Our 22nd Wedding Anniversary

It’s that time of year again, when my wife and I exchange cards and a traditional gift. -This year it was copper.

Our anniversary has turned up this year amongst a whole lot of other stuff going on in our lives at the moment.

You see, I recently wrote how we were ‘minus one‘ when our youngest departed for university in another city.
It has meant that our other daughter now spends a lot less time at home since she’s effectively lost spending time with her sister.

For twenty years, those kids were the priority in our lives -everything else came a distant second.

But now that we are now rapidly becoming empty nesters, it means we need to adopt a whole new mindset and work out what we want to do without the kids constantly in our lives.

At this point, I’m sort of at the point of reverting back to some old hobbies that got put on hold when the kids were born. My wife’s taken to quilting in a big way.

I guess it’s a progressive thing.

A weekend of storm anxiety?, yeah, nah

A big thing is made of storms and cyclones these days, they become a media event all by themselves, with the media constantly telling us ‘it’s the worse storm ever since records began’ and climate change is going to get us, yadda yadda.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/591735/damaging-potentially-life-threatening-cyclone-vaianu-increasingly-likely-to-hit-nz

https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/04/10/cyclone-vaianu-it-will-hit-hard-with-a-big-impact-on-nz/

Going hand in hand with that narrative is any phone constantly been sent OTT alarmist messages telling us to pack a bag and wait for something really bad to happen..

There’s a point when the boy cries wolf too often..

So we spent a stormy night, with my phone in the garage where it didn’t annoy us anymore, watching ‘Leave the world behind’ (a doomsday movie) on netflix as this seemed appropriate somehow.

The next day was wet without wind, which made it ideal for pulling out weeds and thistles, and other stuff around the house.