Outdoor Weekend

I have not been complaining about it nearly as much on my blog as I have in real life, but it has been WINDY here! Cold, cutting, brutal, unbelievably fast wind, every day for over a week. It is not very fun, and everyone here says that it is atypical for January, because usually the wind has died down by this point in the summer. But not this year. In addition to making it difficult to do anything outside, the cold wind makes even our nice, sunny days feel rather chilly and un-summerish, which I do not appreciate.

On the wonderfully bright side, however, the wind went away yesterday! Yahoo! In celebration, I spent almost the entire day sitting outside, drinking tea, petting Holly, and reading. Although it was brilliantly sunny, it was not overly warm, which made it perfect for me to keep my skin covered and safe from the sun, while getting to soak up its lovely rays.

I am reading (on my ipad) Foundation (by Asimov), which J just finished reading, and is quite good. I just finished The Once and Future King (by White), which was also great. Also, notice that our deck is freshly painted a lovely new colour. Our landlady has been working hard, and it looks great!

That was pretty much my entire Saturday, with occasional breaks for eating and a bit of yard work.

Sunday (today), there was a bit of wind, but not too much, so we decided to head to the beach, which we have been meaning to do for a while. I have been several times with Kirsten, but J has been working (often night shifts), and hasn't made it yet. Some of these pictures are from my earlier explorations with Kirsten and Holly, and some are from today with J and Holly.

We went to South Beach, which is only about 6 or 7 minutes away from our house. People seem to not like it as much as Kai-Iwi Beach, but we like it a lot.

This is a little freshwater stream that empties into the sea. The water is so clear!

Holly is always so excited to explore!

After a few minutes of running, Holly takes a break and walks with us, so that she doesn't over-exert herself and hurt her heart.

We discovered - thanks to Holly trying to eat them - that there are little bluebottle jellyfish scattered about the beach!

As it turns out, it was rather horrendously windy on the beach. I shudder to think what it would have been like on one of the really windy days last week! We decided to walk away from the water to try to escape the wind, and found ourselves in this pretty area.

We did not succeed in escaping from the wind, especially when we climbed to the top of mounds! But it was quite fun!

On the way home, we noticed that there were lots of people downtown. We remembered (a bit belatedly) that it is "Heritage Weekend" for this area of NZ. Tomorrow (Monday) is Wellington Day, so it's a three-day weekend (not for J, unfortunately). All the different areas of NZ have their own Anniversary holiday to celebrate when the region was founded or when colonists first arrived there. Anyway, there were various outdoor events going on to celebrate, and we went to check them out. Unfortunately, we got there too late for most of them, but we did have a lovely time walking by the river and around downtown, and listening to quite a nice live band.

People of all ages were dancing, which was fun.

Despite having been in this area several times, neither of us had noticed this neat sculpture. Check out our reflections!

All-in-all, it was a great weekend to be outside. I so very much appreciated the respite (however brief) from the wind, and I'm so glad that J and I finally made it to the beach together. Good stuff.