Life is an endless cycle of happy and sad, birthdays and deathdays, hot and cold weather. This week has had all of them.
Goodbye to dear Yvonne Thompson and Peg Newman, two lovely mothers and grandmothers. They've both been so kind, not just to my family, but to everyone lucky enough to know them.
It's always so sad when great old locals go "up north", as one of my friends says of death. But death means funerals and sad though they are, funerals can be such happy occasions.
Everyone loved Yvonne and had come from miles away to say goodbye.
Daughter Rosalie had organised such a great funeral for her out at Moonlight Stables with absolutely everyone who'd ever been at Arrowtown Primary School (or so it seemed) that we were all yakking away 19 to the dozen and enjoying ourselves so much that we somehow bullied John Douglas into organising a school reunion. I can't wait.
And I'll bet Peg's funeral is the same - the Newmans have all always been such staunch and supportive members of almost every community group I can think of.
Families like these are what make great communities.
Even without Peg and Yvonne any more, we have got so much talent and energy and enthusiasm here.
I tried begging, borrowing and stealing to get a ticket to the Wearable Arts Show.
Luckily, begging worked and I ended up with a primo seat - thanks so much, Jenny!The sponsors were Delvine Wallace and Bruce Gibbs, of Queenstown's Untouched World shop, and Arrowtown's Wallace and Gibbs shops.
Bruce was looking pretty nervous as their beautiful daughter Elizabeth sauntered down the catwalk wearing nothing but hair in funny places.
It sounds like a Brazilian gone wrong, but it looked amazing.
And none of the hair fell off - phew.
Bruce got even more nervous as naughty, sexy singer Charlotte Graf dressed in just men's ties lured him onstage and teased him singing Hey, Big Spender - a fitting song for their very generous sponsorship.
The outfits are all going to be on display at the museum soon, so you can have a close up look at them.
Yvonne's farewell service leaflet featured a glamorous shot of her in '60s skigear - everyone misses the colour and craziness of the '60s, and if you are missing it too much, help is at hand.
Artist Roy Mears has been doing portraits of the famous and infamous of the '60s (he knew a lot of them from his hugely successful career in advertising in the UK). There's Oliver Reed and Paul McCartney, the Kray twins and many, many more.
The portraits are all going to be hanging in Provisions in Arrowtown from next week so get along for a nostalgic get-together with these old friends.
It's another one of those birthday weeks, when it seems everyone has one.
We had Cath Hanna's 60th at Dorothy Browns last week and it's Max Guthrie's nearly 60th on Saturday.
Happy birthday everyone, as well as no fewer than three of my nephews who will all probably have grown beards by the time I get round to sending them presents.
Well, maybe not Oscar, who's just turning 5 ...
And the leaves have stopped turning different colours and are just turning into brown heaps.
Those mean and nasty southerlies are putting paid to the last warm minutes of autumn.
My life has been an endless cycle, or rather one of endless cycling (this week at least) as my fit and forceful friends persuaded me to join them.
First, we did a photo shoot on parts of the new cycleway, which is looking like being one of the greatest attractions of the whole Wakatipu, and the next day we entered the Fat Tyre fundraiser, which had us cycling, golfing and claybird shooting.
To finish off, we cycled up the zigzag and down Tobins' Track.
Honestly!! Me!! The world's most useless cyclist. Even I still can't believe it.
If that new cycleway is even getting blobby, cyclephobic me doing something like that, just watch Wakatipu - everyone will soon be on their bikes.
How will we have time for reading?
My house is so untidy at the moment that I had lost Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick in the chaos for a couple of weeks.
It's nonfiction and follows the lives of six North Koreans who have managed to escape the living hell of life under the insane regime.
It's very, very frightening to learn how hard life is for these people who are being denied access to any information other than the propaganda they are fed.
While we are cycling and watching wearable arts shows and waiting impatiently for the snow to fall and Fleur Caulton's brand new restaurant Rata to open (tonight is the opening party - yippee!), people in North Korea are starving and dying of hunger or of shame as they have to make unbearable choices about who will get the tiny amounts of food available.
Read it and never moan about anything again.
