We’re back. My birthday surprise was a flight to Auckland and a night on the harbour at the Westin hotel overlooking all the really spiffy sail and motor yachts.

It was devine. This photo was taken from my hotel room. We went shopping and my sweetie bought me a beautiful gold chain that I’ve had my eye on for a year or more and a bottle of nice perfume and a few other things best left to the imagination.

In the late afternoon we went for a long walk along the harbour and saw the most magnificent sailboat. Launched on the 13th of December, it’s just getting ready for its first sea trials. It’s being built for Guy Ullens, a very wealthy Belgian man.

The boat, the Red Dragon, is 52 metres long.. over 170′. One of the workers on the boat said the price tag was $50 million dollars! I can’t get my head around earning that kind of money.. not just yet anyway. If you have ideas, I’m all ears.

We also saw the boat Twizzle parked around the corner from the hotel. It’s a measly 182′ Feadship that has won all sorts of awards. My god, what a boat!

I know, I know, I should have taken photos but I was too busy drooling. In the photo up on the left, you can see the bow at the end of the walkway. Here’s a peek from the twizzle.org website.

You can charter Twizzle at $325,000 US dollars a week, but not til next year because it’s fully booked for this year. Holy cow!

Last night we had dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant Mai Thai and our meal was SO yummy. I wanted to walk back to the hotel but I forgot that the night before I had a little accident.

I’d come out of the bathroom and tripped over my sneakers and crashed into an open drawer and then took a header into the glass wall and I only ended up with a very purple and sore toe. My ring toe. So walking in heels wasn’t a good thing. I took my shoes off and decided I could spring for new stockings but even that was tough so we took a cab back.

Today we bought a new office chair for me. The one I have doesn’t have any oomph any more and I have to reach up to the keyboard. I’ll be glad when it’s delivered next week. I’ll tell you the rest of the story in another post.

Today is my birthday. Ok, so it means I’m “officially” old. The man I adore woke me up early and said, “Pack a bag and be ready by 9:30.”

So it’s 9:11am, I’m packed and ready to go but I have no idea where!

There are advantages to being old, it seems.

When Aristotle said:

If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.

Don’t rush to the conclusion that all relationships are a money pit that sucks the life right out of you because that’s not what he meant at all. That might be your personal situation but that wasn’t his.

If women didn’t exist, then men wouldn’t compete for the best one. They wouldn’t be looking for better paying jobs to attract a kinder, more attractive woman. They wouldn’t strive to learn more so they could keep up their end of the conversation with an intelligent woman.

So all you men out there, be glad we exist and love us and cherish us and then we’ll wait on you and spoil you in ways you never thought possible. However, we need to wooed first - and well.

This is for my pal, Speedcat Hollydale, who has a thing for chickens. I like chickens. I love having a small flock to eat scraps and provide eggs and poo for the garden, but I don’t love chickens the way Speedy does. Anyway, here’s a photo of Henrietta, just for Speedcat.

I have just spent the last hour amusing myself at www.virtualmodel.com. You create your own model either using a photo of your head or adjust their model. I tried putting my head on the model but it looked like a model with a pumpkin for a head so I went back to the site model. I was able to choose my skin color, hair style, widen my nose, make my lips thinner, make my mid-section fatter (think barrel on toothpicks), and voila!

Then comes the good part, there are clothes from Land’s End, Levi Strauss and Sears that you can try on. I think I tried them all on. The program adjusts the colors if you’ve already chosen a top or bottom. It’s certainly easier than trying things on to learn what looks shit on you and what might not look too bad at all.

Try it. Send me a link to your model.