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The groom party, partly dressed with my aid, outside a church from the 11 or 12 hundreds.
The nervous groom, pacing expectantly.
The excited guest! The guests did all look as excited as this guy, but we did all feel as excited. It was a happy happy crowd!
The nervous and happy bride, determination in her steady gait.
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The happy, relaxed, united couple, mr & mrs west_end.
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Some wordy famous guy called Keats has a walkway named after him in Winchester. It is nice, but I didn't find it inspiration compared to the things in New Zealand.
This is one kick arse park bench though. Look at all the wood in it!
The river was high that day, which was two days before the wedding.
mr_storysmith searches for Mr Keats inspiration?
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Winchester the place is old, but many of the winchester buildings are actually pretty new. The main bit near the centre in the picture below is partly quite old and has a lot of character for it.
These couple of vaguely art deco houses are also very cool.
Other bits are kind of just old. This four way chimney special looks perhaps Victorian to me. I'm always partial to the quad chimneys.
This last one is a monster of a doer upper, but it looks like someone is about to get serious about it. It would be good to see how this turns out in a few years time.
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Winchester is where mr_west_end and mrs_west_end live. It has funny signs.
Notice this property hasn't sold, it is still available to be gazumped or underzumped by new parties. The whole thing solds like a major pain, a way for people to needlessly mess with each other.
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Guys like things to be hung well, especially in their kitchens. Knives hung on magnets are manly, but dainty patterned platters hung on hooks are all very very manly.
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I like Victorian architecture at many old London Stations very much. This station is on the South side of the Circle Line, amoung others lines. It is the train station I go to to get to mr_west_end and mrs_west end's place*.
* Now that mr_west_end married ms_west_end, they are mr_west_end and mrs_west_end, and may their hearts forever there remain.
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Wandering around London, just off Oxford St (main shopping street) I found this exquisit, if completely purposeless design. So purposeless that in retrospect I think I should call it art.
Don't get me wrong though, this is extraordinary beautifiy, mathematical, mouth watering tessalted serenity.
This one goes out especially to mr_west_end.
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These two are of a kind of shell shapped construct.
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This one is a kind of sun shade? Perhaps a theatre space or picnic area? Who cares really when it is this beautiful. I want one for my back yard.
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I've got a headache, my first for the year that I can remember. Probably means I'll take tomorrow off work, but we'll see in the morning.
To compensate for my headache I've set the fire going, had soup for dinner and am perched with my latop to play a demo of a game that only uses the space bar, should be a grand old evening
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Also for those who don't know I've got a flatmate, ms_pears, who was house sitting and will be my flatmate till about Christmas, maybe longer.
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London has nice parks. They are not fantastic, merely nice.
It has many little ones and all the little ones look like this.
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London, always full of pubs of old friends.
mr_storysmith and ms_unrufflable
mr_si, an old secondary school friend
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It turns out church halls are safe places. I left my fund-raising-quiz-won plate at a church hall about 4 months ago. At the time it was covered in blue cheese on little bits of french bread.
Last night we were back in the same hall, doing more lindy jams. At the end of the night we were packing up, and somebody found my plate for me, safely tucked away in a cupboard.
I shall hang it in my kitchen as a good luck symbol.
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I have future posted some more holiday photos, for your indulgence.
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The Yellow Bird Cafe is a great cafe on Chapel St, close to where I was staying. I had a good mocha there and the decoration of the place was great.
They had these glass cabinet food cooler benches that were instead filled with beer. Also neat outside seating and funny chain mail curtains.
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A Melbourne mochaccino and hot chocolate. They make nice mochas in Melbourne, on the whole.
Melbournites seem to understand milk and steam in ways that are quite compatible with a Wellingtonian understanding. This is very very good IMHO.
The Melbourne mocha is much more caramel in flavour than a Wellington one. It is chocolatey too, but the chocolate taste is an undertone to a strong caramel flavour. I'm not really sure how they are constructing such flavours, but the mochas were great.
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I have conducted further intelligence gathering activities by quizzing my coffee connoisseur colleagues at work.
The Melbourne style of making hot chocolates and mochas differs from the Wellington style in terms of ingredients. The Wellington style is to use powder, sometimes of Dutch origin, whereas the Melbourne style is to use syrup.
I find the powder more bitter but also more chocolatey, whereas the syrup has more caramel flavours and is less chocolatey.
Both the Wellington and Melbourne styles seem to pay good attention to the salt balance, which I think is critical to chocolate, both styles make Mochas that are ever so slightly salty.
Further enlightenment welcome, if the alligator wants to wade in here and share some of his tertiary training on these subjects, it would be most welcome.
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Melbourne has trams. If one of these hit a car, the car would get wasted! You can kind of hear the trams coming, a low grinding kind of sound. They have ding ding bells.
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Two months after my last visit, my magician of a hairdresser has given a strongly asymmetrical cut. I feel much happier for it, I feel like Diana has cut my head back into shape.
My next appointment is Saturday the 15th of November at 1pm, if I remember it.
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Upstairs at the station, even the upstairs is quite substantial. I recall some trickyness with buying a ticket, trickyness the same all over the world.
The money machine at the station only gives out $20 dollar bills. The ticket machine only gives a maximum of $10 change, forcing you to buy something small from a merchant at the station.
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The station is partly open, you can see gaps here at the top off the 'wall' thing. Clever design. This was early morning light, well, early morning for a computer programmer.
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I arrived early on a Friday morning. Got a bus from Melbourne's international airport to the closest train station, called Southern Cross Station.
It is full of geometric and tessellate prettiness.
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I'm future posting some travel photos, I've moved them from my memory cards onto a hard drive, and will back them up to my overseas storage too.
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Half consumed serving of bacon bone soup:
Ingredients
- 7 bacon bone pieces from your local butcher, purchased on the one compatible time between your hours and theirs, 11:30 on a Saturday morning.
- enough water to cover the bones in the biggest pot you have
- half a savoy cabbage, because I am so lindy right now
- a quarter of a small crown pumpkin
- some fish sauce
- a little box of campbells beef stock
- a little box of campbells vegetable stock
- a large man handful of dried split green peas
- free time in the weekend
Put the bacon bones in your big pot. Cover the bones in your delicious Petone water. Bring to a rolling boil them immediately start to simmer.
Simmer bones stirring occasionally for a few hours on your Saturday. After taking delight in sharpening your kitchen knife, cube the pumpkin and chop the cabbage into small pieces. Add with all the other ingredients late on a Saturday the afternoon.
The already salted bacon bones and stock means you don't need to add additional seasoning, hence leaving time for mochaccinos.
Simmer proto-soup again for a few hours on Sunday.
Bring soup to a boil on a Monday night. Serve with grilled toast with fuck-off sized chunks of cheese as pictured.
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Rumble in the Jungle is a dj competition, or 'battle'. It started about midnight and San Francisco Bathhouse on Cuba.
It was good to see and hear a eight NZ djs djing, we got to hear them do little 12 minute sets each over two hours before the competition moved on to longer sets. Some of them where quite skilful, playing two tracks at once almost the whole time.
However the drum and bass they played wasn't really very interesting to me, it was the kind of slightly heavy and boring type that NZers seem to like. The djs and the crowd where really into it, but it just wasn't my type of sound.
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eDay 2008 was a e-waste recycling day. The thing was quite impressive.
You drove up with your car of computers, monitors and bits to join the other 20 cars being unloaded. A team of two or three people unloaded your car while you answered questions for a questionnaire.
I recycled computers dating back about 13 years. Old firewalls, routers, backup boxes, desktops, servers and so on. These parts had all been reused and repurposed under my care, but it was time for recycling them. I'm all clear of unwanted bits for a good couple of years :-)
The thing worked like clockwork, I got through in about 5 minutes.
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Going to the Film Archive
Balooning
A trip to Rotorua as an adult
Waitomo Caves
Waterskiing
World of Wearable Arts
Stuart Island Tramp
Absinthe at the Hawthorne lounge with flames
Drinks at the Beehive, completed with mr_storysmith and ms_storysmith.
Christchurch lindy battle of the bands
Backflip class
Tai Kick Boxing
Gucci Tramping
Moutain Bike Tramping
Cooking Classes of some kind
Te Kairanga Day
