Four Seasons in One Day (Make That "Week")

Yes, I'm back. In fact, I've been back for a few days, but very busy doing laundry and dealing with a month's worth of e-mails and snail mail, not to mention catching up at work.

At my newer job they just continued without me, but at my other job I found that there was more work than I had hoped piled on my desk. A lot of things had been only half done, and not done quite correctly, so I went back and fixed things up. Since nothing too bad would have happened if I had left them as is, I guess I am being a bit anal. If they had actually been finished, it would have been too complicated to alter them and I would have left them as is. Just a matter of changing a few figures here and there...

Back to the title of the post. When we left the UK last Friday it was definitely feeling like autumn. The trees are changing colour and there was a chill in the air. The heather is starting to bloom in Scotland. Then it was Singapore where it is meltingly hot. And humid. I couldn't call it summer as they really only have a dry season and a wet season (and the wet season is fast approaching, but fortunately it didn't rain while we were there). Then it was back to Christchurch where it should be spring. The daffodils are fast wilting, there is blossom on the trees still but they are breaking out into green leaf as well. But the day after we returned there was hail, sleet and slush. Winter in October? That's definitely not right in the Southern Hemisphere. And the next day there was a small earthquake. It sure makes a girl feel welcome!

We were watching the news late one night in Singapore when the subtitles came up "Earthquake in New Zealand. Australia on tsunami alert." That was a bit worrying, until the caption changed to "earthquake near New Zealand" which is not quite the same thing. In the next morning's newspaper we found that it was a 7.4 quake centred near the Auckland Islands which are 350 miles (or is it kilometres?) south of New Zealand - far enough to be about two countries away, if we were in Europe. So, no real problem.

I was busy unpacking on Tuesday evening and discovered I didn't have my camera. I was stressing out, thinking it had fallen out of the luggage trolley in the carpark, until I rang the airport in the morning and found that I had actually left it at the security check on the way through immigration. I was able to collect it from the airport police kiosk. They had quite a collection of cameras there. P. suggested I could have chosen the best one and I replied that mine was the best one.

I put my forgetfulness down to tiredness from the long flights and a lack of caffeine. I cut right back on coffee for travelling. Then I found research that suggests drinking coffee protects women from Alzheimers. (Not men, strangely enough).

So my new excuse is that drinking coffee is good for me. (Though there's bound to be a study somewhere which says it increases my risk of something else).

We took about 15,000 photos between us. I need to get them transferred to my computer from P's laptop, then I will start posting a diary of my trip with pretty pictures. My daughter thinks it's very odd to blog about my trip a month later. Well, maybe so, but I couldn't do it while I was there due to a lack of time and lack of internet connection - and when we did have free time, P was mostly using the laptop anyway.

Watch this space!