Busy weekend alert

Here in NZ we celebrate Queen's birthday a week before the Aussies, so it's a long weekend for us!

Lots of things planned - have to take full advantage of the last public holiday until Labour Day at the end of October. Winter always feels like a long, dreary stretch from now till then.

My dear friend Rosie and her two boys will arrive from Christchurch today to spend the weekend with us. Tonight we'll just have takeaways with a few other friends and have a general catch-up (champagne and gossip). Little do they know this will also mean they'll get roped into making trays of sandwiches and chopping up 10kg of onions (for reasons which will become clear shortly).

Saturday is always all about rugby for us, tomorrow even more so. We have Club Day at the college. All seven of our teams are playing at home, we give player of the day awards to every team, we run a fundraising BBQ all day (hence the onions) and every team has an after-match function (hence the sandwiches). The big game of the day is the 1st XV (Jake's team) against the Wellington College 1st XV - always a lot of feeling riding on this one.

Of course 'keen Mum' here is running the rugby committee this year, so I'll be at school all day helping out. It will be interesting to see how many steps I rack up tomorrow!

Hoping for a quiet, moochy sort of day on Sunday - brunch by the beach and a long walk would be nice. On Sunday night Rosie and I are going to the 40 year celebration of the journalism school at Massey University (previously Wellington Polytechnic). We were there together in 1983. That's right, folks, I am a journalist by training - although it's a long time since I've done that sort of work.

Nothing planned yet for Monday. By then I'll probably have a plenty of loads of washing to do!