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: