Hi!
We had a lovely day today although the sky was mostly overcast it was still warm for the time of year. Our unexpected guests have moved on and today we had the very great pleasure of attending a double birthday party at (of all things) the local Greek Orthodox Church hall. Finding a Witch and a Wizard in such a location is an interesting story in itself but given that this is the Chinese Year of the Black Water Dragon its probably not surprising that interesting things keep happening!
Who is this Witchy person anyway?
Witchy is my flatmate, soul mate and best friend ever forever. I believe I am only still here and still breathing because of her! We met at work around twelve years ago when we were both employed as Faults Specialists in the call centre of the (at that time) largest electricity retail company in the country. We soon discovered a mutual love of language and laughter and developed a great friendship. For ages many of our colleagues assumed we were a 'couple' in the traditional sense of the word but that was never the case as far as we were concerned! We simply both loved life and music and spending time together.
A time came when she was looking for a flatmate at her house to help with expenses and so forth. It coincided with me looking for somewhere else to live - so it just seemed like the right thing to do. Witchy moved into her spare bedroom and gave me the master bedroom and things worked out perfectly. I'm the first person to admit that I'm not the easiest guy in the world to live with but somehow she was (and still is) able to put up with me even when I'm at my moodiest.
Eventually Witchy had to sell her house and we moved to different locations on opposite sides of town. The geographical separation did nothing to dampen our friendship and so, six months later we both moved into a rental house in the eastern suburbs of Christchurch. Witchy had one end of the house and I had the other end - in the middle was the kitchen and dining areas plus an additional lounge where we set up her piano and all my music gear - PA, microphones guitars etc.
This was an ideal situation which didn't last. We made the house into a home and when the landlord saw how good we had made his somewhat tatty old house look he promptly put it up for sale so we moved on to the first of two homes we shared beside the Avon River.
Jumping ahead to post-earthquake Christchurch, both those homes were destroyed (more on that in future instalments) and so we moved to our current home here in friendly New Brighton beside the mighty Pacific Ocean. One of our mutually shared interests is gardening. It was late December, 2011 and high summer here in the southern hemisphere. We were setting up a new vegetable garden which involved the use of compost that was rich with the spores of an organism known as Legionella Longbeachea. I inhaled some of these critters and contracted Legionella pneumonia, a dangerous disease that kills about one person in twenty who catch it. I'll no doubt have more to say about that in the future too.
The outcome of this horticultural encounter was an extended stay in Christchurch hospital on full life support in an induced coma. It was during my recovery after the coma, as I recuperated in Ward 25 that I met the lovely Lilliana who cared for me as a nurse aid. Although she is a fully qualified nurse in her homeland of Romania her qualifications are not recognised by the New Zealand Health Department and so she is compelled to work as a nurse aid.
Lilli became more than a carer and went far beyond the call of duty in her care and support of me. Witchy (who visited me daily), Lilli and I got along famously and so we kept in touch after I was finally released from hospital.
A church, a bridge and a nightclub
This Saturday evening Lilli celebrated not only her own birthday but also the first birthday of her lovely daughter Alexandra, in the hall at the local Greek Orthodox Church and Witchy and I were invited! There was a wonderfully interesting mix lovely people there (including Toni, another nurse who had taken particularly good care of me), lots of kids running about having fun, lots of great music (ranging from traditional Romanian music to Rihanna!) and heaps of great food.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Lilliana and her family and friends for making Witchy and I feel so welcome. Lilli and Alex, Happy Birthday to you both.
Other things of interest, to me anyway, that occurred today - I finally got my little Akai MIDI keyboard hooked up to Acid Music Studio on my laptop so that's another little task of my list of things to do. In the process of tracking down the installation CD for the keyboard I uncovered some old forgotten photo CDs.
Today's photos come from a series of slides I took an unknown number of years back sometime in my mid twenties. This would have been around the late 1980's. The slides show the now vanished combination Road and Rail bridge across the Hokitika River on the South Islands West Coast. The railway line no longer operates and the road bridge is now a fairly ordinary concrete bridge.
Interestingly enough, the timbers recovereed from the old bridge were later used to construct an unusual building in Nelson which became a popular night club. I don't know what its called now or even if it still exists but I played many gigs there when it was called the Cactus Club and was used for regular get-togethers of the Nelson Musicians Club.
Side note
New Zealand has a reputation for keeping things simple: thus the Island at the top is called the North Island. The Island to the south of that is called the South Island and the West Coast of the South Island, where these pictures were taken, is called the West Coast.
It will therefore come as no surprise that the name of the Golden Labrador sitting beneath the bridge was named Dog
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