We celebrated Jonathan’s birthday on the Saturday before the actual day, as Wednesday (his real birthday) was a bit busy with a fireside. We picked up Leao, and met Peter, Jessica and Lucy Ward (my brother and his two older daughters) at the 10-pin bowling alley. We had two lanes – one for the 4 younger ones, with the bumpers up, and one for Peter, Mark and me. It was a very enjoyable time for all. Then we came back here, and Gran joined us and we had cordon bleu schnitzels and oven fries for dinner, and ice cream, jelly and chocolate sauce, with friands for dessert. A friand is a little cupcake-like treat made from rice flour, ground almonds, icing sugar, butter and many egg whites. It is gluten-free in this instance, which makes them a treat suited for Jessica, who is gluten intolerant.
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| Jessica, Leao and Jonathan at bowling |
Jonathan managed to spin out his birthday over the whole week. We went to the library on Monday for FHE and read old Listeners. On Wednesday Jonathan played in a fireside with Elder Hamula present. Everyone who came up and said how well he’d done, he told them it was his birthday, so he got lots of birthday wishes. Then later he was performing with his Hagley jazz band and they all played happy birthday and the audience all sang. And on Thursday his Institute class had refreshments to celebrate his birthday. I think he felt sufficiently special.
Mark’s computer – the Toshiba laptop died. It made strange beeping sounds and then did nothing. Fortunately he had all his files backed up on Carbonite, and also the hard drive is okay so he removed the hard drive and we have that in a little case now. So he is now using the Creative Heuristics Mac Book and coming to know and love Apple. We may all be going over to the dark side, or at least having dual systems. We had to have the Mac for the app development. He also REALLY likes the iPad. I think it is a fun thing, but like the iPhone better.
Jonathan expressed an interest in learning the drums, so we have borrowed a drum kit from Shane’s son, Crispin and have them set up in what was first William’s room, then an exercise room, then a storage room for Creative Heuristics and is now a drum room. He hasn’t done a lot, but, not surprisingly, seems able to produce some reasonable results with close to no practice. When everyone was here for his party we went out and he did a demo or two, which were impressive. Now if he would only put a bit of time in....
We had a lesson one Sunday about temple attendance, and seeing we are so far from the temple, we can’t really put aside one night a month for the temple, so we could do Family History one night a month instead. We are going to try to do this. With Mark being at home, this was meant to give us more time for such things, but it isn’t really happening. Maybe when Seminary ends for the year...
We had a Relief Society retreat at Spencer Park, which was very laid back, and lots of fun in a relaxed sort of way.
One Sunday Jonathan and I did a workshop on music with the youth at a Stake Fireside. We did a 15 minute presentation three times, which went down well. He seemed to enjoy it and loved the attention as usual. It was fun for me, because I could just whisper the name of a tune to him and he would play it – an instant jukebox!
Mark and I went to “Inception” on Friday at Reading cinemas. The movie was good, but the editor took rather too light a hand on the chase scenes. No one seems to understand “Less is more” when it comes to chase scenes. One was in snow with bulky cammo, so you couldn’t actually really tell what was going on anyway. The movie had some interesting ideas though. My favourite line was “I bought the airline (pause). It seemed neater.”
We have set a firmish date for the release of the Rogo app – 16th October. 2010. We hope. Fingers crossed. It IS looking good.
For my mother’s birthday we went out to dinner with the O’Neills, Gran and Peter at Pedros. The meal was very nice and rather expensive and moderate sized servings. Mark tried goat and thought it a little like a cross between lamb and steak, and enjoyed it. I had a skewer of marinated and grilled seafood which was lovely. The accompanying vegetables were delicious.
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| William and the Prime Minister, John Key |
We went to Ashburton Branch as President McDonald asked us to, and we all gave talks, and Jonathan played for them – the hymns, and a musical item. I woke with a cold, but when Mark told me it would be a catastrophe if I didn’t come, I took some painkillers and went anyway. I liked the trip down, going through our talks, and discussing Jonathan’s 21st, which will be on the first weekend of March next year.
I enjoyed a 2 day course in Illustrator at NatColl on Thursday and Friday. My tutor’s name is Beaulah Pragg, and she is very young. She was a very good tutor though, and I feel as if I have learned a lot. My poor brain had trouble making the adaptation from Windows to Mac, but didn’t quite burst into flames. After about 2 hours I felt as if my brain was going to explode, and I still had another 8 hours to go! We have ordered the Premium Production version of CS5, including Illustrator, Premiere, Photoshop, and Flash. For the Mac.
On Wednesday night Linda and Des and Peter and Jessica Ward went with us to watch Jonathan play with his Jazz band. He also played some solo numbers at the end. He really does love an audience.
I have started doing some family history, and have enjoyed using the New Family search website. I found my Auntie Nell’s husband, whom I have looked for, on and off for some time. That was exciting.
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| Jonathan recording for the app at Orange studio |
So that was August (and a little of September).
I didn’t want a whole month to disappear. The earthquake has done enough without removing August 2010 from the blog.
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