Well it’s now spring, which means sunshine! So much sunshine! I am not complaining, my ghostlike complexion after too much winter will soon be on its way!

This week’s cycling has been awesome, and it was green travel day on Friday, so, we drove (we were sleepy and cycle the rest of the time…. sorry earth!)

I experienced my first ‘proper’ earthquake, a 5.1 which felt like being sat in a bumper car and someone hitting into you, then the building swayed and the windows flexed. A little bit scary! People were diving under their desks and getting their emergency bags at the ready! After it had stopped I excitedly text James who hadn’t felt a thing!

This week at jewellery school, I was greeted by two very lovely scraggy pooches, general and Lulu, short for lieutenant. General is my new best friend and decided he likes being sat on my feet.

We learnt how to texture metal. I was shit. We started by putting the metal annealed metal though a press, the pattern I chose made my metal look like granny skin crossed with crocodile – I then thought I’d make it look a bit better by tapping patterns into the metal.

No. Just looked like a car had driven over it.

We all made another ring, this time to be textured. After my earlier disaster of trying to get a fun pattern on the metal I decided to randomly just press lines into my ring – as there wasn’t a line press I used ‘V’s actually turned out pretty cool – abstract may be the way forward with my jewellery design.

I polished up the ring I made last week which now looks awesome, but ran out of time to polish the textured ring, so that’ll have to wait until next week.

James had spent the evening at an intense bike launch, it’s a brand, not just extreme bikes. Although they do make a rather nice turquoise and lime green bike – I could do with an upgrade 😉

Thanks to sleep deprivation / being really lazy I missed parkrun. James went off riding with ‘the boys’. Eventually I got out into the sunshine and it was gorgeous.

Ended up going for a nice 30 mile ride around the bays

Round to red rocks

Up a delightful hill past the recycling centre where someone has decorated their land with metal sculptures

Eventually got to where James was riding where he’d said to meet…. And he wasn’t there. He’d gone for some food and back to town. Thankfully, as I was a little bit tired he came and picked me up!

After a quick little stop off at the British Shop to pick up the essentials… and it was home time.

Sunday was the start of the spring festival in Wellington, which coincided with a tulip festival in the botanical gardens.

There ware loads of people around, including a lot of selfie-stick weilding asians.

Where’s (the) Wally

And loads of very lovely flowers

Baby ducklings swimming around in the pond

Cherry blossom (James was clearly bothered by this and just walked off!)

We head down to the beach for James to have a little nap in the sunshine whilst I watched the clouds whizz by and planes land.

On the way home, we saw a very strange man cycling in a strange contraption. It even had indicators!

Before too long it was the end of the weekend, a quick FaceTime to the fam – hint hint Sam FaceTime me soon!!!!

The adventure continues…