Out and about

Although I have not been writing and the weather has been dubious we have still managed to get out and about and have a few town adventures.

Art Gallery

The day after I finished 'How to look at a painting' I took Nic to the Christchurch City Art Gallery. There was an exhibition I wanted to see and I also wanted to check out some of the paintings Justin had talked about. Fiona Hall: Force Field was fantastic. A life's work beautifully curated and quite challenging. Nic loved it. She has made a wide range of sculptural and print type works that are so diverse that it is hard to get your head around the journey. Never mind. If the exhibition is in your town you must see it. We also visited 'White on White' which is a collection of paintings and things with white as the theme. It is aimed at children and has questions and challenges and interactive stuff. Last year they had a great 'red' collection. Nic and I made had paintings that we were able to email home. Here is his bird

I think it might have been the next day that we ventured out to Wigram airfield to witness the final airshow held at the field. From now on this iconic 'cradle of New Zealand aviation' will become a housing subdivision. We will no longer have a second airfield in our city and rampant development will continue. Obviously this is a hobby horse of mine so I wont go on any longer. However, I will share some pics of the planes. Jonty and I loved them, Nic was not as interested but it seemed that most of the children along the perimeter fence felt the same. We did not pay to attend the real show and get to clamber over planes but rather positioned ourselves at the end of the runway and witnessed some fantastic flying. Our cameras couldn't do the flying justice but here are some images we took. Notice the blue sky in some and then the haze that descended over the afternoon. This was a smoke from the bush fires across the Tasman Sea in Australia that had really taken off that day. I maintain that as most of our weather comes from that direction that the fires have had a major impact on our weather from that day. We have had grey, wet and cloudy weather ever since. The planes we enjoyed watching were the Harvard, 'Red Arrows', the Boeing 757 (amazing), helicopters and the old Hercules. It was great and we are now planning a family trip to the Warbirds event next Easter.

Almost finally, friend Alex's birthday 6 of us went to the new Wagamama restaurant for dinner. We had a great night chatting and enjoying the buzz of the place. All of us were working mothers at the end of another long week and there was no talk of partying the night away when we finally decided to move on. It was fun thought being out with different people and talking about everything under the sun. I know that Wagamama is all over the world and I have seen it everywhere I have been so it was nice to finally get in and see what it was all about. Nice food, good price, loud and buzzy.

Slum Dog Millionaire - Jonty and I managed a night out a few weeks again and went to see this film. I thought it was pretty amazing but having read the book 'Q & A' some years ago I spent a lot of the film confused as there were storylines and characters introduced that I couldn't remember. This is because they were totally not in the book. I felt the beautiful innocence and integrity of the book was damaged in the writing of an 'Oscar worthy' film. In saying that I would highly recommend seeing it. My friends who have not read the book have loved it.