unlucky

It's been awhile since I've played hockey here in New Zealand. I forgot until I was thinking how shitty my morning has been that when you miss a goal or break one of your bones they yell out "Unlucky!" or "Hard luck!" as encouragement. "Good effort!" is another one that was generally directed to me.

This morning I knocked over our shelf in the kitchen trying to grab soy milk and spilled green margarita salt all over the floor with just five minutes to get to work, was locked out of the office at work for an hour trying to clean up from a mess of a wedding (The place was sooo trashed. Like, college party trashed. They left blood on the walls.) while guests stared at me and waited to get into the office, and seriously burnt myself by spilling a cup of boiling water on my leg and foot.


"To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
"In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night"
-from the opening to David Copperfield

drawing up calendars is not working on your thesis

today wellington is cold and misty and like a weird flashback to my most depressing days in june and july when i thought i would never see the sun again.
and i was just getting prematurely nostalgic for it yesterday, thinking how much i'll miss it when i'm gone.

i have 59 days left in new zealand. most of these will be spent not in this cold, cold city.

i just called the only mexican restaurant i've found in new zealand so far that has passable food and they're open for dinner! they've been on holiday since christmas. it's good to know this place exists, because mexican food in nz is almost always as bad as it is in europe. cream sauces and no chilies and the like. but viva mexico in wellington is awesome. let it be known.


"But it wasn't as bad as all that after All. I struck work and we had no end of a good feed and now it is 2 (by our clock). So I'll knock off this rubbish & really settle down."

Almost before this is written I shall read it from another room and such is Life.

This morning I listened to the Memorial Day edition of Prairie Home Companion while polishing the bar shutters in a Victorian boatshed on the Wellington waterfront. It was exported via Radio New Zealand National. Without realizing it, I started singing along to "You're a Grand Old Flag," but with the super offensive lyrics kids in Mrs. Miro's sixth grade chorus made up.

My life is very surreal right now.




KM on travel, 29th April, 1909:


"Shall I ever be a happy woman again. Je ne pense pas, je ne veux pas. Oh to be in New York."

A man selling smoothies on the beach in the Coromandel is one of the top stories on the evening news tonight.
The wind in Wellington makes it too cold to sunbathe.

But these Maori potatoes are cool:

Warm(ish) Christmas

Feast

Us

Pie

Keoni + Pohutukawa

Merry Christmas

Here are some pictures from the Christmas tree in downtown Wellington, which I went to last night with Alex and Keoni. There were bean bags on steps underneath for you to lie on and phone booths for calling Santa, but no bathrooms. Apparently you can request a sequence for the lights to blink somehow in text or online. Christmas these days.

Merry Christmas, everybody. I'm going to go cook a feast.

christmas eve

today i:
woke up late for the first time in ages. today was the first day i've had off in a long time. no babysitting or boatshed!
did some laundry and hung it up outside on our little porch.


went to keoni's and borrowed a pie dish.
made a strawberry rhubarb pie for tomorrow's christmas dinner.


sunbathed on our porch.