Saturday, Tim and I went to the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary, which is especially cool, in that it’s right smack in Wellington — well, on the edge of one of the big suburbs, anyway. They came up with a special predator-and-vermin-proof fence to keep out all the rats and possums and stoats and stuff, so they have super rare birds and tuatara and weta and things you’d only otherwise get to see on one of the off-shore islands. The treat for me this time around were the saddlebacks. I’d never seen one before, and we saw heaps of them, quite close. Like a lot of New Zealand’s rare birds, they are not it the least bit shy (part of how they got to be so rare).

Sunday, we had a billion people over (okay, well, fifteen or so) to watch Mulan, eat stir fry, and play Mah Jong. Although due to an eBay special a few years back, I own no less than three Mah Jong sets (although not one of the vintage bone-and-bamboo ones I really covet), I yet embarrassed myself by not actually remembering how to play. I found some super simplified rules at Sloperama, the online home of everything you ever wanted to know about Mah Jong (and also, incidentally, hanafuda, which other former Back Smokerites may also remember fondly), and we muddled through. I’ve since found a more thorough, and yet still quite straightforward set of rules at Masters Games, and have printed these out to use next time.