Sweet Mother’s Kitchen, 5 Courtenay Place, Wellington What it is: A cheap and cheerful New Orlean’s themed cafe in Wellington.  Also one of my favourite places to eat out.  And I’m only into good food, so that says a lot. The good: Sooooooo yummy!  Everything is delicious, and it is so hard to pick what to eat that I always end up picking too many things and leaving in a food coma. Some of my favourites: beignets, curly fries, pies (of all varieties), breakfast burritos, tacos, quesadillas. Also, the tea.  It comes in tea pots.  With wool tea cozies knitted by Sweet Mother herself (the restaurant owner’s mother).  And mis-matched real bone china teacups and saucers.  How could you not love it!?! The prices are also fabulous.  Compared to the other pseudo Latin/Southern American food in Wellington they are giving the stuff away.  And it’s much better than most of the other places, which are ridiculously overrated (yeah, I’m talking about you Flying Burrito Brothers!) The bad: SMK is so popular that they don’t take …

I’ve been meaning to get my hair cut for ages, and just haven’t gotten around to it.  I like having shorter hair in the summer, and then letting it grow out in the autumn, so that I have lots of hair to pull back and pin up in the winter. On Tuesday I went to my fantastic, lovely hairdresser, and he spent almost 2 hours cutting 10 inches off my hair, giving it slight layers, velcro-rolling it, and styling it. At the end of this all, I looked AMAZING.  Like I’d just stepped off the set of Mad Men. And then I stepped out of the salon into the Wellington wind, and that was the end of my carefully coiffed hair. A bit of re-styling at home made it look great (if not quite as fabulous) again, and I set up my camera for a few quick shots with the timer. Without any help from me, the camera overexposed to various degrees, and I got some fantastic shots.  You would never know that they were …