It's been a while

Kia ora from down under. 

It's a long weekend here and today was, unusually for this time of year, a beautiful clear spring day. I'm away with friends for the weekend and we went exploring today. 

Tree ferns. 

Kawhia is an old fashioned seaside community, pretty and peaceful. 

It's a black sand (iron sand) hot water beach. If you dig a hole in the sand below the high tide mark, the hole will fill with very warm water and make a lovely bath. It wasn't warm enough to strip down to a bathing suit today but I had a great exfoliating foot bath. 

Those pesky gays

It all becomes clear....


All the death and destruction occurring in Christchurch right now is actually due to rampant hedonism according to the website christchurchquake.net which, it's reported, is registered to an address in Utah, USA.


Whoever they are the owner/s of this site sure appear to have some issues with New Zealand culture. Here's a delightful sample  -


"The families of NZ soldiers serving in Afghanistan should be asking, "Is it worth your sons', your husbands', your uncles', and your cousins' lives - to have them risking everything, just because a couple of NZ's top lesbians were blackmailed over their lesbian "threesome" with a butch American lesbian in Washington?" Yeah, that is how NZ's foreign policy was really decided! It wasn't national or strategic interests."

News from the shaky isles

It feels surreal that the beautiful city of Christchurch (about 1,300 kilometres south of me) has taken another hammering only five months after the last massive quake. This time the effect is much worse even though this quake was smaller - there's loss of life because it happened at lunchtime on a working day and the epicentre was very close to the city and only 5 kilometres deep. Aftershocks are happening every few minutes, some of them quite significant so more damage is occurring all the time. It must be terrifying; I have experienced earthquakes but nothing like this.

Please spare a thought for the rescue effort that is ongoing.

I posted a while back when I was visiting Christchurch, see here for a photo of the central city Anglican cathedral as it looked then. See link here for a current view or here for today's shots of around the city centre.

The power of nature is mind boggling.

Is it just me?

I'm scared of the air bag inside my steering wheel.

I've heard people say that if you have your thumbs on the bit of plastic that is the air bag cover in the centre of the wheel, and the bag is activated, it can seriously break your thumbs. It really worries me that I'm going to get more hurt by the bag activating than I might be from the actual crash.

Is it just me?

I wanna be a billionaire

...so freakin' bad

I don't really aspire to billionaire status but as I start to look for some cute summer sandals, I just wish that the bottom end of the market wasn't my only viable option.

Plenty more fabulous stuff where these came from on the wonderfully comprehensive fashion site fashionstylehive.com

Check out some of these beauties.

Christian Louboutin

Givenchy

Dolce and Gabbana

Jimmy Choo