A Bereavement
All two or three of my long-time readers will recall my posts about my Dad and his idiosyncracies. Well, on Sunday he let loose with another zinger."Hey Dad! I missed your call?""Hey Aims! How are you? Good weekend?""Great thanks! Just been at a BBQ with pals.""Oh lovely. Listen, Mum died last night. Do you want to come over for dinner?"By Mum, he means my Grandmother, who I wrote about a while ago, after she broke her hip in a fall. She was 93.All joking aside, this is very much The Family Way. We don't show emotion and we don't cry or, God forbid, talk about our feelings. Funnily enough I feel like I've been adopted at birth, because I

Boredom Busters
We're off on yet another long road trip tonight, back to the Hawkes Bay. Given that we're leaving Auckland right on rush hour, the entire trip will probably take about 6.5 hours.Now some people quite enjoy car trips, in fact I don't mind them during the day if there's some good tunes on the radio and some lovely scenery, which there usually is in good old NZ. But when it's 10pm, pitch black and you're stuck behind a stinky sheep truck doing 10 km/h around the twisty bends of the Napier Taupo Road and you JUST WANT TO GET THERE, God, the allure of the car isn't so beguiling. Plus, because I am so bored, I tend to get reallllllllly hungry. Last car trip we broke our healthy eating run a

The Wit.
Colleague: My computer just crashed again.Me: Did it forget to give way?See me later on the Comedy Channel.

Close encounters of the neighbourly kind
This morning, as I rolled over and hit the snooze button for the 8th time, preparing to burrow down for another nine minutes, a sound made my eyes pop open.It was a fart.Rich had already gone to work. Basil was on his armchair. And it sure as heck wasn’t me. It was our neighbour.You see, we share a driveway with our neighbour, and it goes directly along the side of our house. The side where our bedrooms are. The house is not known for its solidness – in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if the walls were made of MDF – hence if you walk along the driveway while we’re in bed, we’re going to hear you. You are not all alone, humming a tune, enjoying the birdsong. We’r

Another reason to move to Australia
If you can see that, it's disgusting here this week, and gorgeous in Aus. And only 3.5 hours flight away!