This week’s small pleasures #233

The past week seems to have drifted by, with sunshine, rain and a little wind, heralding the last days of summer and the start of autumn. I have already seen feijoas for sale. It is also a year since my brother in Edinburgh died – still hard to believe. You can read my blog post at the time here.

Anyway, there have been quite a few small pleasures this week, from dropping back down to Covid Alert Level 1 for all of New Zealand except Auckland to this keruru, sitting quite happily on a cabbage tree. If I could have stood on the wall beside the tree, I could almost have touched him. It was a lovely sunny day too as you can see.

And so to food….being at home has made me be a bit more creative with lunches. There was toasted ciabatta topped with sauerkraut, prosciutto and micro greens, a salad topped with edible flowers, leftover chicken, micro greens and the last of a jar of cornichons and on Thursday, left over turkey meatballs and pasta. On Friday, I had lunch at Floriditas on Cuba Street, enjoying a chicken mayo sandwich with avocado, cucumber pickle and iceberg lettuce. All very delicious and enjoyable!

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There are all sorts of things popping up over Wellington at the moment. On Friday, it was PARK(ing) day, an annual global event where “citizens, artists and designers collaborate temporarily to transform metered parking spaces into living parks”. I discovered that the project began in 2005 when Rebar, a San Francisco art and design studio, converted a single parking space into a temporary public park in the city. It is a sort of ‘reclaim the space’ type project I guess. One group occupied a couple of parking spaces with comfy chairs, games and were giving out little jars of locally produced honey as random acts of kindness to those passing by. I can’t tell you how much this brought a smile to my face.

Throughout February and March, the What if the city was a theatre? arts event has been running, with all sorts of things from poetry being read at the waterfront, circus acts, music and dance. On Sunday, a friend and I had booked to see Java Dance Theatre’s Back of the Bus performance, which took place, as the name implies, on a bus. I did actually see this piece a few years ago, but wanted to go again as it really is a lot of fun. While the dancers do dance on the bus, the bus also stops at different locations, where we, the audience, are taken by the dancers to a spot to watch them. On this trip we went to the Bucket Fountain on Cuba Street, a room in a flat and an outside a bar in town. It was such good fun, and you couldn’t help but smile for ages after. While we were waiting to get on the bus, we were treated to some excerpts from Don Giovanni, performed by members of Wellington Opera. They were performing from a construction site as you can see below – a perfect example of the city as theatre. The other two pictures are of one of the dancers performing by the Bucket Fountain, and of another dancer (who happens to be one of my Pilates teachers) on the bus itself.

So those are my small pleasures this week. What were yours? Here are some other bloggers with their favourites from the past week. Please free to join in!

• A wonderful gratitude list with attitude from Sagittarius Viking.
• Laurie over at Notes From the Hinterland reflects about the past year.
• Ju Lyn celebrates her daughter’s birthday with some very special looking cake.
• Deb’s World is Bold and Beautiful!
• Grateful Fridays over Little Pieces of Me relishes mountain views;
• Natalie the Explorer shares pictures of doors in Morocco and shares the link to the weekend coffee share blog party. 
• Sanch has a lovely list in her Weekly Gratitude postto share with us.
• March Coffee Talk from Meditations in Motion gets on with her yoga.
• Carol Ann over at Fashioned for Joy has some really wonderful delights of the week.

You can find Thistles and Kiwis on Facebook, and also on Instagram@thistleandkiwis.  As for Twitter….am totally inactive these days.  If you want to get in touch, email me on thistlesandkiwis@gmail.com