Found 2 blog posts with tag: yoga

Suddenly August

I was up in Auckland last weekend for May and Norman's wedding. Awesome to catch up with my KCC crew and even more exciting to see these two be married and to celebrate with them over a fantastic meal at the Cube on Swanson St in the city.

I got to see my two nephews - the older one is as giggly as ever, and extremely excitable, the younger one we call fei jai because of his cute chubby cheeks! They really do grow up so fast and I really wish I could see them more often. I also took my parents to this amazing restaurant called Chikos on Lincoln Road. The chef there is Filipino but trained in French cuisine and his food combines contemporary flavours of Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Japan to produce some truly delightful and inspired dishes. I was blown away by the immaculate presentation of each dish, as well as the freshness of the ingredients and the exciting, unique taste of the meal. Definitely one to visit again in the future, and for $30 per main, a very reasonably priced one at that.

This week has been pretty busy too. I went for yoga again on Monday but felt so horrible afterwards that I'm probably just going to skip the last two classes - I ended up having some shooting pains down my leg and it was so hot and humid that I felt like I was going to pass out. I've just come back from Luke's birthday celebration at the Lighthouse Cinema where we ate an Adventure Time cake and saw Princess Mononoke.

One more week until Wellington on a Plate! Organising people together for this is worse than herding cats, but I'm sure the negativity will melt away once I get some burgers in my mouth. This week's baking challenge was a vegetable cake - a cake with a vegetable as the primary ingredient. Our bakers pulled together with pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, mushroom (ugh!), onion (ugh!!), potato and rhubarb; huge congratulations to Jules and Tim for their contributions to the challenge - next week's is pie!


Awkward Poses

I went to yoga for the first time in my life on Monday.

Then I went again today.

Both times were awful. I am unfit and inflexible, and my hamstring injury was not contributing to my general well-being. It is something I want to try and like, because I know it will be good for my joints in the future and that it will strengthen my leg to prevent injuries like that from happening. But it is a very steep hill to climb and I am having a very bad time.

I spent most of last week cleaning and packing for my big shift 20 metres away. Everything went pretty smoothly, thanks to some help from Wei and my new flatmates. Though my leg was starting to give me some serious grief, I was able to rest it often enough to persevere through the whole day and get everything shifted in. After a trip to the Southern Landfill on Sunday, it all started feeling settled again. As a bonus, Vodafone sorted the Internet out on Saturday so I was able to get that all connected with my new powerline adapters to my desktop. Home is where the Internet is.

We were at the opening night of Mexico on Dixon Street for Jill's birthday and at Dragons for yum cha on Sunday. Then on Monday was the first bake day for the Wellington on a Plate Bake Club - I'm the co-ordinator for two teams at work who are battling it out to be PikPok's top baker. Wellington on a Plate sets a series of challenges each week and it's up to our teams to go out and bake up a storm and bring in the goods on Monday (sometimes Tuesday) for judging. We award points based on appearance, flavour, texture and usage of "Wellington ingredients" and the sum of the scores for each category over all the weeks determines who is the winner and thus who will advance to the Wellington City Bake Off!

The two PikPok teams are Fondante's Inferno and Flour Power: Into the Bread, and the first challenge was slices. There was an assortment fantastic edibles - lemon meringue, honey lemon and ginger, strawberry and chocolate mascarpone, chocolate and star anise, lemon passionfruit and coconut, and almond, peanut and chocolate. Absolutely awesome job by our eight bakers and looking forward to next week's exciting installment!