In August, Yann, Emily and I tripped to Christchurch. The Cupcake Parlour was one of our first stops.

I went to Napier in September with me pa and ma. We trawled op-shops. Here is a mannequin that reminded me of a Marcel Marlier illustration.

I made my first trek up Mount Victoria in October, after eight years of living in Wellington. Here we are at the summit, Erin, me and Blair.

I finally finished my lampshade in November. Look at how happy I am!

Emily, Yann and I celebrated our fourth Christmas in the flat together.

I turned 33 in the new year, and Emily made me this beautiful cake.

Also in January, I was privileged to attend the beautiful wedding of Kate and Wei.

And then, in February, our flat headed down south to the Marlborough Wine Festival. (Horrible sunburn not pictured.)

In March, we farewelled Emily to Auckland. Among countless other things, we miss the fringe benefits of her job. So I have started to bake again.

Just before Easter, I celebrated Passover with some friends. Here is my Seder plate, with beitzah, charoset, matzo and karpas. This was my first Easter in Wellington, and the most meaningful in recent years.

The best thing about these crackers is that they are perforated, which allows me to very neatly break each large square up into four further little squares. It gives me much satisfaction being able to do this with minimal mess and crumbs.

Not surprisingly, Salada crackers are excellent with cheese. Marmite and crunchy peanut butter (separately) are next.

While unpacking our projects, I got talking to one of the advanced students, Gill, and she offered to give me a ride if I want to come back for the next two terms. I hate to leave the shade unfinished, and I'm enjoying stained glass much, much more than expected. I guess I may as well take advantage of low-fee community classes now, whatever the government decides to do next year.

Okay, lampshade stuff...

Here, I am having more soldering fun joining the green and orange pieces together for the lamp skirt. The flux is oily and the fumes are awful, but the magpie in me finds it difficult to resist touching the beautiful shining balls of hot solder rolling off the iron onto the newspaper. I burn my fingertips several times during the class, but pride keeps me from yelping out with pain.

With all ten sets of the skirt pieces finally soldered, I prepare to attach the spider to the main part of the shade. Procuring the spider has been tricky. I was going to have to go all the way out to Pukerua Bay again to get one from Olaf, but fortunately found a place in Newtown that could order one for me. It then took several phone calls during work time to confirm I could have one in time for class, causing curious co-workers to send emails: "What are you ordering a spider for? And why do you have to have one by Wednesday?", except that they used about six extra question and exclamation marks. I work with some very excitable folks.

I need to apply patches of solder on to the ends of the spider's five spokes, so I can then solder the whole thing on to the shade. The spokes are smooth metal and the solder refuses to attach, even when Greg shows me how to roughen the spokes up a bit with some random tool I do not know the name of. In the end we resort to using a different type of flux, which is more corrosive and more spluttery, but helps the solder attach a lot better. Then at last I solder the spider to the shade. Here, badly framed, but looking yet another step closer to a real lampshade.

This is as far as I get by the end of the class. I chose to bring all my stuff home with me for safe-keeping and more photo opportunities. Here, witness up close, my stellar soldering skillz:

And, also, one of many burn injuries from the night, when I accidentally pressed one of the hot spokes of the spider against my arm. It didn't hurt for long, and now only resembles a soy sauce stain.

This is the end of my first eight weeks with stained glass. I expected to enjoy myself, but am surprised at just how much I actually loved it. This has to be the only community class I've attended where I looked forward to every single class (which says a lot, it having been a winter term and all). I especially liked the project-based aspect of the course, being able to work at something big and challenging, achieving a bit more every week, and seeing results without the bother of homework and mid-week practicing required in language classes.

Stay tuned for more stained-glass adventures, kids.

I had plans to work on my assignment, now three days overdue, but couldn't muster up the energy. Instead I drifted round the apartment, looked at the fish, took a photo of my scarf, ate some bread, and watched about two minutes of MASH, then retired to bed for more aimless drifting on Wikipedia and Flickr.

This is the wonderful Clooney where we ate on Friday night.

A dining experience that was, for me at least, right up there with Tetsuya's two summers ago. We were well looked after by head chef Des Harris, who is lovely and so humble for his astounding talent. Two especially amazing dishes were the ostrich carpaccio (thoughtfully created, melting and beautiful) and the citrus bombe glace (sharp, cold, sweet, clever). All splendid.

And this was the second highlight of the concert. My favourite S&G song, Paul Simon's microphone failing, the crowd coming to the rescue, making it all far more memorable than if everything had gone like clockwork.

After this, Paul said, "That was really cool. I'll never forget that", and Art, "That's the nicest thing an audience has ever done for us".

But the first and ultimate highlight of the concert - and the whole weekend - was having the privilege to be with my father when he saw Simon and Garfunkel live in concert for the first time. He has loved them since always, Rachael and I grew up on their music and later learned to play their songs on the guitar and piano, so it was really very moving and quite indescribable to watch him watch them.

Awesome-o weekend.

(I was wearing shorts and dinosaur t-shirts when I was 13. This was back in 1990, so just remember folks, that dinosaurs, robots, spaceships etc were not yet being considered icons of retro cool.)

Tavi, however, creates amazingly inventive outfits from such unlikely items as her mother's shirts, old Halloween costumes, and even the reflective neon belt from a crossing guard's vest. The trousers pictured below are from an op-shop and too large for her so she's taken to them with safety pins. Clever.

I also like her post about beauty icons. So incredibly perceptive, and so strong and original at an age when kids just want to be the same as each other.

Tavi's blog is fun. Go be inspired a little, or a lot.

Greg then helps me assemble and tape together the main pieces of the shade, and together we raise it up and tack solder all the pieces together. He is so calm about the whole thing that I only realise later that what we were doing was the most precarious and delicate part of the lampshade-making operation, the very thing Dave had warned me about.

I spend the rest of the class carefully peeling off the bits of blue tape and tack-soldering more of the joints between each piece to strengthen them. The whole thing feels pretty sturdy now. Next week, I will turn it upside down and solder the inside of the shade. Sometime before then, I also need to buy a four or five-legged spider crossbar, which I believe is the first of the few lamp fittings I will need to acquire.

It's all getting terribly exciting, and seeing it come together all of a sudden tonight was so super thrilling. It's the last class next week. Greg says I will "come very close" to finishing my shade. I mean to take that as a challenge!

Next week, the fun stuff: soldering!

And in between, dinner at Clooney's, and seeing Simon and Garfunkel live-o! Happy days.

It seems that every excellent coat I did see on Saturday was from a men's store, every single one of them splendidly cut, and in smart, sturdy fabrics. I've a good mind to buy one and have it tailored to fit. It certainly would be one of a kind, but the cost could never be justified.

I like to think of these boarding school stories as the book versions of When All Else Fails, a dish our family makes for dinner when we can't think of what else we'd like to have. When All Else Fails is simply chicken cooked with soy sauce and lots of ginger, a fragrant and comforting dish to fall back on when you just want to cook and eat without too much thought and fuss. In the same way, St Clare's and Malory Towers are books to read when you don't feel like straining the critical faculties too much.

When I finally get round to reading, however, there will be plenty of new books waiting:

• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer


• The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay


• Piano Rock by Gavin Bishop


• The 10PM Question by Kate de Goldi.

De Goldi's favourite place for reading was, and still is, bed. "I would wake up on Saturday morning in that deep pleasurable warmth of my bed, with the lovely smell of my pillow, and in my memories it's seemingly, somehow, always raining outside so there's the sound of rain, and it's almost a narcotic experience. I would stay there and read for hours and hours."

I just think anybody who had a childhood like that and, more importantly, remembers it, will surely write the kinds of stories I want to read.

The nice, friendly salesperson asked all about my project. The point was made yet again about just how ambitious I've been to take on a lampshade. He actually said, "That's like going to the Olympics when you just start playing sport!". I asked him what people normally begin with, and he said it depends on the sort of person you are; some people just like to dive straight into difficult projects. That made me feel slightly better, although truthfully, I still don't know just how hard a lampshade will be to make. I chose it simply because I wanted to make something pretty and functional.

I'm feeling rather frustrated now, however. Not because of how hard I can expect my project to be, but because I can already see that the lampshade is not going to be anywhere near as pretty as I had hoped. The pieces are too large and the shape frankly quite ugly. I should have asked Greg more questions and put more thought and planning into the design. If I had known that I was not going to be able to finish the lampshade this term anyway, I would probably have picked a different design, something more for its aesthetic than its simplicity to make.

Never mind, this is only my first project. I hope there will be more to come.

I may or may not have silicosis after spending the better part of tonight's class grinding these pieces down. My cutting skills still leave plenty to be desired. I also sustained a tiny injury from the grinder, opening some skin on my left index finger by getting too excitably close to the grinder head.

I really want to finish cutting and grinding next week and get on to foiling and soldering. That is yet an unknown to me, so I don't know how long it will take. I now see it's quite likely I won't finish the lampshade this term. But there is the possibility of going back for next term's class to finish it, then to try my hand at one of these far prettier and more interesting lampshades.

But I hadn't had a go at the grinder yet, and this seemed as good a reason as any to put off the inevitable for a few moments more, and get acquainted with this much-lauded device. I unwrap and examine all my cut pieces to see which ones needed fine-tuning. Looks like a mighty-molared little mouse got into the glass storeroom over the week. Err, is my cutting really this horrible?

I take them over to the grinder, which turns out to be most disappointing. It is really slow going and keeps washing off the Vivid I used to number each piece as well as mark which bits to grind off. I have about ten or eleven pieces that require grinding. That's not bad out of the total twenty, but it still means slow, boring grunt work on a machine I had expected a lot from.

It is about an hour before I get all the pieces ground as close to the template size as I can. There is still an hour left to go, and I can't delay cutting the curvy pieces any longer. After all, there are only four classes left after tonight, and I still have to copper-foil, solder and mount the thing. I break out the sheets of practice glass, and have a terrible time producing all sorts of shapes other than the one I am supposed to be creating.

I actually feel like crying or stamping my feet at this point, thinking with rising panic of all that beautiful orange glass about to be ruined by my incompetence. I grab the template and roughly sketch two straight lines on the skirt of the lamp, cutting it off at its curviest part. "This," I tell Greg, "is my new design. I can't do the curvy bits!" It's possible that I am whining. He is kind but very firm, and won't let me change the template. "You will be unhappy with yourself if you do that. Here, I'll show you something". He demonstrates a way of making two individual cuts to get the one piece . It makes complete sense. I am able to make strong scores in the glass without careering wildly off the line. I give it a few tries with the practice glass and soon feel brave enough to try it on the real thing.

I soon have a curvy orange piece which is about four millimetres too wide on one side. I ask Greg if there's any way I could get at it with a glass cutter instead of spending what I know will be an age at the grinder. Four millimetres is almost too small for a glass cutter, so he shows me how to grind it down.

Guess what?

Turns out I was doing it all wrong before! As appears to be the case with all my stained-glass ineptitudes so far, it was all down to timidity. I had been merely grazing the grinder head with the edge of the glass. That's why it was taking so long. So the glass grinder really is a thing of beauty and a joy forever - when used correctly. In no time at all, that four millimetres is gone and I have my first curvy orange piece, perfectly cut and ground to size.

I'm terribly excited about next week's class now. The lampshade has thirty pieces altogether. Twenty-one are now cut and ground to size, nine to go. And I know I can do it.

• Claiming my tax credits. After five years of procrastinating, I finally filled out the forms and sent them off last month.


• Starting a cross-stitch project for my one-year-old niece. I decided to do this when she was six months' old. I'll be able to gift it to her on her fifth birthday, at the rate I'm going.


• Completing my NCALE assessments. I've had two years to do this. Now I only have one month.

My favourite find by far was a photo essay by a husband-and-wife team in Germany, documenting their mission to replicate a Tiffany lamp. This particular photo below sure made me feel better about Wednesday night's blunder, although I know their mistake had almost certainly nothing to do with glass cutters veering off the true line.

I also suffered momentary panic learning that most beginners start with simple panels or mirrors, only later working their way up to lampshades. I haven't even chosen a simple 4-panel lampshade the way you're meant to when you start out. Suddenly, the words of Dave (one of the returning students in the class) are ringing unpleasantly in my mind, "Cutting is the easy part. Wait until you come to raise it up. It'll be enough to make you weep". But I'm choosing to blithely ignore this, and remember instead that Greg said not to waste time on twee little ornaments, sun-catchers, and what have you.