BLUE RIBBON DAY

Blue ribbons today. North Island Karate Tournament in Wellington this past weekend.

Cait competed in the Open (adult) Grade team kata event on Saturday and they came third. One bronze medal.

Sunday saw her competing in the youth events. Another bronze medal in, wait for it, sumo wrestling!!!

And then there was the Randori event (tag sparring). According to wikipedia some karate schools employ the term randori with regard to "mock-combat" in which both competitors move very fast, parrying and attempting acts of extreme violence with all four limbs (including knees, elbows, etc.) yet only ever making the slightest contact. Total control of the body is necessary. Result? One silver medal (After winning 4 fights.)

She's a dark horse sometimes, our Miss 13. We didn't even know she was entering the Randori event until today! One of my friends said today "At least you won't have to worry about her in a dark alley." Ah, but I'm her mother - I'll always worry.

Not a bad haul. Hope the Kiwis in Beijing can do as well!

WAR GAMES

This morning DH flew out to Sydney for a boys sporting weekend (Bledisloe Cup, some rugby league game tomorrow and the netball final on Monday night). Rather him than me.

That leaves me home with the kids and a report to write for work. Mr 8 is obsessed with things army. So tonight I offer to take him on in an army battle with his painted models. This is usually a Daddy game. And Daddy obviously has more patience than me. It was a full 45 minutes before I was allowed to move a soldier one inch. Prior to that every piece of artillery, every Panzer tank, every papatrooper, every unit and the terrain was described in detail. More than once. And I was warned not to take on General Rommel. When I finally decided that my Kings Tiger tank ("the second strongest tank in World War II") would take out some large enemy grouping (which country they were representing totally evades me)I was informed that I could not destroy that many people. "It would destroy morale in the field and their campaign would falter."

My morale destroyed I decided it was time to surrender to the greater wisdom of an eight year old.

BY HOOK OR BY CROOK

The last week of the school term saw the Boulcott School school production hit town.

'What's Behind the Green Door' was the story of some children looking for their missing dog in an old house. As they entered each room each class entertained the audience.

Elliot's class were The Bedroom and they performed some dream scenes from Peter Pan.

Mr 8 scored the (auditioned!) role of Captain Hook which didn't require any speaking lines but did involve leading the dance moves from the front - right up his alley. No great photos but all the kids looked great. Scruffy looking Lost Boys (and girls) and Fearsome Pirates galore.

BOOKS

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who've only read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

01. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
02. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
03. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
04. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling I read the first one
05. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
06. The Bible - well parts of it
07. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
08. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
09. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller Have never made it to the end of this
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - some but not all
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - started, didn't finish
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwel
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins It's on my bookshelf!
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist- Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet- William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So 33 all up for me.

And what was your favourite? For me Rebecca, Brideshead Revisited, The Lovely Bones and The Little Prince (which I recall reading also in French!).

Thanks Lisa and Mim for sharing this.

ARE YOU ON OUR SIDE?

So on Saturday night Miss 13 convinces DH to take her and a friend to see Kiwi band Goodnight Nurse.

There's some crap punk band playing as a support act so Miss 13 asks DH if the girls can go off (by themselves) and grab some dinner quickly. He agrees.

30 minutes later DH texts them to say they'd better come back to the venue as the punk band has finished and Goodnight Nurse would be on stage soon.

Text comes back from Miss 13: "No worries Dad, we won't miss anything. We're having dinner with a guy from the band!" (Except of, course it was written in txt-speak which would have confused me - DH is more up with the play).

It seems they had bumped into their friend, J and J's Mum's PA is the sister of Sam McCarthy (the guitarist from Goodnight Nurse). So they all had dinner together.

All that excitement BEFORE the concert.

OMG - I tell you, those girls were humming when they got home!

RED

See all that gorgeous Kenwood K Mix kitchen stuff? I have them. All of them. Red. Delivered to my doorstep by courier yesterday. Carton after carton. Unexpected.

Because I won The Australian's Women's Weekly Mother's Day Kenwood promotion.

How cool is that?

So the next time you see one of those competitions in a magazine where they ask you to choose a prize and write your details on the back of an envelope and post it off -do it.

Because you never know.

A QUEEN'S BIRTHDAY

When Cait was little she asked me if I was famous.Why?

'Because everyone has a holiday on your birthday.'

Well I'm not famous but one of the perks of being born on the 2nd of June is that I can pretty much guarantee that come my birthday there will be a long weekend.

Quite a nice birthday present for a queen!