Yinzer in the Shire

I have always wanted to decoupage. When I was a kid home sick from school I would spend the day watching interior decorating shows and rearranging the plastic furniture in my Barbie dream home.  There are two things interior decorators often talk about, t rompe-l'œil  and decoupage.  I think they just really like to use foreign words.  Being a child and then later a poor college student, I never had much reason to actually try my hand at decoupage. When we first moved to Miramar I found this lovely bottle in an op shop, selling for just fifty cents.  I agonised over purchasing it, I'm cheap like that, but eventually I gave in.  The labels on it didn't fit with the overall vintage style of the bottle and simply would not do. I tracked down a label I fancied at The Graphics Fairy .    The image was a bit large, so I had to measure the size of my bottle and scale the image down in GIMP before printing it out.  I printed this image out...

The Sundial of Human Involvement (not as depressing as it sounds) As you may have been able to tell from the previous post, this past week we entertained a visitor from the States on her first (but hopefully not last) trip to New Zealand. The best part about having company is getting to catch up with loved ones you seldom see, but second best is having an excuse to visit all those places in your town that you otherwise wouldn't!  It is a great excuse to see your city from a tourist's eyes.  Over the course of the week we visited Maitu/Somes Island , Owhiro Bay, the Botanical Gardens, the City and Sea Museum, and the Weta Cave, along with quite a few other tiny stops in between. We also took advantage of almost all the public transit Wellington has to offer, we rode the bus, cable car, and a ferry.  Next time, we're taking the train! ----------------------------------------- We originally set out for Owhiro Bay because we hoped to visit Red Rocks and a fu...

In the middle of Wellington Harbour is a little island with a big history.  Just a short ferry ride away from Wellington City, Days Bay, or Seatoun, Maitu/Somes Island is the perfect day trip. The island is a wildlife conservation reserve so new arrivals to the island are first shuttled into a biosecurity checkpoint.  Prior to our arrival I was worried about what this might mean, but the whole process was fairly stress free.  You are to check your pockets and gear for any rogue seeds or animals that may be stowed away, and you may be asked to brush your shoes to clean off any soil.  We arrived on one of the earlier trips so there were just the three of us to check and it went fairly quickly.  This gave the volunteer, Mike, time to give us a bit of the history about the island before the next ferry arrived. Originally Maitu Island when it was settled by Maori explorer, Kupe, the island has had many faces over the years.   As Europeans began to settle...

I know I promised a techie post in the near future and one is still on it's way, but every time I try to record my screencast something goes technologically wrong.  I am beginning to fear that my laptop doesn't have much time left in this realm. In lieu of a techie post, I am going to share my first Kiwi teaching experience.  I was teaching students how to code, so it still counts, right? Last week I taught a four day course in web and app design to students ages 10 - 13. The first day was a bit hectic.  The company I was working for doesn't have it's own space, so they rent out rooms at colleges across New Zealand during the school holidays.  It's a great use of existing structures, but an be difficult because you never know what you are going to get.  My room in particular was missing a projector remote and had a whiteboard squirrelled away where I couldn't see it in a side room.  As you can imagine, teaching 10 - 13 year olds to code without a pr...