Auckland Zoo

A trip to Auckland today, and a visit to the Zoo.

 

 The perfect way to start the holidays.

 

The hippos looked SO happy in their mud pile. If this is what hippo life is like, I could totally come back as one.

Burma the elephant almost ran us over! The kids looked totally amazed to see an actual live elephant walking past.

This is my favourite photo of the day :) Perfect timing.

I think the primate enclosures were my favourite. Hard to see here but there are spider monkeys all over the bank- just going about their usual lives with a human audience. Near to here was a gibbon enclosure with the most amazingly loud gibbon - makes me realise how noisy a jungle must be. I really wanted to see Janie the chimpanzee but she must have been resting inside as we couldn't see her.

 

This photo makes me smile. The last time we were at the Zoo, Big M was 5 and there were only 2 heads looking over the fence (Little M was a baby in the buggy). I must try and find the pic sometime and compare. 

A fabulous day - very hot (maybe spring has finally arrived!) and tiring but loads of fun.

Hooked

 If you follow my projects on the Ravelry friend activity feed you will have noticed an abundance of crochet projects!

After learning the basics of normal crochet, and how to make amigurumi at KAN everything seemed to have clicked into place for me and I have barely knitted a stitch in the past month!

My first ever ami piece (penguin finger puppet pattern used in the class - I made mine into a duck....it's wonky but was immediately claimed by miss 5).

A bit boring but cotton dishcloths are always useful. This was a good practice piece to work on my tension, and to practise going around corners. The worsted weight cotton was nice and smooth - very easy to see each individual stitch and I think a great choice for a beginner.

This is my first "proper" ami piece - owl two ways. This is an easy pattern and I'm really happy with how she turned out. I think I've had the safety eyes in my button stash for about two years! so it was good to finally use them.

Following on from owlie success I made a mash of monsters - just for fun :) A great way to use up some worsted + leftovers.

Right now I'm working on a crochet blanket. It's a bit of an epic project but I'm still finding crochet SO QUICK! It's been great to learn some new stitches and to really consolidate my new found skills :)

Happy hooker is hooked!

KAN

At the end of August I attended Knit August Nights in Napier. My first ever 'knitting conference' - it was, as you can imagine, so much fun. It is incredibly inspiring to be surrounded by crafty folk - everyone single person 'gets it' (no awkward 'yes I knit' explanations required!), and to look around a room and see needles (and hooks) in every hand.  It was also very cool to meet fellow Ravellers that I had "met" online before, or recognised from ravatars.

I shared a room with lovely Jackie (we have exchanged so many emails and texts so it was fantastic to finally meet !) and clever Frances of sourkraut spindle fame. We shared knitting stories and yummy treats and I really couldn't have asked for better company to share my first KAN experience with. Our room was right on the harbour - lying in bed listening to the sea, and waking to the sunrise over the water was just beautiful.

On Friday I attended the traders market - scoring some much coveted Vintage Purls Max, some  lovely Knitsch (funnily enough also in green/purple), a very gorgeous owl shaped shawl pin and some other wooly bits and pieces. While classes were on I sat with some friends (old and new) and knitted and enjoyed a drink. Really a perfect Friday afternoon in my opinion!

Saturday I spent in classes. Totally exhausted myself but now find myself able to crochet, make amigurumi and hand-felt. I have wanted to learn to crochet for a long time and found the class to be perfectly pitched and the handouts to explain everything just how I would have worded it myself. I went (somewhat ambitiously) straight from the crochet class to the amigurumi class and while I struggled, I also didn't find it too difficult once I got going. I have to say since returning home I have become somewhat enamored with the hook and have barely knitted a stitch!!

Sunday was spent exploring beautiful Hawkes Bay - attending the amazing Farmers market in Hastings (a must see if you are ever in the area on a weekend....just wow), the Arataki honey centre and of course, a wine tasting (at the exquisite Te Mata winery). I flew home later that afternoon feeling tired but so fulfilled, inspired and wishing the event was over a week instead of just a weekend!

Maree and helpers do a fantastic job of organising everything, the venue is great, the atmosphere even better and I will definitely be back next year!! (I'll also try and remember to take more photos! - the 'official' photos are here)

Book review: The Poisonwood Bible

The Poisonwood Bible 
Barbara Kingsolver

I've had a borrowed copy of this book on my shelf for about 2 years. Last month I was gifted a copy ina swap and it was the push I needed to finally read this celebrated novel. I am not sure why I procrastinated so long - I devoured it in a little over a day.

The Poisonwood Bible is the story of a misguided Evangelical preacher who drags his wife and 4 daughters to the Congo in the 1960s to work as a missionary. Naive, unprepared and blinded by righteousness the family struggles to survive in their new found home while around them the country is in political turmoil as the Congo seeks independence from Belgium.

The story is told from multiple viewpoints - something I often struggle with in 'epic' type novels - but here it works well with each woman having a distinct voice. I particularly looked forward to Adah's chapters with her clever word play and her insightful observations which she was unable to verbalize . At times though the characters feel a little like over emphasized caricatures - the doormat wife, the tomboy, the cripple, the innocent, the airhead. Particularly Rachel - unwittingly providing the comic relief in what is otherwise a bleak and pessimistic novel - her self absorbed view of the world and her ironic misuse of words is funny to begin with but does grate by the end of the book. Whilst I most enjoyed the descriptions of daily life in a Congolese village, I also loved how each woman chose her own path out of the Congo and how these choices were followed decades later providing an insight into how 18months in the village shaped each of their lives.

Kingsolver doesnt pull any punches and the excesses and political interference of the West (particularly the US) are not glossed over. Kingsolver's political views are fairly clear and perhaps this will be a turn off for some - I appreciated that she shared her viewpoint and took on a subject as complex as this.  It is an eye opener - a unflinching one at that, and at times it made me feel ashamed and uncomfortable -  reading this book with a full stomach while there is no clear solution to right all the wrongs (still) happening in Africa.

I wish I had read this book years ago.
4/5 stars.

Five!

Hard to believe but my baby turned 5 this month. I remember when I started blogging at sweetp-knits and she was just a few months old!

It's an exciting time - lots of new beginnings, for her and for me.

She is really enjoying being a big girl and going off to school in the mornings and coming home on the school bus. Long may the enthusiasm last !

She is a bit of a character and doesn't like anything pink or girlie. Many months ago she requested a yellow robot cake - so we themed her party around that. I found an awesome robot cake tutorial online - perfect for my cakedecorating challenged self. She loved it :)

 My days are very quiet now but I am finding my days go by very quickly. The girls finish school at 2.35 and it rolls around very quick.  I had all these (lofty) plans of what I would do with all my "free time" but I seem to be busier than ever!

The Gift

The Gift.

The boy stands alone in the dark. Normally he would be afraid to be out here by himself, but tonight there’s no room for fear. Tonight, it’s going to happen. He knows it, feels it in his bones. It makes his hands shake to think about how much he wants to prove them wrong.

His eyes see nothing - just blackness all around. There are no stars. He can hear the sea rushing against the shore, far enough away that he can’t feel seaspray on the air; so close that he can hear nothing but the constant suck and crash of the waves. It helps him to block out the rest of the world, helps him to concentrate on his task. Nothing else matters now.

His hands are rigid with the strain, knuckles white and fingers curled up to the sky like claws. He can feel the energy gathering, growing, piling up on itself in the tips of his fingers. With every passing second it grows stronger, and from somewhere deep inside himself he wills it to stay alive, to take that final leap to spark and combust. The energy is building, hot and burning, but he ignores the pain, trying not to think about running to the sea to plunge his hands in the waves. He cries out as the heat intensifies again, a sudden burst so strong it must surely be making his blood boil.

Then, the flames appear. They dance and flicker on his fingertips, crackling against the cold night air. Furls of smoke rise from his hands, illuminated by the bright white fire that was once a part of him. The pain is gone now, replaced by a satisfying sense of power.

A triumphant grin breaks across his face.

Book review: Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow/Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg.

Smilla Jaspersen thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. When her six year old neighbour falls to his death she is convinced that his death was the result of foul play and not an accident as the police believe. As a Greenlander, Smilla has always felt at odds with her new home in Denmark, and she is lead back to the icy frontier of her roots as she begins to unravel the mystery surrounding the boy's death. 

This book is hard to categorize, and describe. At times it sweeps the reader away on achingly beautiful and poetic descriptions, there's a real sense of atmosphere - ice becomes a character of its own, and the cold seeps out of the pages. And then in the turn of the page there is a clunkiness to the prose that grates and made me feel like something had been lost in translation. (The book was originally written in Danish).

Smilla is at turns, provocative, with an inner strength that is admirable as she hunts for the truth, and then at other times her motivations are a mystery, or she utters something that seems just plain... odd. She portrays a sense of aloofness, a disconnection with the world around her which at the beginning was interesting, but by the end I felt like her voice had been lost a little. The plot too, at this point seemed to ramp up to 'the big reveal' only for it to feel forced and the ending rushed and incomplete.  I also remember feeling this way about the film adaptation that I watched many years ago - there is very little I remember about the film actually (except that Gabriel Byrne starred) but I do recall a sense of disbelief that the ending 'went there'.

That being said, the setting was incredibly fascinating. The 'sense of snow' was incredibly evocative and exotic. We, in New Zealand, have one word for snow - the Inuit people have so many - Smilla's gift for the ice was probably the thing that held the book together for me. I didn't know anything about Denmarks's relationship with Greenland and the issues globalisation has caused there - so that too was something I enjoyed learning more about.

I have a suspicion that this book will linger in my mind for a long time, but I don't think I will be rushing to reread. I gave it 3/5 stars. 

1001 books to read before you die #157