Positive Terminals

HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2003 is well underway – many beers have been consumed and many hours spent lying in the sun - yes Auckland actually does have really good weather sometimes – but only so that the crap weather seems even crappier!

Yesterday was an action packed day! I woke up and made Tim his morning coffee, then I cooked him his eggs on toast, then I did some dishes and cleaned the flat – then Tim decided to haul himself outta my super comfortable “rock free zone” bed. Well.. his version of events might be a little different, but pretty close.

Feeling invigorated after all this activity – and knowing Tim’s true love of shopping I decided to treat him to the joys of Newmarket. I’m still looking for my perfect coffee maker, and we hunted for this for about 6 or 7 hours (time flies when you’re having fun!) …. Well maybe it was only an hour or so!

After all this fun and excitement I had to drag Tim away from the shops since it was well past lunchtime. We covered up in sun screen and hopped on a bus down to the viaduct, where we decided to eat lunch at the only place that had a free table (we shoulda guessed there was a reason for this). After sitting there for a while with all the waiters doing a good impression of trying hard to ignore us, Tim went off to see if he could scrounge up any service. He did manage to order some beers and score a menu – so we sat back to wait for someone to take our order. Well that was a little optimistic. When we were about to leave a waiter finally decided to find out what we were doing there and we were lucky enough to be able to order lunch. Luckily the food was a whole lot quicker than the service!

Next we grabbed a ferry over to Devonport, stocked up on Summer Ale (a truly fine New Zealand beer) limes, and ice-cream, and spent most of the afternoon sitting down by the beach where there was an amazing view of most of Auckland (except the North Shore but that bit doesn’t really count anyway).
After a few beers Tim was keen to entertain me with a few tales from his innocent past – such as being brought home unconscious in a police boat, climbing in his hotel window with only half his clothes on (not the right half either!) and confusing rubbish bins with toilets and coming up with such great lines as “I need to be reconnected to the positive terminal!” this had me rolling round on the grass laughing for quite some time, and I’m very tempted to print him a T-shirt with this great line in my home t-shirt printing workshop.

When we ran out of beer we went to play pool – and after putting in our $2 we discovered a new version of pool where you have 5 little balls, 9 bigs, and 2 blacks. Unfortunately after drinking her 3 beers one of us couldn’t quite get the hang of this new version of pool – even with her 4 ball advantage – and lost terribly to some dodgy Australian she happened to be playing (I am still the mini-golf and 10 pin bowling champ though!)

We headed back to Northcote – after stocking up on dinner supplies – made a yummy pasta which we ate on the front lawn (not half as good as my awesome balcony) then Tim spent the rest of the evening with Tony Hawke and I chatted up boys on the internet … I mean caught up with my old flatmate who’s just moved to Christchurch!