Singing for my supper

 Yesterday's high spot was a tour of Waihi's gold and silver mine.  The photo doesn't do justice to the size of it and the pit in the photo is about half the size of the various tunnels that run under the town.  The days of digging out nuggets are long gone (they never really were) and all the precious metals are now extracted by various chemical and physical processes that yield a whopping 3 grams of gold per ton of rock.

It was a busy day today, starting with a gargantuan breakfast on the newly covered deck - fortunate that it was covered as it was bucketing.  My first job of the day was to go for a blood test which took longer than expected as half of the staff of two at the local lab was off sick.  The remaining lady was very friendly and efficient and I enjoyed the time in the waiting room reading the 1977 Giles annual.  As I had been a good boy, I found a custard tart waiting for me in Georgia's car.
Then we were off to Waihi Beach again where someone had organised a "Bring your greyhound" event.  I don't know if we were late or if the peeing rain put people off but we (and Georgia's greyhound, Poppy) were the only ones there which meant that Poppy could gallop around the beach on her own.  Cassie then did us all an unintentional favour by falling over while paddling so we headed home again for a late lunch of Bovril on toast. 

Once that was out of the way we headed en masse to the local Mitre 10 - some of their stores are the size of Lowes in Asheville but this one was more like a whatever the one in Hendersonville Road is called (memory not working at all well today).  I'd promised to update the lighting in Georgia's kitchen but there were a couple of other places that struck me as gruesome so we added those to the list.  Having filled a trolley with lights, cable, odds and sods and a jacket for her hot tank it was time to head home and start installing.  Bathroom came first with the old light from there going into the laundry to replace the light that looked like it came from a western saloon.
I couldn't do anything much in the kitchen as the wall I was going to mount lights on (changed our minds and decided to mount them on a beam) needed painting.  So I attacked the outside lights which were a mixture of bare lightbulbs and long fluorescent tubes.  We decided on some very handsome bulkhead LED lights - I've put one up but we have come to the conclusion that rerouting the cable to put the lights pointing towards the house rather than towards the neighbour's house is a good idea.
After all that industry, having a curry delivered was the only sensible option for dinner and a bloody fine curry it was, too,  I can't remember last time I had Goan fish curry and this one was made with terakihi making it doubly good.
Main job for tomorrow is to replace all the old brown light switches with white ones and a couple of single sockets with doubles and then take a nose around the Lego museum (it isn't an official Lego museum so they have to call it something else).