Civil Cup Slice Off and All Black

At the risk you really start to think I do no work at work I thought I'd tell you about the latest event organised by our social committee. (I gather most of my faithful followers already have a completely false illusion that I do no work, so I am not really changing anything.) We are having a slice making competition. (From what I have gathered so far, slice is the NZ term for squares.)This is one of the events in the 2009 Civil Cup competition which I mentioned in my post in November about the Crazy Hat Competition.

For the Slice competition each team (Structures, Geotech, Road, Traffic and Transport, etc.) will submit one slice for judging by a panel. So, leading upto the big competition each team needs to decide what they are submitting as their entry. This means that a different member of our team is responsible making and bringing a slice to our Monday morning team meeting so we can taste test each and decide what we are entering in the big competition.

Today key item of discussion at our meeting was whether we would be able to remember all the different slices (we have 12 team members) at the end of the heats and decide what we should enter. The conclusion was that we need to score and rate each slice as we go. We now have a box and ballots to rate each slice out of 5 for both taste and presentation. We also realised that we don't have enough time until the competition to try each slice if we only have one per week, so we added friday afternoon to the roster.

I said I would bring the first slice, and brought the very typical west coast Canadian dessert of Nanaimo Bars this morning. They seemed to be recieved well, but time (and the votes) will tell.

The social committee had also arranged a volunteer project for last Sunday (yes, not a work day) where we went and planted trees and other native plants in a regional park. I started off the day planting, but as my mother can confirm, I am not a huge fan of gardening or yard work. So when they asked for a couple of people to help pull down a no longer required fence I jumped at the opportunity. So for the rest of the day I was bent over pulling nails out of the battens.

I was just reading some of my past blog entries and have realised that there are an awful lot of spelling errors, typos and completely incoherent sentances in them. I will try to use spell check and read through them before hitting post, but no guarentees.

In other news from the southern hemisphere, I am moving flats. My current flatmate is moving to her boyfriend's place so I was given the option of keeping the flat and finding a new flatmate (and potentially some household and kitchen stuff) or move. A friend had just bought a townhouse and was looking for flatmates, so I decided to move. It is just around the corner from my current flat, so I am moving a whole 300 metres. (In New Zealand, everyone has flatmates. Even working professionals in their late 20s or early 30s have flatmates. I don't know of anyone who lives by themself.)

I also ended up going to the All Blacks Rugby game a couple of weeks ago when a friend showed up at a potluck with a spare ticket looking for someone else to join her at the game in 2 hours time. So I dashed home to go put an extra 5 layers since our seats were not covered and it was raining and off we went to the game.