All you can meet

Here's a few photos of the kids, because let's face it, who doesn't love pictures of kids?

Psychopaths, that's who.

Here's Bethan wearing gloves (as opposed to violently shaking her head and refusing to put gloves on at all):



Bethan always comes home from school (daycare) with stuff all over her face. Sometimes it is arranged in interesting patterns.

She is also quite obsessed with her bag - this absolutely MUST be taken with her whenever we go out the door. No one but her is allowed to carry it either.



Betty and Ella are snuggled up to watch - what?



Why, it's High School Musical, of course!

This is not a tent:



It is a library:



Here we see Bethan, Aimee and Ella waiting for their dinner. There is probably some significance in the fact that they're all wearing one-piece pyjamas:



Bethan had a brief fascination with Ella's fire helmet:



On an unrelated note, this series on Fridays on Prime about the Royal Family is fascinating.

Half a loaf is better than no bread

Here's a slightly random collection of photos for ya.

First off, here is some very successful baking from a few weekends ago. The bread is the standard Edmonds book recipe, but with one-and-a-half-times the yeast:



The chelsea buns are also from the Edmonds book, only the newer version. The old book says to use scone dough, which seems insane to me:



That was the first go at chelsea buns, and the delicious fantastic result spurred me on to give them another go the following week.

They were nowhere near as good; neither was the bread I made at the same time. Yeast. It is a mystery.

Here is a photo taken on my phone, on the walk to work. I don't even remember taking it, but I like the way the phone hasn't been able to cope with the hugely bright reflection:



This is me trying to capture the threateningly ominous clouds looming over a wet, twilit Hamilton. The phone (being a phone first and a camera second) had other ideas, but I still kinda like the look of it:



Lastly, here's the little-known "Lover" special edition Mercedes SLK:



Click for big and note the badge on the right-hand side of the boot.

Fringe festival

Ella has wanted to have a proper haircut (i.e. done by a qualified hairdresser, at a salon) for quite some time.

She finally got her wish a week or so ago. She has been determined to get a fringe (despite her parents' protests), so here's the result:



I'm not sure if the teenager-style surly pout and exasperated hand-on-hip pose came free with the haircut or cost extra.

Wreck chord l'eau

I don't know about you, but I love the cold. This time of year is one of my favourites, and not just because of skiing. I love frost almost as much as I love fog, and I love walking to work in the cold, with me gloves, hat and walkman on.

I took the camera with me this morning and took some pictures. Please remember that this is the camera which now has neither an optical viewfinder nor a visible LCD screen. If the framing is a bit off in some of the pictures, well, I was just lucky to even be facing the right way.

This is some spiky frost on the top of the Volvo:


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Close-up:



If you don't find those little crystals incredible, well . . . you bloody should!

This is the top of our letterbox, which is normally a flat, smooth metal sheet. It is not hairy, as it appears here:


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This is the empty section at the end of the street. Nothing like a frosty sunrise to make even the normally dull look cool:


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Looking through the Claudelands fence towards the city, the sun reflecting off some building or other:


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More Claudelands:


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I'm pretty happy with this one (O'Neill Street), wish I'd managed to get the tree at the right completely in frame though:


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How's this for a (blind) macro shot?


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. . . . aaaaand a close-up:



Last one (honest) - here's the Waikato, steaming away:


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C-O-M-M-E-N-T
Find out what it means to me . . .

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:


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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:


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Kids darn the sayest things.