Opened the curtains to the balcony this morning to find a clear sky, calm sea, slight pink hue settled over the island and a bright, round moon completing the picture. Last day of winter? Think that day happened earlier in the week.
Four degrees at 6.30 this morning the only sign that it is not yet high summer, We have, to be fair, had the mildest of winters. Polar blasts have been generally been short lived and those wildly-windy and wet spells have been interspersed with long spells of fair weather.
Let me get the soccer out of the way!
3-1 Defeat in the knockout final. A poor performance by our standards and a season ending injury for me. No participation in this weekends league final and a disappointing end to my "competitive" playing days. It is time time to throw my lot in with the social teams in the club. More of a runaround, less committed and more "my age and lack of pace".
That is that! Bring on the cricket season, though this year we get a break of about a month between the two codes, unlike last year with the soccer season going until early October and overlapping with cricket. A month of two day weekends!
May be a good time to arrange that weekend away. Brian and Michelle were keen on my suggestion to do a weekend away somewhere between Auckland and Wellington, Maybe the National Park or lake Taupo in the central North Island.
Been pretty busy in the garage of late. Took two days leave early this week, one reason was to get over the soccer injury, the other because I just needed some time off. Built a TV cabinet / shelf for the downstairs lounge, now that we have moved our living room there from the upstairs "family room". It is a pretty small small space and the furniture we had did not really fit. So a purpose built unit to house the TV, DVD, VCR.
VCR is vital with the world cup coming and the fact that we are on the other side of the globe - games are mostly early hours of the morning.
Also fashioned a rather funky looking coffee table to match the TV unit and have leveraged on of the side tables I had made for the family room until I make up some to match the coffee table. That was Monday and woke up on Tuesday energised enough to tackle the picnic table I have been considering for some time.
Worked a treat, though the wood was "wet" so it needs a week or so of good weather before I can sand and varnish. Built entirely of fence palings. 1.8 meter lengths of rough-sawn pine 150mm wide and 25mm thick. Absolutely stable, solid and comfortable.
Projects that are still in the pipeline are a dresser for our room, a book case for Travis' room and framing a few of Sherrie's art works for around the house. Have also been pottering on the motorcycle and need to service both cars, which is looking like being this Sunday. The big job is going to be changing the automatic gearbox oil on both cars and I doubt the Nissan has ever had a change of auto fluids in it's 200 000km. The oil is very dirty, though the gearbox is quiet and smooth. Speaking of the Nissan, we made our last payment on it this week. Wooo Hoooo!
That's it for today! And it really is a cracker, probably means that the first day of spring will be shite!
Update (4 Sept)
First day of spring was crappy! Second day was glorious, fathers day - more on that in the next blog.
We won the league final on penalties, so the season ends on a bright note!