Mmmm Christmas food

We spent Christmas Eve in good company, and worked on educating the locals about NZ culture.


We went over to Patrick & Elena's place for Christmas Day - their house is stunning, and far more seasonal than ours. Incidentally, we did have roasted chestnuts and an open fire.


Our traditional Christmas foods were very well received. The cake and pudding both turned out well, and eveyone agreed they tasted like Christmas.


Although we only had a light dusting of snow on Christmas Day, here are some snow pictures from another big dump the previous week:

What's with all the snow?

While it's a real pain to get around in once it becomes packed into a continuous slick of ice, the snow makes the OSU campus pretty stunning:







Although the statues get a bit cold.

It'll be a beery Christmas

Last night we went to the Heart of the Valley Brew Club's Christmas party - needless to say the games were themed to a common interest. The beer-bottle ring-toss became pretty competitive, but at least there were plenty of prizes:



The worst part was having to scrape ice off our bicycle seats when we left to go home. Shudder.

The next morning brought our first snow:


It's snowing again outside in earnest. It's a huge novelty for me, but Mort is becoming pretty traumatised, and even ventured outside with me to check out the scenery (it's currently -3°C):



On the upside, there is always solace in camera-stalking the local grocery store:

Turns out it's Winter afterall

Despite my denialist attitude, snow is forecast for next weekend. Yup, we're looking at a high of 2°C, a low of -2°C. And symbols I don't recognise indicating the form of precipitation to be expected. Well, we'll see if it comes to pass.

With that in mind, I pretty much spent the weekend knitting useful articles:

A hot-water-bottle cozy for the elusive hot-water-bottle....


It turns out most people here are familiar with the idea of a rubber bladder that holds hot water for comfort, and may even own one, and yet they're not available in any of the local stores. I eventually got a really flash one from Amazon.com (thanks to a voucher from a certain Weazel) - it's silicone, transparent, and (best of all) from Germany.

I've noticed of late that my ears have been getting somewhat tortured my windchill while I'm cycling to and from work (esp. on Friday morning, when it was -3°C), so I've made some ear-muffs that attach into my bike helmet:




On the upside, it now feels totally appropriate to cook and eat huge gobbets of fat (in the form of Christmas pudding), and we somehow managed to scrape together all the ingredients, including awesome slabs of suet.

There was turkey and beer

We had our first experience of Thanksgiving - accompanied by a massive smoked turkey. It certainly was a great way to celebrate the superflux with a bunch of friends, then slump comatose on the couch to watch "Run, Fatboy, Run", a sweet movie that really suited the mood. We spent the rest of the long weekend eating the leftovers that were shipped home with us, and brewing beer:



Apart from brewing beer, talking about brewing beer, and watching the beer brew, we haven't really been up to much. In celebration/trepidation of the colder weather, I've been knitting a cardigan:

Spiders & Socks

One thing we hadn't considered until recently is that we're in a country where people can keep all manner of creatures... One of the histology lab techs showed us around her spider collection - here's one of the more photogenic members of the party (scale is in cm):



It certainly gave us something to think about in terms of keeping a pet in a place where we can't have cats or dogs....

I haven't been up to much (apart from work) for a while.... Finished more socks:


Mended more socks using a sneaky darning technique I figured out (I'm sure other people have worked the same thing out many times before):



It's just a case of using a sewing needle to duplicate stitch over existing stitches around the edge of the hole, and knitting needles to knit across the hole... It's very quick, and would be fairly invisible if I had matching yarn.

In other news, I finally get my first rabies (ahem... Anti-rabies) jab tomorrow.

Newport

Last Sunday, Elena & Patrick took us to Newport for an afternoon at the seaside, the aquarium and the pub.

The sea lions were thoroughly entrenched at the pier, barking continuously and ridiculously like they belonged in a cartoon.






At the fish & chip shop, the catch is labelled with how it was caught and by whom, which is pretty cool.


The aquarium seemed to be quite modern, with a variety of interesting art & decor.



This was carved from a single piece of Big-leaf Maple:



As always, the lion-fish were spectacular - I was surprised to get any good pictures at all though, since I wasn't using a flash and had no tripod.



This eel has cool pointy yellow nostrils:


A universal favourite was the jellyfish area, with a fairly extensive collection of the little & not-so-little guys:


They were not included in the petting tank, however:



Heaps of anemones were really stunning (and photogenic):


And check out the chiton... Yes, this species is in fact an ambush-predator - awesome!


I name this abalone James Bondfish:



Californian sea otters have the market totally cornered on "cute", and they know it.


Puffins, however, are way too tough to care about "cute".


Watching more sea lions from a different perspective was also fun:



It's an Auk.


Thankfully, someone with pretty severe OCD had arranged the gift-shop by species:


And these were just growing outside - so jealous...


We headed up to Seal rock to check out the Pacific coast (from the other side) - it's pretty rough, but gorgeous.




After that, it was off to the Rogue Brewery for beer, dinner and beer - this is the way to the bar:


The whole place smelled strongly of hops, yeast, and happy. Spectacular beers, every one.



Kindly, they supplied tasters for a small fee:




An update on the hippo: Mineral analysis of the urolith revealed pure calcium carbonate, and there were tonnes of small thrombi in the cardiac vasculature associated with extensive, acute infarction. Probably, the brain was the same, but we didn't take it out for practical reasons. Essentially we think the hippo went septic, which induced a pro-coagulable state that resulted in diffuse intravascular coagulation.

Firearms & Halloween

Mort got to go outside last week - the son of the guy who replaced our dishwasher took him out to a firing range after the job was done. He's a reserve deputy County Sheriff.

This is where people go if they want to go to an official range to let off rounds (rather than finding a quiet spot in the forest): The bays circle around a hill, so it's a pretty big compound.




And here is some of what they bring:



Left to right: Glock in .40 Smith & Wesson; .357 Magnum; Taurus Tracker 7-shot in .357 Magnum; .38 Special +P 5-shot (with laser sight).

Mort is firing a Kimber Colt 1911-style pistol in this picture:


The Glock (standard issue) and the Kimber (Xmas present) are the ones commonly carried by Deputy Tyler.



And here is the Taurus Tracker:




We were spent Halloween with Elena & Patrick - they go in for the decorations in a serious way, even filling street-adjacent rooms of the house with props and black-lights...



Mort got to learn about pumpkin-carving:




He was plainly enjoying it.



Pretty effective, eh?


Here's the outside of the house after dark, including gravestones, a fog machine, screaming skulls, and many, many more....




And in case anyone wants to know, this is what voting in the NZ elections looked like to us: