My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 8/2/13

Posted on 7 August 2013 by SJPONeill

1. What is on your Summer 2013 bucket list?

I don’t really have a bucket list…I’ve been around a lot and done a lot of things and am pretty content with the things that I’ve done, places that I’ve been, etc so any such list I might have of things to do before I go is pretty simplistic…for this summer, my one ambitions is to landscape this area so that any rainfall runs parallel to and not towards the house. It will have to be dropped quite a bit on the bank side and the fence past the tank will have to be replaced as the ground level there will drop my about half a metre: probably a good time to convert it to post and rail….

2. What is the most useless item on your child’s back to school list?

Not something we have to worry about now and, as grandparents, we can encourage all sorts of inanity…

3. What is the one reality TV show that makes no sense to you?

There’s reality shows that make sense? The only ones that I watch, if they meet the definitions of ‘reality show’ are some of the more up market cooking shows like Masterchef…well, just Masterchef, really….

4. What is one movie you can watch over and over again? Why?

Oddly enough, the 2009 version of Star Trek….I hated when I first saw it but it’s really grown on me. This might be just because I know that it outrages all the pureborn Trekkies to the point of pain but more and more it is because I think it has a top cast, is an interesting take on an old but tired story, and pays more than lip service to character development…on nights when TV just sucks and I don’t want to think too hard about selecting a movie or I just want something familiar on as background while I work on something else. more and more, Star Trek 2009 is my pic…

Just for those too dumb to figure out what actually happens in the movie, this picture might help make it clear. Everything after The Original Series is gone now (and so, in logic, is First Contact). Is that a great loss? Mmmmm…possibly not…4000 seasons of Voyager, The New Generation and Deep Space Nine pretty much thrashed the franchise to death…MAKE IT STOP!!!! So JJ ABrams did….get over it…

5. What’s your favorite back to school tradition?

Enjoying week day daytime peace…

via My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 8/2/13.

My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 7/19/13

Posted on 21 July 2013 by SJPONeill

My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 7/19/13.

1. What is one thing you have too many of in your house?

A toughy…

…my wife would probably say these…but…then again…they keep me home at nights and off the streets…

2. Did anything go not quite as planned on your wedding day?

Not really but inherent in ‘planned’ is having a plan and ours was of a fairly minimalist type…we really just took it as it came on the day…the only real potential hiccup was the late realisation that we needed two witnesses on the day…overcome by tapping a couple of other tourists on the shoulder the day before…

Carmen and Simon Get Married 010

3. What is your favorite summer smoothie recipe?

Easy…leftover fruit, juice and spirits, ice cream for bulk and flavour…blend and kiss use of your legs goodbye for a few hours…

4. What is the weather like where you are?

5. What is your favorite book to read to your kids?

No favourite per se but a definite preference for older books over those published more recently that seem to have all very nice pictures but that are found somewhat lacking in the story department…

My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 4/12/13

Posted on 15 April 2013 by SJPONeill

1. Where do you hide things from your kids at?

We have two large garages – if we can’t find stuff in either of them they have no show at all…

Garage 001

2. What is your favourite rainy day activity for bored toddlers?

Painting and drawing
Twins 400

‘Helping’ in the kitchen

Another showing of 9; mercifully they are over Chitty Chitty Bang Bang now

3. Are you a punctual person or are you always running a few minutes (or more!) late??

I try to be the former but am always playing catch-up – even when I leave early for an appointment something usually happens along the way.

Ouch!!

4. When eating out, do you prefer off the beaten path “Mom and Pop” cafes or tried and true national food chains?

Some place we either know or that someone else has recommended – most of our culinary adventurism occurs at home…

DSCF6607-001

5. Does your significant other snore? Do YOU snore?

No comment. Of course not.

215200_1031321346433_1327374792_87910_3374_n

via My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 4/12/13.

My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 4/5/13

Posted on 7 April 2013 by SJPONeill

School days

1. Would you go to your high school reunion?

Not really something that are a big thing down here…about 15 years after we all left high school, a bunch of us got together for a weekend at an old ski lodge above Kurow and that was good but I’m not sure the big class get-together US-style would have the same attraction here…

2. What’s something that you’ve recently splurged on; either for yourself or someone else?

This…simple pleasures… a whole $1.50 in the disposal bin at the Taumarunui Library

tillman f-8

…although I guess us investing in a new printer (still to be delivered) this weekend counts for me as it is A3 size and will be awesome for paper models – for Carmen, it’s just a printer…

3. How do you handle your child’s fever?

Call Carmen.

4. What’s the nicest thing to happen to you lately?

This that Carmen got for my birthday a couple of week’s ago…

boysown

…again…simple things…simple pleasures…

5. What is your current favourite song?

I don’t really have one but I am prone to getting a song going around and around and around in my head and not going away for ages…the worst is the theme from CHiPs…

via My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 4/5/13.

My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 3/28/13

Posted on 30 March 2013 by SJPONeill

Cake for Birthday #41…

1. How often should adults have birthday parties?

At least once a year i.e. birthdays should be acknowledged, not just passed over or forgotten…whether it’s a big party, or just a few friends and family is entirely a matter of choice and personal preference…

2. What was your room decorated like when you were a child?

Only room photo I could find…

Very cooly…I had loads of shelves for books and toys, had all my Matchbox cars displayed on top of the dresser, and all my model planes hanging from the ceiling…posters, mainly scifi-themed on the walls…not many photos though as this was before the era of convenience photography…

Only image of my model planes from way back then…I think this one might still be stored away somewhere…?

3. Do you have any traditions for Easter? If so, what? and do you have a why behind that?

Not really but it is usually a chance to get last-minute summer jobs done before the weather rolls in for the next few months…this year, however, we are just hanging out for that weather to roll in as it is so dry at the moment we don’t dare do any ground work for fear of extending the desert…

4. Do you get Good Friday off? If so, any plans?

R&R…I am finding the one problem with working from home on a casual/part-time basis is that work days are not as clearly defined as they are in the Monday-Friday 9-5 paradigm so this weekend so yesterday was definitely an enforced chillin’ day…

5. Did you wear hats & white shoes to church on Easter? (Or was that just in the South?)

Not here but maybe in the South…?

via My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 3/28/13.

My Little Life: Five Question Friday!! 3/22/13

Posted on 25 March 2013 by SJPONeill

My Little Life: Five Question Friday!! 3/22/13.

1. What advice would you give a newly married couple?

Starting out doesn’t have to be flash…

Save….save like you don’t know where you next paycheck is coming from…eschew (say ‘no’ to) flash new cars and household bling, turn away from offers of credit cards and cheap loans…get your house paid off and build a home…

2. Who does more laundry around your house?

Me…but, in all fairness, I currently work from home so have the best opportunity to load up the machine and hand each load out during the day – and to recover it just on the off chance it should actually rain here in the Raurimu Desert…

Not my turn today though…

I must say, though…really, I must, thjat this sounds very much like one of the domestic issues that will lead to a conversation that ends in the ‘statement’ “See…!!!!!” and/or “I told you so…!!!” Tread carefully on this one, guys…

3. What items, if any, do you prefer to buy organic or make yourself?

The writing on the eggs is their collection date…

As much as possible, we like to grow our own vegetables and now starting slowly on our own fruit…we have been growing our own herbs for years and even had lemons growing successfully until Mr Lemon Tree got caught out by nasty old Jack Frost…we’re self-sufficient for eggs including having enough surplus to trade for chicken feed…

The white things on the ground are summer hail stones…

4. What book/TV series would you recommend for a friend on bedrest?

All five seasons of Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica for TV series…two of the greats scifi sagas ever told…more so after Mrs Lucas’ little boy dropped the ball…

William Shatner’s three Trek trilogies: Odyssey, Mirror Universe and Totality…I like them over other Star Trek books because Shatner (or his ghost writers) gets into Kirk in an almost autobiographical manner…

The best of the nine by a good country mile…

5. So, they say it’s Spring now…what does your “spring” look like at this very moment?

Well, here on the upside-down part of the world from Mama M, it is still the worst drought in seven decades (does that sound better or worse than 70 years?). Although it is still relatively green here, we are rationing our water just in case in continues on for more than another few weeks…

Green 2012 North Island on the left, 2013 scorched version on the right…

My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 3/15/12

Posted on 16 March 2013 by SJPONeill

My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 3/15/12.

1. What is one thing you wish you did not have to teach your children?

That there are some people that they need to be wary of, that not everyone is what they seem and really wants to be their friend…I miss the good old days when children could walk to and from school without fear of impropriety…it’d also be nice to see an end to the herds of unruly SUVs that congregate around schools twice a day…

2. What are you going to use since Google Reader is going away?

Don’t care…don’t use it…never could get RSS to work properly for me without feeling that I was spamming myself…

3. British comedy; Hilarious or strange?

Classic…even the stuff that I don’t like…subtle and not a smack in the face with a baseball bat like most US comedy…when the US can get Basil Fawlty, it will have arrived in the realm of true comedy as opposed to slapstick…

4. Do you prefer card games or board games?

I only really play with the girls so whatever they want but probably my preference is for board games as their hands aren’t big enough yet to hold cards properly, certainly without giving the game away to those sitting around them…personally, on the half day a year when I have time, I prefer board games…still waiting to try out the special rules in the Star Wars Monopoly I got for Christmas ’11…

So much cooler than boring Monopoly…

5. Will winter ever end?

Asking the same question here about summer – some rain would be really nice after almost six weeks without…so very happy we put that second water tank in last year…but last year, winter never did end and just rained through summer and back into winter again…didn’t think that was much fun but it was probably preferable to this year’s drought…

On the left, the North Island, nice and green albeit a little damp in March 2012; on the right, the krispy krittur, it is becoming this year…

Five Question Friday! 1/25/13

Posted on 26 January 2013 by SJPONeill

That I don’t always contribute to Five Question Friday is often not so much an issue of whether Mama M’s questions float my boat in any given week but is often more of me getting motivated…but certainly in this period of seeking employment and optimising the great weather for domestic projects, motivation is running high…so here goes…

1. Do you embrace or dread snow/cold weather days?

When it’s straight cold e.g. like this:

…I don’t mind it too much…when it’s ongoing days of this:

…when all the heat is sucked from the ground and house, and it is just miserably cold and wet…nope, not much embracing going on then…

2. Which game show or reality show could you totally win?

As a spectator, I usually do OK in ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire‘ but would probably freeze and stutter if actually on the spot; reality shows just leave me cold so I think that’s a non-issue...

3. What is your preferred climate?

I like New Zealand, specifically where we are now on the Central Plateau where both winters and summers are comfortable but not extreme…I’m not sure that I’d be so keen to return to the deepest South again, certainly not anyplace where urban snow and frost would be regular occurrences…then maybe, I’m just over urban…?

4. What do you buy every time you walk into the grocery store, no matter what?

I always stock up on dairy: milk, butter and marg…if we don’t it it now it can always wait it the freezer til it’s time comes…

5. If you see a spider/bug in the house, are you brave enough to kill it, or do you call for your other half?

I’d prefer that someone else deal with it, but can general wind up enough backbone to deal with it myself…I spent enough time in South East Asia sharing space with greeblies to want to still do it now…

November 16 ~ 5QF

Posted on 18 November 2012 by SJPONeill

Five Question Friday (well, Friday for those who aren’t as quick as us Antipodeans who are already well into Saturday!!) is being hosted by Kate’s Life this week while Mama M confronts her fear of flying and heads off to Disney World with one of her daughters…

A bit more work required to answer the questions this week…or maybe I have just gotten ‘net-lazy’…as the host site has a restriction on copying and pasting its material…probably to restrict copying of photos but really…between ‘drag and drop’ and screen captures and MS Snip, if someone is going tot ‘take’ your photos, then they will find a way…as it was dragging and dropping the five questions for this Friday also carried over a bunch of HTML that took me a while to figure out how to edit out…

I think people need to be careful what they are trying to achieve by blocking ‘copy’ access – if they really want to protect it, then it probably shouldn’t be the Net…anyway…

1} What snack/drinks do you eat at the movies?

Aaah…the movies…I remember them…can’t remember the last time I actually when to a movie in a for-real movie theatre…think it was probably for the second or third slice of the Pirates of the Caribbean exploitation aka ‘let’s thrash this puppy to death‘ saga…maybe that’s why I haven’t been since…?

My movie watching away from home the last few years has been at about 39,000 feet and around 500 knots on a screen not much bigger than the average paperback. On the up side, the movies, except for the rubbish on Qantas flights, are usually all new releases or a combination of new releases and classics. Of course, with some of the new releases nowadays, you might as well just cut straight to the classics. My last flight from Singapore back home, I had already watched all the classics and didn’t watch a single movie the whole flight. Instead I had a most delightful item chatting with an elderly lady in the seat beside me who was on her way home from a month’s holiday in Italy – far more enlightening and entertaining than any of the faff new releases being offered up on the teeny-screeny… So, as I normally fly down the back with the goats and chickens, my movie food is generally something that might have been meat once sitting in some stuff that once was veges, washed down with a dodgy beer and a supper of potato ships, OJ and a club sandwich…

Movie nights at home in front of the big screen are something different entirely…last night was healthy munchie night with carrot and celery sticks and cauliflower chunks dipped in homemade blue cheese dip…see the next Masterchef Raurimu update for details…other nights its less healthy munchies like Biguns, Rations, and thick-cut potato chips…

2} What’s one food you refuse to ever try?

I rest my case…

Kina although I take Kate’s point about raw oysters…tried these again in Brussels on my last trip, the meal at Le Jardin de l’Ilot Sacre where we paid the better part of 150 euros for a sad-as sea food platter, and raw, oysters still didn’t do anything…cooked, yes absolutely, anytime. Kina? Raw, cooked or gold-plated, nope, never…

3} What’s your favourite nail polish color?

Normally black or blue and a direct result of having dropped something on my toe or jammed a finger in a door…

4} What is your favourite Thanksgiving tradition?

Well, Thanksgiving isn’t really a biggie down here, nor is there any close New Zealand national equivalent…tradition around this time of the year in this little corner of Godzone is probably looking for the first unfurling of the ponga fronds…

5} What are your least favorite [sic] words in the English language?

‘Favourite’ being spelled without a ‘u’?

Didn’t really think that I would have much in the way of least favourite words, well, not ones used in polite company, but, yes, ‘slacks; would probably be in the list – just don’t like the way that word sounds…

Five Question Friday! 9/28/12

Posted on 1 October 2012 by SJPONeill

OK, here we go for 5QF this week – have just arrived in Brussels after 36 hours on the go via Changi and Heathrow – couldn’t check in for a couple of hours so put our feet up at Blues Corner bar and acclimatised with three or four Leffe Blonds…don’t have access to my image library while on the road so probably no pics this week unless I see something relevant from my window as I type…

1. Do you prefer to drive to your vacation spot or fly?

If it’s in New Zealand, and in the North Island, then almost certainly drive – we are heading way up into Northland for Christmas and driving up in Lil Red and I am so much looking forward to it. A holiday in the South Island, we would probaly fly down and get a hire car from the APOD…anything overseas would be fly in-country and then see what we see vis-a-vis further mobility…

2. If you could live any where in the world, where would you go and why?

Well, having been all around the world a few rtime, I am actually pretty happy just where we are – if I had the money we’d dam up the valley a tad so that we could have a bit of a lake front but that’s about the only thing we miss where we are up on the Mountain i.e. the lack of significant swimmable/boatable water…

3. Should grown women wear leggings?

Well, from a purely superficial male perspective, only if they’ve got the legs for them; if not, we ll, somethings just don’t go together, y’know…

4. If you could change your name to any other name, would you? And what would it be?

Dunno, Luke Skywalker is already taken and nothing else really appeals – guess I’m happy enough as is…

5. What magazines to you have subscriptions to?

Right now I am subscribing to the Fighter Aircraft series because I liked the little 1/72 scale Spitfire than came with Issue 1 last year; I am getting a bit cool on it now because they seem to be sliding towards more and more 1/100 models which don’t go with my collection and which I think are a lazy way of cost-cutting, and b. because the companies quality assurance is the worst and many of the models are damaged within their protective packaging i.e. they were already damaged when they were put in the packaging…am just getting over it as we live too far from town to easily take back damaged items.

I am hoping for official approval to get a two year subscription to the new Airfix magazine, Airfix Modelworld as I really enjoy its articles, the articles are across the spectrum of modelling, it is a worthy successor to the old Airfix Magazine, and it comes with a free model…