This is half-pie.

Last weekend, being helpfully annexed to that most sacred of Australasian secular holy days Anzac Day, was a long one. And so we went over the hill into the Wairarapa to Masterton to stay with Becky’s parents.

It’s lovely and autumnal over there at the moment, and while we were there the weather held (against expectations) and we had warm fine days for the most part.

Masterton is blessed with Queen Elizabeth Park. It’s a good place to wander about in at this time of year – acres of exotic trees all coloured beautifully; a lake; a pretty good kids playground; and at the weekend, a miniature train. Fun for everyone:

And I forgot to mention one of the best Cafés in the Wairarapa – Café Cecille – is in the park, with another café over the way at the very fine Aratoi Museum of Art and History.

But enough of the travel-guide stuff. At the end of it all, the kids had the most fun with the simple stuff – and some new friends – and so here’s my favourite photo of the weekend:

It’s been a long, mild autumn so far. Long may it last…

Observing that it’s been fifteen long days since the last posting here I feel compelled to write something, anything. Don’t know why.

So, exciting things that have happened lately (YMMV on the excitement factor):

• the Blackball Salami company make the most amazing bacon. It smells like maybe they used beech to smoke the stuff because just cooking it makes the kitchen smell like a bush campfire. Awesomely good.
• Galactica Is On Again. American friends provide in a very timely fashion; and now we have Sunday night viewing free of either crap movies-of-the-week or British “quality” drama full of the same tired faces.
• Saturday soccer. Bella is playing, and although I most certainly do not like having to haul my arse out of bed any time before about nine on a Saturday morning it’s actually worth it for this. The fine, still weather did help yesterday; later in the season we’ll probably curse the day we agreed to it.
• my fortieth is coming. Actually, I am less than excited about this, but have realised that I don’t have to have a party if I don’t want one. I need to think of something interesting and exciting to do. Or maybe buy – we’ve been cruising the galleries with aimless intent.
• cult game for the Wii, Zack and Wiki, is brilliant. Zack the boy pirate and his pet monkey must solve puzzles to win treasure. Doubly nice because the girls can and do make very good and useful puzzle-solving suggestions; while the point and click interface can be managed easily by them.

Well, that’s more than enough excitement for now. I’ve got Monday to look forward to, after all.

I am afraid to report that Monteith’s have jumped the shark.

DB have been giving away dozens of the new Monteith’s New Zealand Lager via a new text message voucher system on several high-profile blogs. Presumably the idea is to generate some buzz. OK, I can help with that.

I won a dozen via The Spare Room (ta!), thanks to an email from Martha, picking it up in Masterton en route to Napier for Easter.

So, what’s it like? It’s not unpleasant, which is about the best I can say. I don’t think I could care to tell the difference between it and any other green-bottled international lager: Stella; Heineken; Steinlager; it’s all bland alcoholic lolly-water. And I’m hardly likely to ever try.

But worse, I think, is the way that it so totally breaks with the brand of all existing Monteith’s products that even looking at the bottle brings on an uncomfortable feeling of dissonance in me.

Actually, I’m wondering why it bothers me so much. OK, so I have been drinking Monteith’s, more on than off, for over 20 years. I’m kind of attached, but hardly exclusively. I guess I have a nostalgic affection for it: my heart believing the brand hype of a brown-bottle West Coast Miner’s brew, the same stuff I used to get in quart bottles from the pub down the road from the farm; even though my head tells me the stuff comes from Auckland from the same factory as this weasel’s piss.

This new lager comprehensively craps on my foolish heart’s delusional belief. The bottle is smooth, green, and glossily designed; it’s trying hard to scream I’M A SOFIST SOPHISTACK SOPHISTICATED BIG CITY LAGER AND NOT FROM A HICK LITTLE COUNTRY EITHER, HONEST. And as far as I can tell the Monteith’s label is there solely in a cynical bid to attach a ready-made heritage feeling to a beer that has probably only been created to compete internationally with those various aforementioned lolly-water lagers.

Fuck ‘em. My heart was wrong, and I must move on. And mostly I have; to Tuatara and Epic, and the occasional Sassy Red when I can’t find those.

It’s only beer, after all.

Update: Even the former brand manager for Monteith’s seems to find the new lager’s branding odd …

I’ve created a muxtape here. Muxtape is a flash-hyped (i.e., new today, the cool kids are on it in a server-groaning flashmob, only to forget about it by tomorrow) service for creating something akin to a mixtape of ye olde technology.

I always used to love making mixtapes for people I was either trying desperately to impress or felt had dreadful musical taste, and maybe things don’t change. You may therefore decide for yourselves which category you fit into.

The muxtape contains some of my favourite mashups… or it would be, if the damn uploading on the shite broadband connection I’m on wasn’t so appallingly slow. I should have completed it by next week sometime.

In the meantime, and if your own connection is a spanking one, let me know where your muxtape is…

While at the Phoenix Foundation gig we had to make a trip away from our rather good spot (parents of small children will understand why we had to do this, and quick). On our little trip we happened to walk past the Water Whirler, which somehow Becky and I had never seen working before.

So I snapped it with the cameraphone, and I think it came out better than it might have with a real camera, the low-light noise making like Seurat:

The clouds in particular do it for me. But if you want to get a better idea of the nominal subject, there’s lots more photos of the Water Whirler here.

So, just as perhaps hinted at in the final paragraph of my most recent Wellingtonista post we took the girls down to Frank Kitts Park this evening to see the Phoenix Foundation, live in a free gig.

We sat on some steps above the main mass of people on the grass so the girls could see what was going on. (That music that comes out of our stereo at home? It’s made by real people. Those people. Up there on that stage.) Rosa fell asleep in my arms halfway though the second song (40 years?), but Bella watched through it all, occasionally jumping up to dance. We, of course, loved it. Great music, happy crowd, kids stoked to be out doing something cool and different.

And then, the last song. Bella climbed onto my shoulders, and Rosa on to Becky’s, and they sung/shouted the words of Bright Grey, a song they know and love well:

…that orange and yellow, they’re making me mellow…

And then rounding into the “ooo-ooo” bits with gusto, enought to make some of the people around us stare and smile. The song faded away, the grins on the girls faces remained; more “ooo-ooo” from them as we walked to the car, the songs of the encore playing behind us.

I think they’ll want to do that again.

This being our National Day, and a holiday, we would have had the traditional barbeque dinner this evening… except ours ran out of gas before the steak even went on. And meanwhile I’d got diverted and burnt the bottom of one of our best pots to a blackened mass. Bugger.

But earlier we’d had a great time: after Bella’s football practice we tried out the new Mojo Kumutoto for lunch (nice, although the service was a little slow and we got “forgotten”… but we got given a great number of buy-one-get-one-free coffee cards as compensation, so all was made well) and had a wander on the waterfront.

Seems a bit of a pity to have to go back to work tomorrow, really.

It is a hot sunny evening and I’m at home feeling absurdly relaxed. Many things are conspiring to place this time out of the ordinary; but chief among them are the facts that Becky and the girls are away (I’ll join them tomorrow, but for now I’m on my own); and I found a shop stocking Epic (the first beer I’ve ever tried, and kept buying, based solely on internet word of mouth / Facebook/Twitter etc etc).

So now I’m wondering what to do. There’s lots really, even when the things that really should be done are discounted (like mowing the lawn… yeah right).

I could either:

• surf the Fail blog, this year’s answer to lolcats; or
• try and finish Zelda, or at least start Metroid; or
• upload some stuff to Flickr (no wait – I’ve done that already); or
• watch some more of Firefly on my iPod; or
• idly search domain names looking for good stuff that’s not taken; or (the default option)
• get plastered, sitting on our sunny evening deck.

Too many choices. Default option is looking likely.

Both girls love animals, but Rosa is the one with a particular affinity for the small and creepy.

Today, while the others were away, she led me outside. “Dad! Come and look at the weta motel! There’s a really big one in there!”. She unscrewed the wingnuts holding the cover on, and there they were.

This is pretty much par for Rosa, and of course was easily surpassed later in the afternoon when we discovered she’d adopted a rather battered and broken-winged bumblebee as her latest pet. “It’s called Queenie!” she said proudly.

I explained that she should try and be careful as bumblebees weren’t always very good at knowing friends from squashers. Not that this advice changed her behaviour one bit, as she let it wander over her hands and up her arm.

She made her sister go and pick some clover for Queenie, and we watched as the bee’s long black tongue tried to dip into the clover florets.

Hours she spent, and would only come inside at last for the evening once Queenie was in her own bed, a bower of clover and grass picked for sweetness, and a carefully folded tissue for a pillow, laid out on the front door step away from any rain that might fall.

What will we say to Rosa if Queenie is gone by morning?

Strange. I’ve just noticed a draft posting on my blog, uncompleted from the weekend.

As I tap this it’s late but warm and still, like those baking summers of youth. It is unclear whether the Motel we are in has intentionally provided free wireless, but nevertheless that is what I have discovered. Finding this at the beginning of the weekend really started things off nicely.

Becky and I are back at Lake Hawea, just two weeks after our previous visit. This time though, we’ve left the kids in Wellington with their grandparents while we rage it up at my cousin’s wedding here.

Since being away the weather has stabilised. Yesterday, the day of the wedding, was one of those amazing southern days where the sun is baking hot but the air remains relatively […]

As I read it I remembered somewhat squiffily tapping it into the iPod in the dark, having been over-pleased with myself at figuring out how to attach it to a local wireless network (a tip: sometimes wireless access points appear to allocate IP addresses outside the range that the ADSL router has allowed to be NAT’ed – and this can explain the sometimes infuriating situation where it’s possible to connect yet not actually go anywhere).

Obviously though I’d gotten tired of tapping and called it a night. As I should also now.