Rock 'n' roll

Mum and Dad are staying with me for the third time in four months. They'd only just got off the plane on Saturday evening when we had to go a barbecue at my cousin's place. It was a long way from a party, but we had some unexpected rock 'n' roll as I felt my first ever proper earthquake. I was surprised by the loudness of it, and for a split second I thought it might turn into the big one. It was big enough for me anyway; as a wild guess I said it felt like a 5.8 - I overestimated by just 0.1 as it turned out.

We visited four open homes yesterday. Three of them were out of the question - one had a serious damp problem and you had to hold your nose. I'm eliminating lots of properties and not finding many suitable ones. Still, there are three currently in play.

The three of us played Scrabble last night. Mum is pretty good at Scrabble really - she's got a good brain and (not wanting to criticise) could make better use of it. I won a nail-biter by three points, 240 to 237. Those scores aren't bad for a three-player game involving none of those silly but useful two-letter non-words. Dad's 164 wasn't to be sneezed at either. Mum went first and got FoRAGER straight away for 64; I responded soon after with ENTRIES (lucky to have that combination) for 63.

I found this article (well, survey really) from the Guardian today. It paints a bleak picture of Britain's future, and probably the future of Western society as a whole. I've been thinking for a while about how technology is killing jobs. Check in your baggage at the airport, or even do your grocery shopping, and you'll see man increasingly being replaced by machine. Jobs are vanishing. "Get a job" is something you hear a lot, but when there are fewer and fewer jobs out there, what do you do? Find something you're good at and "create" a job yourself I guess.

I followed bits of a cricket match at the Basin yesterday. I could only really see the scoreboard from my flat, and there weren't many people in the stands, but the match was almost as close as last night's Scrabble - Wellington lost to Otago by six runs. By the way there's a flat for sale four floors above me in the same apartment block; that's one of the properties currently in play.