Sunny days and kiwi tunes

Hello! Thanks so much to everyone for the birthday wishes, I had a lovely weekend! The weather in Vancouver has been amazing for the past couple of days so we made the most of it by spending as much of our time outside as possible. I had my first iced chai of the season, wore a skirt with bare legs (and no doubt blinded some people, hello whiteness!), went to a funny little jumble sale and ate delicious Belgian chocolate cake (for breakfast today, also). It was a pretty low key weekend as I realise now how I am friends with a lot of very busy people and getting them all together is damn near impossible, but it was kind of fun to spread it all out over brunches and cocktail dates (raspberry vodka and lemonade, so delicious). It's funny, I'll admit that I did let myself get a little bummed that I didn't have a big fancy party....until I remembered I don't at all feel comfortable at big fancy parties, especially not if the focus was to be all on me!

I bought myself some new shoes as a bit of a birthday present to myself, the black Toms I'd been thinking of. Definitely not a super glamorous shoe purchase but cute nonetheless and so comfy. Oh man, if you're in search of a comfy shoe for general walking about then look no further. I'm completely smitten. I'm really terrible for buying cheap and easy shoes but with the amount of walking I do with the kids and not being a driver I really needed something that was going to hold up a bit better than a pair of flats from Army & Navy (I did say cheap and easy) and I'm pretty sure these are going to do the trick! I will say that it might pay to try some on before buying these as they do fit a little narrow for those of us blessed with wide feet, but they've worn in so quickly and now fit my feet perfectly. Hooray!

It's New Zealand Music Month at the moment, so I wanted to make a kiwi mixtape for you all. It was much harder than I imagined! I knew NZ music might be a little obscure but I didn't expect things to be so easy to find, and that it would be pretty much lady free. While there are a lot of amazing female musicians from back home it was nearly impossible to find them online, and when I looked at Nature's Best, a compilation of the top NZ songs of all time, there were only 5 female tracks in the top 30! Shocking. I've decided to split it up into two mixes, one being the oldies and the kiwi music I grew up on, and the second being some of the more recent stuff to come out of the New Zealand music scene. I've tried to include as many ladies as I could, but I sadly couldn't find this gem that I enjoyed dancing around to as a young gal, or this one with the extremely questionable lyrics but secretly fantastic video clip (I was obsessed with their outfits), or even this one where none of them look at all like rock stars, but man could Jenny Morris sing.

Anyway, here it is. Enjoy!