Trendy haircut for Ev

To be cool, you have to look like you have murder on the mind; however, in the immortal words of Leonard Cohen, cheerfulness keeps on breaking through:

Junk time

The first properly sunny day in almost a month and the timing was perfect - with a junk trip out to Mils beach.  Evan was looking cool in his orange junk-trip shirt, below that Aiden and Jordan on the half deck out at sea, and the gang chilling in the water just off the beach.

Summer routine - swimming and skimming

I've been running and swimming on alternate days, grinding back after patch of poor lifestyle choices (though waiting for the worst of the wet season to pass before hitting the bike - the roads are literally green with mossy stuff) and Aiden has been coming along so that he can skim.  Sadly summer offers even less in the way of surf than normal - but he's determined to thrash what there is.

Ev knocks over primary school, twenty one and a new Black Shrimp

So, in a woeful patch of postlessness the summer holidays have arrived, and with them, Evan waves goodbye to primary school.  I was away for his final day, but delightfully Courtney and Jordan were home and went along with Ange to pick him up and and woop woop.

Other big stuff that's recently happened was Courtney turning 21 - you go sister (the pick below is after the fact at a big brunch feed at the Intercontinental in TST (it was seriously fantastic) and Simon taking delivery of his new Black Shrimp (you'll recall the Kenton river boat, but this one new and improved, and shipped out to HK.  The photo is utterly fantastic, sailing it home through HK harbour on a crystal clear summer's day.

The weekend at home - wooohoo

Super-lovely to be home for the weekend - smiles between the miles; was in India last week - and it was fabulous, but still away.  Off to Aus tomorrow.  Spent Saturday gardening - very restorative as an activity; some proper manual labour, some decorative and a refurbished herb garden.  Then off to the sandbank for a super-low tide.  I smile at the personalities - Ev, sort of dreamy and soulful. When we got down to the slipway around 4.30 it was sunny and hot.  He found an old cask and crawled through the side and up through the hole.  A conning tower perhaps, with the pole as its periscope.  Then he decided to dig a hole, and build a sand chair, the completion of which he celebrated with a little jig.  Aiden on the other hand is out for some speed, up and down with his skim board.  And its just what the boy needs, a healthy chunk of time doing sprints, burning off the Mr Angry that thirteen's testosterone tsunami brings.

Tsing Ma Bridge from outside

I went with Franka, Jules' mom, to fetch Aiden from the airport, returning from a school soccer tour to Thailand.  He seems to have had a wail of a time.  The ride to the airport was in a convertable, very cool, so I got to take a couple of pics of the Tsing Ma Bridge, from the outside - nice.

Summer

Has arrived.  Lovely light, steamy late afternoon and evening at the short bar on the slipway