Monday, January 26, 2009

Book Club

When we left NZ, one the of the things I sadly said goodbye to was my bookclub. It didn't matter that sometimes most of us hadn't read the book, it was an opportunity to get together and talk about everything and anything. We did discuss the book at some point during the night :-p

My brave friend Penny has organised a Blogosphere Book Circle, an online book club and I'm excited to be taking part. I'm especially excited about our first book as I was fondling it in a book shop the other day. Here's our list for the next 12 months.

  1. February: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society/Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
  2. March: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close / Jonathan Safran Foer
  3. April: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto / Michael Pollan
  4. May: The 19th Wife / David Ebershoff
  5. June: The zookeeper's wife / Diane Ackerman
  6. July: Letter to my daughter / Maya Angelou
  7. August: PS I love You / Cecelia Ahern
  8. September: Beautiful Boy/ David Sheeff
  9. October: Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World
  10. November: The girl with the dragon tattoo / Stieg Larson
  11. December: Love in the time of cholera / Gabriel García Márquez ; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
  12. January 2010: The book thief / Markus Zusak

Friday, January 16, 2009

Puck's Adventure

Puck's our younger Siamese cat. He's almost 18 months old and is a Seal Point meaning that his points (legs, ears, tail and the mask on his face) are a dark brown and his coat is beige. He has bright blue eyes and is very curious.

Last night after 35 degree heat, a cool change came through in the early evening. I opened up all the windows upstairs and shut Loki and Puck in the guest room, which has screens, so I could open the ranch sliders downstairs. Loki and Puck are indoor cats but at any opportunity they like to explore outside.

Just before dinner the oven tripped the circuit breaker on the complex circuit board. An emergency electrician wasn't able to come until the next morning so we were stuck without power. Luckily I had just finished cooking so I got out all the candles, we all ate by the fading daylight and Luke took Jacob upstairs for a shower while there was still hot water. While he was up there I shut the ranch sliders and let the cats out as they were now pitifully meowing. I also opened up all the doors upstairs to get air moving. I forgot that one of the windows in our room hasn't got a screen on it.

Luke dried Jacob, dressed him in a singlet and nappy and put him in his sleeping bag. He read him a story or rather recited him "Kisses for Daddy" and then I took over to feed Jacob to sleep. Luke went downstairs to take out Jacob's dirty nappy and I started hearing this strange noise. It sounded like the ranch slider opening but that there was something terribly wrong with it. It happened again and again and I was wondering what on earth Luke was doing when I heard a very sad and scared meow.

Suddenly everything clicked, I put Jacob on the floor, ran through to our room and looked out the window. There was Puck out the window on the roof over our terrace. He was almost in the gutter and the noise I had been hearing was him trying to climb up the roof and sliding back down. I yelled for Luke, he ran upstairs and climbed out the window. He grabbed Puck by the scruff of his neck and hoisted him up to me and then climbed back in the window. Puck was very sorry for himself and to make matters worse very time he'd slid back down he'd been poked in the bottom by our overgrown bougainvillea.

After Jacob went to sleep, Luke and I read by candlelight. Puck is over his little adventure but hopefully he won't be quite so keen on outside. We now have power restored but the oven needs to be checked over.
I'll post some photos of the cats at another time. We have almost used up our data allowance this month so no more down or uploading for a little while. But you can check out early photos of Puck here and here

Thursday, January 08, 2009

Glass

Yesterday Jacob broke a glass, luckily he was not hurt and I swept up every shard or so I thought.

I've just pulled a .5cm shard out of my heel. I was twisting to step over the baby gate into the kitchen so it went in at strange angle and took me ten minutes and a pair of tweezers to remove. I will now resweeep the floor in case there are any more.