Days of ducks and roses

It's been kind of quiet the last ten days, so here's one more pic of Patti and the ducklings at Taupo.  After Patti left, we had to get ourselves together--cleaning house and doing a little cooking.  Most Kiwis wouldn't know it was Thanksgiving, but we would.

  Last weekend we helped a new friend from meeting with a gardening project and renewed connections with meeting folk and a few other friends.  This week's highlights included meeting with my writer friends and visiting Roxy Theatre in Miramar, home of Sir Peter Jackson's studio and the Weta workshop,  Sir Peter's been kind of busy this week.  In addition to working on filming the Hobbit,  he has bought the Bats Theatre downtown, saving those playmakers from financial ruin.  The Roxy is an old movie theatre he had also bought in Miramar.  He kept the original facade but re-did the inside art deco, with a beautiful wooden bar and lovely lighting.  The large rocking chair seats are leather; it smells good in there as a result.  The only slightly odd touch is a statue of Gollum in the lobby, just like the one at Weta.  Here's a picture of John with that one.

We were missing family and friends a lot this week, so it was helpful to make our gratitude list, which included many of you.  We invited our neighbor, Vanaja, a pathologist who ethnically Malaysian and who is getting ready to move back to Australia, and our friend Mary, who is a Kiwi but has spent the last 45 years in the States, over for our approximation of the Thanksgiving feast:  no turkey, but chicken, John's curried sweet potatoes, some sort-of-similar-to-the-usual stuffing, broccoli, cranberry apple stuff (frozen cranberries located at Wellington's parallel to Whole Foods, Moore-Wilson), and pumpkin pie, which required buying and roasting a whole pumpkin from the market.

Mary had lent me a book about the painter, Rita Angus, which I had read as a part of my quest to know more about Kiwi artists and writers.  If any of you are interested, I also recommend stories by Maori author Whiti Ihimaera, especially, "A Game of Cards," as well as the work of Katherine Mansfield.  Don't think she would have been an easy person to be friends with, but she certainly had a gift for description.  I would also recommend the movies "Boy," about a boy living on a Maori marae and "The Orator," NZ's foreign language entry (in Samoan) about a dwarf descendant of a Samoan chief.

Today is election day in NZ, and the newspapers and TV have been abuzz with the contest.  Their system is a bit different from ours, which they call "first past the post."  They currently have something called MMP, which seems a lot more complex, by which they try to represent a spectrum of interests.  Whether or not to keep it is one of the matters being decided too.  As I understand it (imperfectly), people can vote for the system, for a candidate in each race, and for a party.  There are seven parties I know of:  National (currently in power--rather mainstream conservative), Labour, NZ First, the Maori party, the Mana party, the Greens, and ACT.  If a party gets over 5% of the vote, they will have seats in Parliament, and coalitions will be formed.  Elections are held every three years (which people complain is a short cycle), but their campaign season is limited to five weeks before the election (enviable).

Since we are not voting, we've just been enjoying the sun.  So today we visited the rose garden, which was all in bloom.   Tonight we plan to see a British movie, and tomorrow we will have one more Thanksgiving celebration with the other American docs out in Paraparaumu.  Then it will be time to get ready for our next set of company.  Tom and Janine are coming December 4.  We are really looking forward to it!