly. She can name all the bits of the guitar, and knows which note each of the strings is, and even seems to have a fair idea when a string is out of tune.

I don't care if she loses interest after a while, getting interested in it in the first place is good enough. I first learnt guitar in Form 2, and didn't go back to it until half way through high school.

Here's a gratuitous Betty bath shot, wouldn't want her to miss out:



I WANT COMMENTS please?

Sparkle pony

My brother had a birthday at the beginning of this year, I think I sent him my present about 4 months after his birthday

BUT

in my defence it was a pretty cool present.

I got one of these kits from Evil Mad Scientist. I bought this thing sight unseen from Amerikkka, and took it on with only the barest of soldering ability.

I got a mate to show me how to solder small components - to my amazement it turned out to be very satisfying, so much so that I was disappointed when there was no more to do. Every soldering attempt in the past has been (a) messy and (b) incredibly frustrating.

I bought a lot of LEDs from here - even at only 25c each, it really adds up when you're buying hundreds.

I got them all soldered on after much deliberating over the layout. In case you don't know, my brother DJs under the name Haszari - he made himself a logo which is essentially an 'H'. This is what I built:



It has a light sensor, so it won't drain those big D cells during the day:



Photos courtesy of Haszari cos I forgot to take any.

P.S. after TOO LONG editing the template for this blog, the photos no longer overlap the words at the side. No worries.

Paint the whole world with a . . .

Up above the trees and houses . . .

We had an awe-inspiring thunderstorm last night. No pictures of that, but here's a phonecam of a rainbow I saw this morning (click for bigger I think):



I think of rainbows a bit like I think of libraries - something free that's so amazing, surely it'll be taken away one day?