Waiata

I spent yesterday down at the Pa practicing waiata. Translation: I went down to the meeting house my family belongs to outside Normanby in Sth Taranaki to practice songs. They are making a CD and have been running practice sessions for the last few weeks. The songs are a mix of traditional and modern, all with a link to the history and people of the place. It's helping my pronunciation no end also I can now greet people properly, and ask how they are and answer when they ask me - those classes are definitely working!


By the time I left in the afternoon the weather had closed in so it was a good thing I took these shots of the mountain early.

It's been a huge week

and I have the t-shirts to prove it!

We have entered the second phase of advertising for the Wars exhibition and buttons and t-shirts are now doing the rounds. They were handed out at the Museums Aotearoa conference that we hosted this week and it was great to see them around town.

I was honorary conference staff for a day so got the shirt for that too with a cool logo incorporating the mountain (on the left) and the sugarloaves (on the right).

I must however confess to ditching the gym in favour of three glasses of wine and some stuffed mushrooms at the opening function. I feel slightly better about this as I had spent the whole day chaperoning delegates to and from sessions all over our building which seemed to involve an enormous amount of going up and down stairs. I now know that this is an area of fitness need and will be off the treadmill and on the stairmaster when I get back to the gym next week!

What did you do for Easter?

Did serious damage to the local hot cross bun population, a lot of reading and a little gardening.

And moved half our non-fiction collection around. Because you can but also because it was a bit confusing and I finally decided we just had to fix it.

So, first take all the books off the shelves - we covered both cafe areas, the newspaper area and half our display space...


then you take apart some of the shelves to make them easier to move and put them in their new spot...

then put everything back, that's the trolley train full of books waiting to go into their new spots.

Lastly, open the doors to the public and wait to see what happens.

It took us a day and a half but we have had nothing but good comments. Such a relief.