Flew into Hong Kong on Saturday morning (night flight after a big meal in town, and the world's rudest air steward on Air New Zealand - who aren't normally like that).

Got the express train from the airport, and was impressed straight away - amazing buildings and structures all over the place. My sister lives in Happy Valley, which is just rows and rows of apartments stretching up the side of a valley - when you stand on her road and look into the valley it's like looking into Mega City 1 (geek moment).

Got straight into it - went shopping at Causeway Bay and worshipped at the temple of Ikea! On Sunday we just had a lazy day recovering, although we went supermarket shopping and marvelled at the rampant consumerism - it's such a change from NZ - we don't even realise what we're missing. I saw an 'organic' spray for washing fruit such as waxed lemons. It's just surreal!

Monday was an exploring day - we went to Kowloon, to Mong Kok, where we went to a lovely flower market, which was worth a look, and to the bird garden (not v big and v smelly), then down to the goldfish market, which was amazing, with dyed goldfish and lots of dying turtles. We walked back down Nathan Rd, all the way to the Science Museum (along Knutsford Terrace which had some very nice looking restaurants). The SM was quite good - it had a huge exhibit on occupational health and safety, including a robotic display of how to store dangerous chemicals.

Tuesday was the start of the moon festival. We went to Stanley Bay during the day - it has a really good market, with European sizes - I got a nice smart work blouse 2 piece for HK$99. We had lunch at a german beer keller - a mixed sausage plate, with sauerkraut, and some yummy wheat beer. Then we went and sat in a pub called the Pickled Pelican which had a nice mix of beers, and watched the rugby! Tuesday night was the moon festival itself - we went into Causeway Bay, with some lanterns we picked up at Stanley Market.

We had dinner at a tapas bar called El Sid, which did sangria (yum) and very garlicky garlic bread, then went to Victoria Park, which was absolutely full of lanterns. There were a few shows on - dancing and a fashion show etc on stages around the park, and probably the equivalent population of New Zealand out in the streets wandering around. We saw the new moon, so felt good about it!

Today, we've just been pink dolphin spotting off Lantau Island. The guide was quite depressing - more and more of them are dying because of the incredible pollution levels in the water, but we were amazingly lucky and saw a whole pod of them - a couple of mothers with babies (pups? Calves?) and a couple of others, who swam around the boat for about half an hour. The guide was over the moon, and kept going on about how lucky we were - I felt really privileged, not least because they might be extinct in a few years!

Prime finally showed the Dr Who Christmas Special tonight. It was brilliant!

Russell T Davies is a genius for dialogue. And Catherine Tate as the bride! There was a point in it when she got upset, and you could see her jsut about to go "am I bovvered?" Funny! David Tennant is growing on me too.

On other TV related matters, C4 did a '40 songs you are embarrased to love' which was compelling viewing last night! Most of them are way old, and I knew all the words, but hadn't seen the videos. Billy Idol's White Wedding was in the top 10, and had bizarrely racist overtones which you don't really pick up in the song - the whole wedding congregation did a nazi salute in the chorus. And Billy Idol did this Elvis lip curl while he was singing, which made him look like a complete knob.

The funniest one was definitely Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, where she is running amok in a boy's school. I have never seen so many scantily clad young men in my whole life (although it would be worth trying). Very very funny, and would probably be even funnier with the sound off. There was one bit where she was singing and a bloke in a loin cloth jumped up and did a high leg kick to one side, right in front of her, not in time to the music or anything. Very incongruous. I bet she had a lot of fun making it!

Went to see The Cure last night - they played 1 night in Auckland because some fans got together a petition to persuade them to include NZ in their world tour!

I got gothed up, for the first time in years, we got a babysitter and we had fun!

They didn't have a keyboard player, which made some of their old stuff sound odd, as did the fact that they had a 'rock' drummer, but they played loads of really old songs (the walk, a forest etc), and did 'Boys don't cry' as one of their (many) encores. They played for about 3 hours, and we finished up dancing in the rows between the seats.

Didn't get to bed til about 1, so I felt it at work today, having got up at 6,30!

Found a website recommended in urbanpagan by airforcegrrl

http://www.astrowisdom.com/thisnewmoon.htm
which is excellent, and updated for every new moon, and links to updates for every full moon. The website als says there are articles about the demotion of Pluto to a dwarf planet. Squeee!

I watched a really funny film yeterday. Hot Fuzz - it's a comedy cop movie about a police man who is sent away from the force in London because he is so good he is embarrassing the rest of them, to a sleepy village in Somerset (well they've set it in Wells, near Bath). It turns out to be a village with a dark secret...

Hot Fuzz

I also watched flushed away - it's a kids film (my daughter got it). It's co written by a 1970's sitcom writer from the UK, set in london, but bizarrely (given that the central male character would be played by Hugh Grant in real life) is voiced by Hugh Jackman. It's a good film, lots of send ups of British stereotypes etc, again very funny, and with soem adult jokes that whizzed over my daughter's head but had us sniggering.

Flushed Away

I've had a really busy weekend, and got loads done.

Its New Zealand winter now, so it's cold but most days we get some sun. We went to Bethell's Beach on Saturday, which is where Xena was filmed (Calliope's cave). Really beautiful beach, lovely sand dunes,and HUGE waves that were whipping up foam which we caught as it blew across the beach.

Today I carried on working on the fairy grotto - I'm making the door of the room into a giant tree trunk by painting a tree around it - it's quite difficult to get the shape of the boughs right. So far I've used 3 colours of leaves, but I'm going to have to go back and reshape some of it. I've been using acrylic paint, and one of the tubes was almost solid and smelt like old brussells sprouts (not kidding) - it worked okay once I'd mixed it with water. I also reorganised and sorted out all my daughters toys, and did all the washing and cleaned the fridge. This is mainly because we've got a visitor arriving on Wednesday for a month.

I'd been having weird dreams lately, lots of dreams about dead people, so I have had a phone round over the weekend to make sure everyone is still alive. I spoke to my best mate, who I hadn't really spoken to for a few months cos it's difficult with a 12 hour time difference when we're both doing things. I was also looking up something on Google, and by chance I tried putting in one of my friends from college, who came up on her work website. I emailed her and she wrote back - we lost touch years ago, cos I used to move about every six months with work. I don't know if it's because its winter, but I am trying to catch up with people I owe e-mails to now, and trying to update our family website (which is only for our family to see photos of what we're doing here).

I'm also really tired and trying to eat more healthily because of it - today I lapsed with a danish for breakfast, but had celery soup for lunch, which is meant to be very cleansing, and steamed veg with cheese sauce for dinner, although we started doing stuff for lunches for the week after dinner, so I also had a cheese twistie and a banana muffin and a bit of chocolate shortbread ( we add the healthy stuff in later)

I had a late night haircut on Tuesday night. Partway through it there was a huge power cut which knocked out the power to about 10,000 homes and businesses - my hairdresser moved me to the front of the shop by the emergency exit sign, anmd finished off my haircut by the light of the emergency sign and his assistant holding up her mobile phone. It was definitely a new experience!

Got called to my daughter's school on Thursday - she'd had a fall from a climbing frame onto her back. Although she was moving I took her to the hospital to get her checked out, and they lay her on a trolley, slapped a collar on her and rushed her into resuss to check her out and xray her. They kept telling her not to move, so I was bricking it. They told me it's pretty rare for young children to break their necks, but it's also quite difficult to spot on an xray, and as she was mnoving and not in screaming agony it was probably not broken but I should watch for any unusual symptoms for the next couple of days! Cue anxious mother overdrive!

So we've spent a couple of days at home not doing much exercise, and she's seriously got cabin fever! We have to go out tomorrow! I have never played so many board games in my life! I've also been run off my feet indulging her (my choice - I'd be peeling her grapes if we had any).

On the plus side, we've had the time to get back into the fairy grotto - painted an elf and we're part way through a toadstool house. She's been helping me paint - she's getting very precise - and we've spent a lot of time together.

I'm trying out one of the sponsored layouts - seems pretty fab

Been a very tiring time - lots of work. Way behind on painting - only 1 more flower fairy done. No astrology for ages, tho I need to check what's retrograde at the moment, cos something definitely is!

Went to a fantastic presentation on climate change yesterday evening - speaker from a govt science body who shot down the idea of sunspots causing global warming IN FLAMES! He also very patiently explained to an audience member that although another ice age might happen in the future, it would be tens of thousands of years away, not 10 years away, so we couldn't rely on it to slow down global warming! I sound a bit jubilant - it's because I get really cross with the media pundits leaping onto the nay-saying bandwagon with the benefit (generally) of no scientific knowledge to encumber their widely published opinions. * goes off to lie down in darkened room*

Big dinner party tomorrow so I need to find a decent recipe for chocolate torte!

So the virtual book arrived and I'm less grumpy!

Spent all day tidying the house and buying storage boxes for all the paper on the floor.

Tweaked an orange muffin recipe to make lemon muffins:

dry ingredients

1 cup sr flour
0.5 cup brown sugar (recipe was for soft, I had granulated organic, which gave it a bit of a crunchy texture
grated zest of 1 lemon

wet ingredients
1 egg
0.5 tsp vanilla essence
0.5 cup lemon juice (from 2 small lemons and topped up with water)
4tbs oil

I mixed and it started reacting straight away! I put into mini muffin pans and baked for 10 mins at 200F. They didn't rise that much more, but they taste beautiful! Like lemon drizzle cake.

I'm taking them to a meeting tomorrow night. Fortunately I made 3 spares as testers and I've eaten 2 of them already!

This is a whinge.

I buy e-books - there are some good authors out there whose work I have read on the web - Jane Davitt, Willa Okadi, Morgan Hawke etc. I like the process because it's immediate - you pay the money and download the pdf.

At least, that's what I thought 'til today.

I bought a Morgan Hawke vampire book from Extasy books, and stupidly didn't read the instructions properly until I'd paid (it directs you to how to pay be credit card, but tells you above that you won't get the book until they have manually uploaded it onto a virtual bookshelf on the website).

It's a lesson to me to be more careful, but now I am v cross and bored, sitting at home with nothing to read.

Grrr.

Just finished writing a paper on climate change and the coastline. I did quite a bit of research on Katrina, and other storm-related floods around the world, because cc is bringing more intense storms.

The data is quite scary - Katrina killed 1800 people in New Orleans, and is on record as the US's most costly natural disaster. And yet, storms of similar scale hit the Uk and Netherlands in 1953 and killed around the same amount of people, which made the governments bring on decent flood risk management policies, warning, good quality defences, emergnecy planning etc. When the same scale of storm happened in 1978 THERE WERE NO DEATHS.

When Katrina first happened I saw an interview with the designer of the Levees, who said he had been told to scale down for cost reasons. In my research, I saw a report to Congress which said 'maybe we should have considered the cost of loss of life in our calculations'. It's kind of depressing.

Anyway, new IPCC report is out. They're going for a lot more certainty in most things, but they haven't included the impact of green ice melt because it's 'unpredictable'. So Al Gore (and a decade of coastal scientists before him) is saying 5m for the greenland ice, another 5m for the antarctic ice, and IPCC is saying 48cm by 2100 but we can't estimate the amount of ice melt! Can annyone see a bit of a planning gap looming?

Just been reading

Investigations and Aquisitions by Lori (who is on lj as ljs).

It's brilliant. Giles and Anya living in England working as private investigators and 'aquisitors?' but also working for MI5 so there are Spooks overlaps. Beautifully written in the style of a lot of authors from the 50s or 60s - Dorothy L Sayers et al.

I also love the way Lori writes Giles Anya - she gets the romance pitched perfectly, and the two characters' personalities bring out the better points of each other. Very good!

Other than that, been reading a paper about the impacts of Katrina - 1800 dead, and some people likely to never return, but only some of the lessons have been learned from. Am busy researching a paper at the moment so don't have much LJ reading time!

Auckland has just had the 'Big Day out' music festival, with Muse and the Killers. I ummed and ahhed about going cos someone was crushed to death a few years ago when Limp Bizkit played and they blamed the organisers for not caring about the audience. By the time I'd decided to go (and take my kid) all the tickets had gone - Boo!

So I had a cheer myself up weekend instead.

I made a chocolate fudge cake on Saturday - it was huge - a 2lb cake tin. The centre was too light and not fudgey enough, so I won't include the recipe.

On Sunday the weather was lovely - a NZ summer day in all its glory. Spent the day on the beach with the kid bodyboarding, then came back and had a gourmet BBQ. Tried Tarahiki - a NZ white fish - firmish flaky texture. I bought fillets and marinated them in lime juice, caperberries and sweet chilli sauce, then onto the BBQ for a few mins, and served with a squirt of lemon juice. Instead of rolls I did panini grilled then topped with olive oil, BBQ'd red onions, grilled tomato and red pepper slices and some sea salt. Its also asparagus season here, so we had plainly BBQ'd asparagus. Pudding was the chocolate fudge cake, which works better as a pudding than a cake, especially when served with chocolate fudge brownie ice cream and cream. Calorie attack!!!

Best of all, there are clear skies tonight, so I and all my neighbours saw the McNaught comet. It has an amazing tail on it.
link to this for piccies is NZ Herald

The other thing I've been doing lately is reading fanfic by ljs . Having read her "What would Hugh Grant do?" fic (Ganya) I've made a start on her website (as her journal is flocked) to read more Ganya. She writes it so well - I haven't finished the fic yet, so I won't name it as I haven't commented on it - but its written the way I would want Giles and Anya to be together. Its incredibly romantic, but still with the full-on characters. Whew!


Have also started on glassdarklyuk kinky as hell Wesley/Spike fic (Spesley?) and am enjoying it immensely! I will write more about this!

It's the end of a few communities/fics this week.

The most amazing one was buffyverse top 5 - a fantastic comm. So many recs in just a few weeks - I found some great new (to me) writers and artists. Roll on October 27th next year!

Second one was Noel of Spike - there was some great work done for this.

tabaqui 's Neverland just finished - she is such an amazing writer - Neverland was so powerfully written that I find myself dwelling on it, thinking about the characters' motivations and feelings. Nothing she writes ends with the full 'happy ever after' but it finishes right!

First day back at work today (boo).

Still managed to find time to paint a bluebell fairy on M's wall. She wanted it to look a bit like her, so it took me ages to mix the right paint colour for the hair and eyes. Looks pretty fab now though.

That means there are fairies on all 4 walls - I've still got to do an autumn fairy and a boy fairy, and maybe a couple more flower fairies. Will upload a picture into my icons (tho not tonight).

Been scrolling through some of the fic and art flagged in the best buffy fics community I just joined - some of them are amazing - vamptastica does amazing artwork and ljs wrote the best giles/anya fic I have ever read, in the context of Hugh Grant films!

Got Bones S1 for xmas, so I want the outlaws to go away and give me time to watch it

Family hell at the moment - partner's mother, sister and 2 kids (2 and 4) have descended for 3 week stay.

Bizarrely they all snore the same (and leave their doors open so I can hear synchronised snoring while I'm typing this. Another triumph of nature over nurture?

Kids (including M) all massively overexcited and overtired.

I'm off to work tomorrow to escape - partner has asked to come too!

Loads of bad travel stuff has happened in Indonesia - will have to check planets - plane crash and ferry sinking. Still have 1 family chart to write up and I'm being really slack.

On Monday, partner fell off ladder and spilt paint on the floor
on Tuesday, partner broke glasses
on Wednesday partner was sick and couldn't get out of bed
same on Thursday
On Friday partner and daughter got caught in a traffic jam for over 1hr coming to p;ick me up.

I think it must be some sort of mars or uranus square, unless its something to do with the void-of-course - will have to plot charts and look into it.

Another day, another fairy!

Getting better at the drawing straight onto the wall thing now.

Went for a starlight fairy, so I did her dress in dark blue - used some kids paint, which didn't go on very smoothly - it seemed to dry at differential rates, which left it looking streaky. Next time I'll try mixing it with a wall paint and see how that goes!

My daughter painted the wings herself - blue glitter. Looks pretty good - the patterns are definitely cartoonish, and quite solid rather than ethereal - I don't think that's a bad thing - I think kids are surrounded with enough 'too beautiful' things.

The icon used is the wish fairy I did last week. Next week - who knows!

Started decorating my daughter's room this w/e. She'd asked for a fairy grotto, so I got some what looked like very pale pink paint for the walls (note to self - when its on the whole wall it looks a hell of a lot pinker), and some fake ivy plants in hanging baskets. No, it looks good, really!

What she really wanted tho was fairies! So I copied one out of a book of hers, as the first one - made it about 10 inches tall, and did a practice run on paper first. Headed upstairs feeling confident - turns out that you can't erase pencil off of walls without leaving big greasy eraser marks and streaky black smudges.

Worked out eventually that those funny little foam blocks made to get marks off the walls will work - they're too 'blocky' for detailed work, but they do okay if you get a whole leg wrong (like I did).

So, outline done - then I started painting. I'd made another mistake here - I'd bought a few emulsion test pots to use, which are much runnier than art paints. Cue much more use of the magic block!

It turned out okay - I used some kids paints for the wings - silver glitter, outlined with silver pen. Now I have to do another one next weekend, and obviously ~I'd picked the easiest-looking one to do first. Daughter thinks I'm god's gift to art tho, so its worth the pain!