It was so cold this week that even the water for washing windscreens at the petrol station was frozen.
I thought that was why there were so many frozen faces around the Basin, but I have just been informed it's because the wonder doctor from Auckland has been down. She can give you pills to make you live until you are 100, and injections to make you look as if you are only a quarter of that.
When I was at school, we were very mean about teachers who dressed as if they thought they were our age. My friend once passed me a note in class which she had abbreviated (or maybe misspelt) to "Mutt dressed as lab", and it was a shame that the teacher in question knew exactly what it stood for and gave her a lengthy series of detentions.
Age is all relative, and when I went to see Penny Railton in Christchurch, we were just sitting chatting as the nurse came into her room.
The nurse apologised for interrupting and Penny said: "Do you know? I've known this child since the day she was born". I could see the nurse, who was about 30, looking round the room for a child instead of the middle-aged frump in the chair.
But I'm not going to be middle-aged for much longer. This is my last week of being at the halfway mark (well, I hope it's halfway). After that, I'm heading for the days of incontinence and kleptomania and my darling is very worried about the thought of his-once-young wife turning into a 50-year-old one.
One thing I am going to do once I am 50 is have an afternoon nap every day. I've been in training for some years now just to be ready for this happy stage in my life, and I can tell you that I am really good at it.
Life here is so great, whatever your age, that age hardly matters. I walked up Tobins Track yesterday in brilliant sunshine and sat at the top in bright white snow under a blindingly blue Wakatipu winter sky.
It's hard to believe a place so beautiful even exists, and so easy to take for granted.
We're really lucky with all the events here as well.
Nadene Milne asked me to come to a morning tea to meet Elizabeth Thomson and listen to a talk about contemporary New Zealand art.
Elizabeth is the artist who does those beautiful, intricate bronze moths and trees and flowers and mountaineers and probably lots of other things I don't know about.
Nadene then took us round a private collection of some magnificent New Zealand work and explained the thinking behind it.
Tracy Geek really excelled in her role as kitchen Doris and handed round the cakes and sarnies and sticky buns beautifully.
I have to tell you - sticky buns have come to town. This is nothing short of a disaster. We used to drive to Cromwell on summer Sundays for Provisions' SBs, but now they have moved to one of Arrowtown's old miners' cottages and are available 365 days a year.
Except for those hideous days when greedy people have got there first and bought them all already.
If you know someone who is very sad, a sticky bun will be just the thing to cheer them up. Or a lamington. Or gingerbread ...
Ali Evers-Swindell, who was planning to be sad after having some teeth out, got the gingerbread.
When I dropped it into her, she was still completely full of happy drugs - the kind Jamie Hopkirk gives his more nervous patients.
She was so far from sad that I am not sure what the word is for that state! I nearly took the gingerbread away again to give to someone more deserving.
And still on matters dental - a very happy birthday to the couple who make so many local people smile so beautifully, orthodontist Phil Sanford and his nurse and wife Joyce, who had a shared birthday and housewarming party at the weekend.
Love Child.
The daughter of ballerina Ricki Soma and British historian John Julius Norwich, Allegra was raised by her mother's estranged husband, film director John Huston, after her mother died while Allegra was a child.
The biography of her family and her upbringing is painfully honest and you cannot help but feel for this little girl who just aches to belong somewhere to someone.
All she wants is to be normal and live a normal life like other people, but hers keeps changing and everything she thinks she knows about herself keeps changing as well.
This book is beautifully constructed and full of stories of the movie stars and writers and singers who littered her family history. The picture she paints of her glamorous-sounding life are riveting - she is very brave to have written about herself like this, and the praise she has received for it is well deserved.
Enjoy the weekend and keep those book recommendations rolling in.
