Long weekend

Labour Day is back where it belongs!

For the 6 years I was living in Melbourne I got caught by Labour Day being in March not October. How you can forget a long weekend I'm not really sure but I can only claim that my brain refused to process any holiday in March apart from Easter. One year I really did put a Postit note on my steering wheel saying "don't go to work" as I'd spent the whole of Friday trying to get things set up for Monday only be be told about 100 times that no-one would be there.

The flip side of that is I would get to late Sept. and be really, really looking forward to an extra day only to have my hopes dashed when I realised it wasn't going to happen. We did get Melb Cup day off but somehow it's not the same, especially as it's a Tuesday.

So it's Monday, I'm home relaxing and my mother was right, the weather is horrible - a cold wind and tipping down rain. Apparently one of the very few predictable things in life is this, Labour Day Monday will be wet.

Flowers - real and not so much

Rhodofest starts next weekend and I have my own little festival happening in my front yard. Hot pink camellias and a purple rhodo which has been in bud for about 6 months and finally came out last week.



On the no-so-real end of the scale I have a very nice little collection of woven flowers from the conference in Christchurch. Te Roopu Whakahau (the Moari Librarians Assoc.) had a stand at the trade show and for $2 you could buy a raffle ticket for a hamper and you also got to pick a hand woven flower to wear. Within half a day they were the hot ticket item and the crew manning the stand were working their fingers to the bone weaving more.



What makes them totally funky is that they are made from book binding materials - cloth binding tape and buckram.

But wait - there's more! I won one of the hampers (yeah) and as well as some yummy consumables there was a book on weaving flowers. So below (and a little hard to see, sorry) is my first attempt.

In the spirit of recycling and because I don't have ready access to flax I have used packing tape which in Aus tends to be blue but here is mostly white. Not bad for a first go I think and there will definitely be more. No suprises what might be in some Christmas parcels this year if I can get myself up to giving away quality.

Not your usual conference photos

Countdown to the Rugby World Cup - only 99 weeks, 3 days and 17 hours to go!!!

Coat racks at the conference centre - it is Christchurch after all

Music and...

Bicycles at Sol Square - for me a tiny reminder of Melbourne's funky lanes

And finally the condiments on the table in the Fish and Chip shop in Sol Sq, note the formica table and that's an old glass milk bottle with our water in it. The food came wrapped in newspaper and it's the best fish & chips I've ever had.

The joys of flying

I have just got back from 3 days in Christchurch at the Lianza (Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aoteroa). This is an annual get together of the whole profession from right across the country.

I flew from NP to Christchurch, via Auckland last Sunday - the day of the AirNZ meltdown. Their whole system went down for almost a whole day on the last day of the school holidays, at first estimate that makes for 10,000 locationally challenged flyers. I am now the proud owner of two beautifully hand written boarding passes and an enormous amount of respect for the positive thinking power and endless good humour of the AirNZ flight crews.

As for the trip home??? Well - fog, driving rain, fierce cross winds and the very real possibility of landing in Whanganui (a two hour drive away) instead of NP. Nuff said.

Rotorua in the rain

One of the things I love about working in Libraryland is that we like to move things around. This means that you get to see places that you might never get to otherwise. Rotorua is not exactly on the 'need a good excuse to go to' list but it was great to have a meeting to go to so I could go over early and have a look around.

One small problem with that plan - it rained all the way there, the whole time I was there and most of the way back, apart from when it snowed.

Despite that I visited the museum on Sunday afternoon. It's in the original bath house which is a beautiful old building set in the Government Gardens.