Pants

July has been a record-breaking month of blogging for me. That's a shame because my writing has been decidedly pants this month.

There are a few other things I was too tired to mention last night. Last Thursday we had our body corporate meeting. Guess what - for seismic purposes my apartment block is two separate buildings, and the one I live in is safe. Not safe safe, but above the magic 34% threshold, while the other building is a few points below. Unfortunately that doesn't mean a whole lot. A prospective buyer isn't going to think, you know what, that great big yellow sticker there only applies to half the block so this flat should be fine. And because it's a body corporate, we'll all have to chip in whether we're in the safe part or not. The costs of earthquake strengthening could easily run into seven figures. Heck, it's costing us $40,000 just to find out how much it will cost. Most people - myself included - don't have this sort of money, and there are thousands of us in the same boat all over Wellington. The government will surely have to step in. Where will the money come from? Well they could have used that few hundred million they spent on the America's Cup, so now I have to hope they win the bloody cup and can use the money from that.

My brother had an accident on his last scheduled skydive. I think there was some problem with the parachute not inflating fully, he had a very hard landing and was extremely lucky to only have bruises and no fractures. I hope we can stay in touch from opposite sides of the world. Despite a nightmarish last seven months for him, I'm optimistic of his future in the UK.

Last night we had another big turnout at the autism group. One bloke, who was a regular member back in the "old" days, made his first appearance for about 18 months and was taken aback by the sheer numbers. He used to be on the board of Autism NZ. We now have three facilitators including an Irish bloke of about my age. As usual we did our "what we did at the weekend" bit, in turn, and as usual our male facilitator said he played football. I always imagined it was some social team, but last night he said his team won through to the last four of the Chatham Cup. This comment went by almost unnoticed, but the Chatham Cup is a pretty big deal. A quick Google tells me that he's the captain of the team who came back from two goals down to win their quarter-final 3-2, and he scored the goal that sparked their fightback. For just about anyone on the spectrum, experiencing that level of success at a team sport is hard to imagine.

I just finished P G Wodehouse's golf book. Golf lends itself so well to amusing anecdotes. It's so full of jargon, even more so in Wodehouse's time when the clubs had names like niblicks, mashies and brassies.