On Saturday I had dinner at my cousin's place. I wasn't feeling wonderful but I instantly felt better when the three boys greeted me at the door. Tim, the middle one, fired his water pistol and wanted me to have a go. He informed me that they did have three water pistols but one was broken. I promptly broke both the other two in the space of two minutes! Oh dear! I felt pretty bad about that and bought Tim a slightly less breakable water pistol from Farmers on Sunday. I'll give it to him the next time I see him. A whole industry of water guns, potato guns, dart guns and you-name-it guns has suddenly sprung up, judging by the arsenal on display at Farmers.
My cousin came up with a wonderful idea for a business opportunity that could, who knows, extricate me from my current job. I'd be perfectly capable of doing all the donkey work but unfortunately I've got the business acumen of a woodlouse. I'm still positive about giving it a go. My cousin told me not to worry about my job - "you know it's hard for them to sack you" - but that's hardly the point. Being bad at, and totally uninspired by, my job doesn't help my self-esteem. It'll make me more depressed, my performance at work even worse, and my struggles to hang on to my job even more desperate. And if I start shouting and swearing and chucking things around the office I'll become decidedly more sackable. This is just the situation I was in three years ago.
I suggested that I see the Muppets at the cinema with the boys this weekend, but of course I'm off to Auckland this weekend, so I'm a muppet for suggesting it.
Last Wednesday I met up with Danielle from the autism group. She's very shy, even by my standards. We had dinner at the Moroccan restaurant next to Taste of India on Cambridge Terrace, and then went to the tramping club. There are in fact two tramping clubs that meet in the same building. The one that I'll be joining is the Wellington Tramping Club, not the Tararua one that lost a member two weeks ago. I'll be going on an easyish (I hope!) day trip at the end of the month. They had a map of the Tararua ranges on the wall - it really is a completely different world from the urban one I live in and all very intriguing. From that point of view, as well as all the exercise I'll get and new faces I'll meet, I'm looking forward to it. I'll be a bit apprehensive too though.
Danielle washes dishes to earn some money. It's not a great job but it's a job, which I know (speaking from experience) is really important. That's what is so sad about the gradual loss of checkout operators and airport check-in desk people. I had three dishwashing jobs from 1996 to '99. My first was at a 1000-year-old pub. It was very busy on a Saturday night and I always stank of fish when I got home. I was happy to do the job even if the social aspect to it wasn't a lot of fun. The pub had a massive electrical fire in '97 although I wasn't working there that particular evening.
Danielle will be 26 tomorrow. I'd like to get to know her a bit better. We'll be going to the tramping club again tomorrow night.
On Sunday I bought this album from Kiwi band Steriogram for three bucks (!), for the cover as much as anything else. The album was released in 2010 but the cover reminds me of their (amazingly brilliant if you ask me) Walkie Talkie Man video which came out about the time I arrived in NZ.
It's great that you can use the Basin Reserve as a park when there are no matches going on. You can't use the bit that people play on of course, but on a sunny afternoon like we had today, it's very nice to just sit on the freshly-mown grass bank and read a book.
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