who turned off the sun

Hey All,

So Drea finally came back from her conference to Dublin (and surprise trip to Boston). Yay! It's nice to have her back. Before leaving on her trip she had been conspiring with her brother to make a week-long stopover in Boston to surprise her parents. I think they must have been in discussion about the best way to do it for about a month or so. The final surprise went something like this...

Drea arrives in Boston on Friday afternoon. Friday just so happens to be her nephew Luke's birthday. The plan was for Mark and Molly (Drea's brother, and sister in law) to take the kids and Tom and Marianne (Drea's parents) to a childrens museum followed by dinner. Drea was to arrive in Boston and call Mark. Mark then would pretend to recieve an emergency call from work and leave the group to pick up Drea at the airport. Drea would don her disguise: sunglasses and sunhat, and wander past her unsuspecting parents at the museum, then ask Mark if he would like her to take a picture of the family. With camera in hand she would instead take a video of them all as she slowly gave hints that they might actually know her. I could say that the surprise was total but here's the video so you can decide yourself (what kind of weirdo tells someone to say "hamburger" when posing for a picture)....



It's been wonderful having Drea back in the house. I have someone to talk to, someone to share meals with, someone to enjoy Dunedin with and most of all, someone to steal heat from (and steal I do!). Somehow the lightswitch (aka sun) got turned off in Dunedin and the temperature dropped from the mid-teens (that 50's - 60's for most of you) to right around 0 (yup, that'd be freezing). It even snowed in Dunedin shortly after I had decided to ride my bike in to work. Oops. To make matters worse, I couldn't get the fireplace working. Which really hurt my pride as I was once a boy scout. But luckily I can blame the family of birds that took residence in our chimney for my lack of progress. I called up the landlord who climbed up on the roof to take a look and proceeded to dislodge our flue. Again, oops. He promptly called up a chimney sweep to fix it last week and so when we got home we lit up a roaring fire to great success. Two cold nights and two roaring fires later we recieve a call from our landlord. He asks me, "How's it going?". I say, "great, we've got a roaring fire going and..." which was quickly interrupted with "Nooooo!" Apparently our flue did not get attached and we've been venting our smoke into the attic. Can I get a little oops oops? So you might imagine that an abrupt cold snap might make the local chimney sweep (and repairman) a popular guy. Sure enough, the earliest he was able to schedule us in to fix our flue is this coming Tuesday (over a week from when we called up and a month from when we discovered it broke). So in the meantime Drea and I have moved the bed into the living room (next to our currently defunct fireplace) developed an intense appreciation of hot water bottles and wool, and started to understand what makes tea so popular around here (psst...it's hot).

So this weekend was looking like an especially cold one and we decided it was probably best if we got out of dodge. Luckily Drea had discovered the Slow Food Otago group was having a winery tour and luncheon/bbq out in Cromwell on Sunday. We needed no better excuse so we booked ourselves a nice little place to stay Saturday night, packed up our food and some warm clothes and got out of town.

It was a lovely drive up to Cromwell as it's Autumn here and the trees are only just past their peak color. We got in to town with enough time to do a little wine tasting. For anyone heading up to Cromwell, may I recommend the Wooing Tree winery for a very tasty Pinot Noir.

Sunday turned out to be beautiful with snow across the tops of the nearby mountains. We hit one more winery on our way to the Slow Food event. The event was at the home of a couple who used to be the New Zealand ambassador to Tonga and then Iran and are now trying their hand at winemaking.

During our tour of the winery (under the netting to keep the birds out)

The winery and snow capped mountains in the background

They hosted about 20 of us at their home and everyone brought something to share. I think the highlights were the avocado dip (avocado, pickled garlic, pickled garlic juice and lemon juice), lots of homemade breads and cheeses, some walnut-garlic pate, some fantastic desserts and lots of wine. We brought prawns, mushrooms and capsicum (peppers) marinated in a sesame soy ginger sauce. It was delicious. We also brought a fruit salad that we threw together when we remembered that morning that we were supposed to bring a dessert.

Slow Food Otago

It was a lovely time and we met some very nice folks. Looking forward to the next event.

This is a random bicycle fence we passed on the way home - old bicycles left to decorate a fence. They like their themed fences here - we've also seen a shoe fence and even a bra fence!

Warm thoughts and love to all,
Dave and Andrea