Reminder of hotter days

Russell lupin on Summit Road, Akaroa Harbour - Monday 5th

I've included the above photo to remind me that we have had some truly hot days but they've been few and far between. Driving to work this morning was dark, gloomy and cold. Lots of cars had their headlights on and it was depressing. This is meant to be one of our warmest months for heaven's sake! But after about half an hour at work, the clouds cleared and its turned into a fabulous day with minimal wind. One really can't predict the weather now days.

I had a surprise phone call about 4pm yesterday from my nephew L inviting me to go up the gondola 'RIGHT NOW!'. He loves the gondola with a deep abiding passion so as a treat for surviving his first 5 days at school, he got to go up the gondola with his mother and his favourite auntie (sorry E - but be reassured, he didn't mention T at all). The 'right now' part was that they were parked in the gondola car park already so I had enough time to grab my pass and exit. We had a lot of fun but I had to leave them up there and come back to work to put some payments through. Boring. Got an excellent view of the cruise boat that's in at the moment though. We'd guessed that there was a boat in because there were a lot of shall we say 'older people' wandering around over at the gondola. I still find it staggering that people would choose to come on a cruise from Australia to Lyttelton!

I've been driving my sports car a bit more lately. Its more challenging to drive than modern cars so sometimes I just can't be bothered with it but yesterday was more challenging than normal. As I was coming through town I noticed that changing gear was getting more and more difficult and that the gear lever felt quite loose. I decided to apply my positive theory to it (as in, believe that you'll be able to change gear easily and you will) which helped to a certain extent. Before I drove home I. had a bit of an investigation into it and having done so, volunteered to drive it home himself, for which I was very grateful. Its now parked up and he's ordered parts from the UK to repair it so who knows how long that will take to come through. Sigh. I was enjoying tooling around in it.