Homey

There's a great new tradition starting in the Wood household: going out for breakfast on the weekends. Ahh yes. With all the cafes around here, we can go to a different one every time and never have to repeat a place if we don't want to. We're really liking nearby Petone with its cute shops and easy parking. We had breakfast at Go-Bang-- I had poached figs (which looked like slugs) on muesli. It was good despite the slug-ness.


Our landlord thinks that it is somehow cost-effective to try and assess our 10-20 year-old tv to see if it's repairable. So we dropped that load off and was told it would take a few days to get fixed. (grr)

We had friends over for dinner-- we had tacos and made pumpkin pie. Ok pumpkin pie is sorta hispanic and goes with tacos; pumpkins were a New World discovery afterall right? New learning today: whipping the cream too much is NOT a good thing for pumpkin pie (but IS a good thing for butter).

I am feeling more and more at home each week now; I had no idea I was missing out on that feeling until recently. Bryce and I really have a routine going on the weekends which is really comfy. I think it all starts with a good breakfast. Out. :-)

Chicken Enchilladas

I baked the cinnamon rolls this morning that I had made up yesterday and brought them to work. Everyone seemed to like them, but I noticed that everyone chose to wait until morning tea to try one; they were too sweet to eat as a breakfast. huh. Now that I think of it, I eat a lot of dessert-y things for breakfast (cinnamon rolls, pumpkin bread). Don't know if that's an American thing or just something that I learned from my family. There is a perception of America (that is probably true) that American portions are really big-- at a pizza place they serve "regular" sized and "New York" (large) sized pizzas.

The treadmills at the gym measure your speed in km's (of course). (Kilometer's are called "k's" for short.) I keep forgetting the conversion factor for k's to miles, so on the treadmill today I just sorta ran as fast as I wanted. I usually run 5.2 mph on the treadmill, and today I was at 9.2 k's and feeling a little winded. I had to knock it down to 8.5 after a while. Talking with the math-whiz husband afterwards, he calculated that I was running 5.7 mph until knocking it down to my more normal 5.3 mph. Huh-- pretty cool I accidentally got myself to run faster than normal.

Bryce was pretty proud of himself when we met at the train station/gym-- he had found corn tortilla mix (you can't find corn tortillas at the store yet, although I'm sure they're on their way shortly. There's pre-packed enchillada sauce sold with corn tortillas already, and Ole El Paso flour tortillas are available too). Bryce made the corn tortillas (which he rolled out with a full bottle of wine-- we don't have a rolling pin). We made Jessica Alba enchiladas. We can't find enchilada sauce, green sauce, or Anaheim chillis to make green sauce from scratch, so we made do with a can of pureed tomatoes with various spices added in (chilli powder, habanero sauce, jalopeno juice, some onions and garlic). They turned out wonderful-- a good culmination of about 2-3 hours of effort.

Cinco De Mayo

I'm not exactly sure why Cinco De Mayo is a holiday, but it's a holiday that has to be celebrated. (I do know for sure it's not Mexican Independence Day). We went out to the Flying Burrito on Cuba street for--Flying Burritos and margaritas. Laura and a new girl we met from Holland came out too. Before we set out, our coworker Karepa passed out margaritas, which was so sweet of him.


Since none of us were kiwis, we all talked about how we decided to move here-- Laura and Josien took initial trips out here before their big move (I didn't want to go that route because of the expense). All of us have felt the homesickness-- and then loving it here. It's so hard to find a place you love that's not your original home. I just keep feeling a longing for what I had even though it's wonderful here.