It’s all Chiara, all the time.

How I–snap! click! pop!—went, with what feels like no transition whatsoever, from staying home every night, not even going to yoga, to double-booking every weekend and having to schedule nights off from social stuff, is anyone’s guess, but all of a sudden all my conversations are about how I can make it to this one…

It’s cool and rainy and a little grey right now as I write this, but spring grey, soft grey; not the intractable closed-down iron of the winter that’s finally dripped and dragged to an end. Earlier it was short-sleeves-and-sandals weather, and I didn’t even need a hoodie as I got the season’s first cheap red…

Friday night I walked home after work and waited anxiously for my new stove to be delivered. All the appliances in this flat are hilarious for their own various reasons, but the stove was not funny at all because a) all its various temperature markings had been worn away so you just sort of had…

We put Theresa on the plane to Melbourne yesterday—two carloads of friends. She’s doing a working holiday visa there for a year, after two years in Wellington, and I don’t think any of her friends have completely absorbed that she’s gone yet; we joked about getting tickets to Auckland and continuing the party up there…

The stove doesn’t work—I’ve tried out all the burners and they get sort of lukewarm for a while, enough to almost boil water for pasta, but then they just shut off randomly. One of the windows sticks. There’s a washer from 1982 but no dryer. The bedroom closet door draaaaags across the carpet. The curtains…

You told yourself you were going to scale back from social stuff this weekend but you’ve been out every night all the same. Brunch and lunch and coffees and dinners, lots of friends, lots of talking. Lots of texting and running around. You are home only to sleep and to throw your clothes in the…

Saturday morning, Chiara and her flatties lay around the lounge discussing their respective Friday nights they wait for a load of firewood to arrive, which they will have to lug up four flights of muddy slippery steps if they want to stay even slightly warm for the next eighteen months of Wellington’s winter. Outside, it…

Things go quick or they don’t go at all, these days. I’m never at home anymore, there’s never enough time to do anything like grocery shopping or laundry or reading or writing blog posts or anything, because either I’ve got dinner with one friend or dinner with another friend or easy-ish yoga or really hard…

I am sitting our lounge in front of the fire; the flatties have mentioned something about it’s being ‘too warm’ in here but I have had—wearing yoga pants, two long-sleeved shirts, a pink fur-lined hoodie, and pink fur-lined slipper boots—to disabuse them of the notion that there can ever be such a thing as ‘too…

Towel-dry your hair and put on a singlet, thick socks, a shirt and two jumpers, shivering in your unheated room. Wrap your neck in your biggest scarf and pull your hat down over your ears, pull on your new mittens and be late for the bus, head down into the rain. Look at the different…

At yum cha on a rainy Saturday afternoon… CHIARA:…yeah, so—sorry, can I have one of those sticky rice things?—we have this rule in the house, now. You know how we’re all lonely spinsters, all three of us? Well, we decided that if anyone ever brings someone home, she has to cook pancakes the next morning…

She missed the twilight while she was at the store, wandering around the aisles sort of dazed, trying to remember if they are out of milk at the house, if she needs more ravioli or feta cheese. The winter’s held off the last couple of weeks—she’s been trying to spin out wearing her cute new…

The last big Italian lunch I went to was for my own birthday; so I was really looking forward to the one this afternoon. May has been surprisingly still and calm and warm and every morning when I’ve hopped out the door and run down the 38923892 stairs to the street I’ve looked out the…

Yesterday I had the day off because I was at a hui in Te Kuiti all weekend; one of my flatmates and I took the opportunity to stack this winter’s firewood and then we went to see my friend Tom speak at Pecha Kucha. Tomorrow night I am meeting Giulia for coffee and then going…

My birthday weekend was so good that I had one of the several cakes people made for me for breakfast today just because I felt like it. I’m sort of sniffly and snuffly and had to skip yoga tonight so I could come straight home and make soup for dinner, but I am still basking…

Sick in bed for a day and a half, in a way I haven’t been since the Bush Administration. Tired and sore and achey and shaky, sweating through the sheets, sweating through my purple octopus shirt, dazed and dehydrated, staring at nothing. The last time I was this sick I was in my mother’s house…

The bay heaves and surges, flexes its muscles but never breaks into waves; the clouds filter the evening’s light whitely, greyly, into the fading hills. I look out the window at the smudged harbour, tired from yoga, tired from my week. Looking forward to dinner and bickies and bed. Mist gauzes over the open mouth…

Right after we all got back from Christmas and New Year’s my very lovely flattie gave us some simultaneously awesome and awful news: she was moving out. Awesome: she’s moving in with her fantastic boyfriend! Awful: she’s leaving us! I had a couple days to wrap my mind around that, thinking about the hassle of…

Yesterday was pretty exciting because not only was it Waitangi Day and good old Sevens, it was also like the one day of summer that we have in Wellington per year, and when I say that I mean that that’s what they were actually saying on the news, like, “Summer to fall on weekend this…

You have been going to the summer garden concerts since you first arrived in this city: as you walk down from the cable car along the path to the soundshell you think about the night you first thought you might like to stay for longer than a year. So many memories, now, as you search…

It’s been pretty awful weather since I got back from Golden Bay, as in it’s currently 54 degrees (Fahrenheit, that’s 12 for everyone else) outside, in the middle of what’s supposed to be summer, and it’s raining sideways and the wind is whipping the tree branches against my window in such a manner that suggests…

Last night we all went to the Wellington International Ukulele show at San Francisco Bathhouse and got home ever so slightly late for a Sunday night, after much singing along to “Africa” and “Sweet Child O’Mine” (works surprisingly well as a happy cheery folky song) and everyone’s favorite “Heartache”. This morning when I got into…

I leave in a couple of days for my summer holidays (and of course it’s still winter weather in Wellington, of course it is) and have been busy with many parties and much wrapping-things-up with work and much trying to see everyone before I leave for the usual lunches and coffees and dinners. I’ve been…

There are six or seven things I’ve been thinking about lately and meaning to write about here (Pride and Prejudice, my heterosexual life partners, the end of crappy ol’ 2009, how my hair lady gave me this weird winged mullet with which I am having a hard time coming to terms) but there’s no time,…

Friday evening I was invited to aperitivo, like after-work drinks for Italians, at the studio of someone I know through my friend Giulia and also from Facebook. I wasn’t quite sure what this was all about, exactly: what kind of studio was it? Who would be there? What sort of a snack situation were we…

The sun’s going down now, slowly, softly, and part of me thinks I should go downstairs and chop some kindling and make a springtime fire, but really what I’ll probably do is shiver slightly as the clouds rush overhead and drink another cup of tea in my yoga pants and oversize Auahi Kore shirt I…

Of course in the Northern Hemisphere Guy Fawkes Day would be cold and dark and autumnal: brief glares on a freezing November evening, actual bonfires, something warming in a hip flask perhaps. In your city, it’s cold and dark too, when you finally decide that oh fine, it’s just once a year, and suit up…

We’re at an intriguing meteorological stage, right now in Wellington: it’s still sort of officially winter in that it can be cold at night and one wants at least two blankets on the bed, but the birds have been singing and the flowers have been blooming and everyone is waking up a little bit from…

Monday I made some lentil soup with carrots, onions, a whole thing of tomato paste and some leftover frozen corn when I got home from work. I would have liked to put in some celery but celery was SEVEN DOLLARS at Moore Wilson and I was too tired and cold to go over to New…

Wake up, finally, because the morning light—well, the mid morning light— got in through the curtains. At first you thought your phone was going off on your bedside table but really it was the birds outside in the trees, singing, singing, making you believe the long cold wet winter is almost over and that one…

I don’t know about you, but I had a really nice weekend. It was full of pretty people and cute dresses and an interesting documentary and journal-writing at Fidel’s and lazy pajama-based mornings and a hubristic party and good talks and yummy hot chocolates and delightful cupcakes and a walk on the beach at Lyall…

Two pairs of socks, in the mornings; a singlet top, merino jersey, fuzzy-collar zip-up sweater and a coat. Scarf and a very cute hat that always gets me compliments, and sometimes the orange chenille gloves I think I got at the Greenlake PCC nine billion years ago. Tights and boots. Three duvets on the bed…

Community transmission of contagious disease being what it is, I’ve been back working on Operation Swine this last week and a half, and I am so totally OVER IT, man Most people at work have been on this thing for like eight weeks now and everyone’s tired and everyone’s tense and everyone has the little…