Buildings, Boardgames, and Birds

With housing sorted out, here are some other things we've been up to.

We visited our cat at the cattery, and he is doing fine. He loves eating the grass. As soon as I opened his cage door, he bolted out to the enclosed grassy area and started munching. No care that we were there to visit him. Typical cat.

We saw a building being demolished, and you so rarely get to see the innards of a building, I had to take a picture. Assumption is that there was too much earthquake damage to repair it.

Yesterday we went to another garage sale not far from here and bought a stand-up fan (for the few days it actually gets hot here), a new sweater for me, some Tupperware containers, and a small baking pan. I'm really hoping the number of sales increases as the weather warms up, because it's a real deal to get things for way under retail here because of the price of imports.

Next we went to an organized game day put on by the boardgame group that our homestay is a part of. We sort of got stuck with a nerdy high schooler, but he wasn't too bad. We played Salmon Run, Wasabi, Ave Caesar, King of Tokyo, Love Letter, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, and then a tournament game of Carcassonne (didn't win, unfortunately).

beautiful tulips

Today we went to the huge park here, Hagley Park, to see sled-dog races (without snow) as part of the opening of IceFest, Christchurch's way of celebrating its part in Antarctic exploration. There were all kinds of dogs, not just Huskies, and people were on bicycles and scooters tied up to the dogs so they could race around a track. The dogs not racing were barking up a storm wanting to be freed. It was cold out today and did rain on us a couple times while we out. We went to the Canterbury Museum for a little bit (it's free so we will be back to see the rest) and enjoyed the tulips and birds in the park. 

After coming back while sitting in the living room, we heard a "cluck" coming from outside.
A lone (wild?) rooster was roaming the streets, and a neighborhood cat was staring at it but then got scared and ran away. While we were getting in the car to pick up Domino's, the rooster came out from a yard and starting walking toward me with a purpose so I jumped in the car before its evil machinations could manifest themselves.

rooster near bottom, gray cat on walkway in the adjacent yard

at the park: different kinds of ducks here

black and white ducklings!

black swan with its gray babies