It's raining

Another day of wind and rain here in Wellington. Nothing unusual for this time of year, but I think we're both getting a little tired of double winter. We've just returned from our final film choice at the NZ International Film Festival - "In the Attic - Who Has a Birthday Today". Anyone with kids should definitely catch this if they can! We were not the only adult couple there, but it was certainly aimed at the younger crowd. The animation however, was impeccably done and the story very heartfelt.

I think Jamie's posted our other film selections, and hopefully some advice on not wasting your time/money on the plot-less, bloody, talent void mess that was The Killer Inside Me (likely to be out in the US at some point).

Well, hope you readers are enjoying Jamie's wonderful photography and his ambition to post updates (obviously) more frequently than I.

Ta for now!

The New Zealand Art Show

Thanks to ours friends Carrie and Rhys, Mallory and I attended the New Zealand Art Show today. It is a three day art exhibit and sales event that takes place each year.  You just pick things off the wall and buy them - very cool.  The work was flying off the walls which was fun to watch.  Most of the pieces were priced  around the $500 range which is a good deal, however out of all the things that were there, many of which were pretty good to excellent, there was nothing that stood out enough for us to make a purchase.  Here are a few photos of the day.

Here is Mallory checking out some art - one of our favorite pieces is on the wall to the left - Sprinkle Jesus.  It is Jesus on the cross figure made up entirely out of  rainbow ice cream sprinkles - yum!

We Would Like To Hear From You!

I just realized that I had the comment button on the blog turned off, so even if you wanted to you could not leave a comment on our site.  It has been an unfortunate one way conversation until now.  Please join in the fun by leaving comments and/or messages.  We would love to hear from you and get a feel of what you like about the blog - that way we can do more of it!

Butter

Butter in New Zealand comes in these very large blocks.  It is good butter but it will surprise you at how quickly you can go through them.

Instead of eating it, one day I decided to make them into art - or at least a house.

Perhaps there is a future in this type of thing? 

Life Without Television

Our life as summer vacation continues as we try to find fun things that do not cost a lot of money.  This week we turned to the fine art of puzzle building.  Our first attempt was a cheap Impressionist type puzzle of a cottage but it was too hard.  We opted instead for a Where's Wally puzzle - that's right Waldo apparently goes by the name Wally here in New Zealand.

  Mallory happily working on the first puzzle....
Nice hat Mal...

 Where is Who? Wally? Waldo?

The finished product! 1,000 pieces!

New Zealand 2010 International Film Festival

We are headed out to the film festival these next two weeks.  We are going to try to see a few films but the choices are overwhelming.  What we did is each grab a catalog and individually select what we were interested in seeing.  Then page by page we went through our picks together to see if we had any matches. Surprisingly, we had enough for a pretty full schedule.  Here is what we have to see:

In The Attic

The Misfortunates

The Killer Inside Me

The Double Hour

Four Lions

I Killed My Mother

Winter's Bones

NZ Quirky Stories - Short Films

Candyman

A Town Called Panic

If you have seen any of these films and have opinions on them please let us know.

We purchased a set of tickets yesterday to three of the films.  We'll let you know what we thought.

Wellington Zoo

Mallory and I went to the Wellington Zoo today which was very nice and we had a beautiful day to walk around and see the animals.  But I have to say what we enjoyed most was the great signs they had posted throughout the place.   Here are a few of them:

I would not want to go to the Zoo with this kid!!

Here is Mallory reading the signs,

and below what it is like to live here.

Rummy

Since Mallory and I do not have a television (among other things) at the flat, the place has a bit of a "summer camp" feel to it.  Since we have to keep ourselves busy we have turned to the card game Rummy.  We actually started playing on our travels to New Zealand.  Now, we have gotten better, more competitive and obsessed.  This week we launched a week long rummy challenge. 
We finished Friday, playing a total of 13 games. 
I won 7 to 6.

The cards we play with we picked up at an estate sale in Pittsburgh - they are from the
New York Bartenders Union.

To be fair Mallory did win in overall point score by 145 points, but we determined from the start that we were going by games won and lost. Sorry Mallory : -(