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a great day of partying today.  we had our own party to celebrate our first anniversary in new zealand, and invited some of our bestest friends from church round who have played their parts in helping us settle in.

the day started with me taking the girls to their orchestra lesson (and me sitting reading all the weekend paper in the car)

then we came home to help but i don’t think our helped was that helpful so we were given permission to go to a local cafe for garlic bread and toasties

we walked past the local tool hire place which is always a treat

and a bit later we were sent for plunger coffee which we got from a posh coffee place

kezia did lots of blowing of balloons

and jane did lots of cooking

(she didn’t cook these chocolate fush)

and of course people ‘brought a plate’ so we had a great selection of cakes etc

our friends the dunnings even brought this fab cake picturing jandals (sandals) made out of jaffas (kiwi version of chocolate m&ms, but slightly orangey)

some of the kids played with the playstation in unusual and experimental ways

fleur got a bit worried by my photography but bruce loved it

here’s warren who i go walking with

and his wife debbie

and here’s some laughing.  i had my portait lens on so i haven’t got big group shots i’m afraid

here’s buzz who i had lunch with in the week

we had a great time and i think our party people did too.  we’re so lucky to have such good friends here already

once we’d tidied up from our party we headed out again to go to a leaving party for our lovely friend eugene and his family.  we thought it was going to be a small part, but it was actually huge and involved a full sized pig and loads of Filipinos and people from our church.

i seemed to have failed to have taken a picture of eugene, but here’s Thomas who isn’t a filipino but is from our church (and in our life group)

and here are the shoes outside the front door which people waded through / over to get in (whilst slipping their own shoes off on the way in)

so we’re all quite partied out and ready for bed !

esther had the funnest day of all of us by spending a day playing cricket with some of the new zealand national ladies cricket team.

and kezia heard that she’s passed an audition at school to be in a concert with her chum.  she’d originally been told she hadn’t got through but it was a mistake so they had.  they are going to sing along to Abba’s Mama Mia.

from the amount of toys that were in our garage last night i think the church ladies group (and their children) came round today.  and i went out for lunch with my work chums to Joy Bong next to my office which was jolly good.

the girls had their swimming and we were then going to head back in to town to go to ‘Art in the Dark’ which is a light installation thing in a park near my office (which explains the sign about ) but we decided were all a bit too tired. so instead we stayed in and watched South Pacific which is jolly interesting seeing as we live in it.

i had lunch with Buzz under the cinema in town today (in the foodcourt).  we did good chatting involving some hearty laughter.  we might do a podcast sometime if we ever get ourselves organised and think of something interesting to say

jane had a good day at school. her chum Alex (who shares the other half of the full time job that jane is doing) came back for coffee after school.

and the girls had good days at school and big fun with bubbles this evening

after dinner i went for a healthy stomp along the creek (edge) with Warren.  here’s the mangroves which apparently have been around new zealand for millions of years.  and i got bitten by mozzies which shows summer is on its way.

now the southerly winds have passed (it’s good to pass wind) things are warming up and it was a lovely sunny day and 19 degrees when i got back from work which made it lovely to sit outside for our dinner.

if you like up to date statistics (and most kiwis do it seems) you can see some recent weather measurements here.  our nearest location is Auckland (Whenuapai) which is near the bottom of the page)

here’s the video (can you spot my invisible editing ?)

we did it.  we survived our first year !  (picture above from a few weeks back)

and we celebrated appropriately by all doing our usual everyday life things which i suppose proves we’re settled !

jane and i went to work and the girls went to school

i had a visit at work by three eastern rosellas

they walked along the wall outside my window and admired the views

before attacking each other

 

this evening we finished off kezia’s audition video – vicious chopping was required to get it down to 60 seconds.  i think it looks quite good despite all the edits !

 

so, onto year 2 …

i worked from home today so that meant i got to have a quick skype with jane’s parents which was nice.  other than that i had a busy day writing documents and doing conference calls.

jane had her day off today so did coffees with friends and went in search of her summer wardrobe.

the girls had good days at school and then had their tennis lessons.  esther has moved up a group as they are banded by age.

Then kezia and i shot a video for her to enter this.  one of the benefits of living in a country with a small population is that the odds of winning competitions is better so well worth entering !

i’m not sure we’ve got it cracked yet and i’m going to have to be a bit more ruthless with editing to keep it to the required length.

jane is having a movie evening and is (finally) watching the Piano, whilst i’m off to bed cuz i still feel a bit crook.  see yas

 

a year ago today we left the UK for our flight to new zealand.  time has flow-en by.  Wednesday will be our New Zealanniversary

the girls were back at school today and esther was particularly excited to show her friends her glasses, even going to some length to distract one friend whilst she put them on.  it causes the friend to do a classic double take with excitement and esther was very pleased with the reaction !

i didn’t get a debrief from kezia as i was feeling a bit crook when i got home to went straight to bed and have only just woken up.  i suspect it’s something i’ve eaten as my food intake was pretty poor today.

and the weather at the moment. oof, i tell you.  chully.  it was quite cold when we arrived last year, i think it’s quite common for the weather to make a ‘bumpy’ landing to summer warmth. 

so that’s that.

jane and i woke up in the wrong place this morning having slept in the spare bedroom.  esther’s going to use it tonight and jane and i are back to our usual quarters.

anyway, after church we did a bit of tidying about and had lunch

then we decided to go for a walk with the girls taking their cycles

it turned in to a bit of an off road adventure

but we found some cool little tracks some of which we’ll explore further without bikes

 

we also did a few geocaches including this one hidden in the flax

our walk also took us by the north harbour stadium which is quite close to where we live.  you can hear cheers and singing (and a single vuvuzela last night) when there’s a match on.

today it was ruby and last night the national football team were playing.  we went to neither unfortunately.

but it was nice to find some hidden corners of our ‘village’ which is now mini town size

here’s the local senior school which is near where we live

we had an explore round that too and it looked quite funky from behind

then this evening we had the andersons round for a lovely colonial roast beef sunday dinner cooked up by the lovely jane (my wife)

here’s our exploring walk.  we live in the blob near the bottom left.  the walk was about 7.5km if you are interested fact fans.  (the stadium is the white semi circle middlish right, and the waterfall at the top of the picture is near the end of the detour top left.

we didn’t watch the Piano last night as we were too tired so i can’t review that for you i’m afraid.

back to school for the girls tomorrow.  life is about to get real busy again !

it was a rare saturday morning where non of us needed to wake up early for anything

so it was a bit of a shame that we had a bed delivered at 7am !

but seeing as we were all awake we went to takapuna for breakfast in the posh waterfront cafe for some posh people watching

and then we went for a walk along the beach and back

the tide was in which made for some excitement as we tried to avoid getting out shoes wet at some points (everyone except kezia who was being a proper kiwi by not wearing shoes)

along the way we saw abandoned shoes

 

and a few dead fishes (fushes)

 

quite a few starfish freshly washed up

and jane’s friend fleur

the rest of the day was spent doing our tax returns (although i would chose the weekend when the hrmc’s website is undergoing maintenance so i can’t submit our forms)

esther went off with three of her school chums to the local hotpools for swimming fun

 

kezia and i constructed the new bed and then kezia went crazy golfing with jane

now, if you are one of our impending visitors you can have your beds in a number of configurations.  you can have it as a wide double bed (i think the right half of the bed is big enough for two) with a little gap either side to slide in. 

Or you can have it like this against the right hand wall so one person gets a proper amount of space on their side

or you can go for the more spacious/accessible twin bed approach and we’ll put a bedside table in the middle.  let us know your preference (by email rather than in the comments)

and i noticed a picture of kezia mounted on to cardboard has been jammed in to the printer to stop paper splurging out on the to the floor.

jane and i are now going to watch the piano which was filmed near where live.  good night.

the weather picked up for our last day so we headed out of town to walk to the seal colony by Red Rocks where you can see the mountains at the top of the south islands across the cook straight.

 

when we started the walk it as a bit cold and windy making putting up hoods a necessity but also quite tricky

the walk goes round the edge of the coast along a road which can be used by 4 wheel drive cars for fun and adventure

you weren’t allowed to shoot people walking dogs which seemed fair enough to me

the views were quite amazing

here’s a mobile home which has been well braced to prevent it blowing away

these are the red rocks.  they are called red rocks because they are both rocks.  and red.

here’s another bach (holiday home) braced against a rock

this is a bird

this rock is called devil’s gate and is the location of a seal colony

 

it’s actually quite a sad colony as they are all males who failed to find a mater the season before

 

so they lie there lamenting lost love

and occasionally blubber about

we sat there for yonks and watched them whilst eating our sandwiches

then we headed back

here’s a look back towards the south island (which is actually to the west of this bit of the north island)

here is kezia’s tongue

we then went to a nearby cafe for afternoon tea

and then we drove up to the nearby wind turbine

 

the turbine backed on to Zealandia where we visited earlier in the week.  and from the top of the hill we could see all the places we’d visited in town and on the island trip.

 

and watched planes taking off from the airport

we had an hour spare before we had to get the hire car back so we stopped off at the botanical garden and visited the play park

it looked really good, but wasn’t that great according to our test pilots

after getting a lift back home from the car hire place we quickly packed our bags then headed out for dinner at the Hog’s Breath Cafe with our friends Janine, James and Amy from church (and Amy is one of Esther’s best friends at school).  They were down visiting Wellington for the weekend so it was great to catch up with them

 

friday night was really noisy in the street outside our motel so we didn’t get much sleep but that was ok as we were up at some silly time the next morning to get our taxi back home to Auckland.  In fact we were up so early there were still people rolling home from nights out as we stood outside with our suitcases !

bonus information: 

this cd was in our hire car CD player.  it contained a number of great tracks which we knew already (black rebel motorcycle club, blondie, arcade fire, mumford and sons, gorillaz, blur) and a number we didn’t know which were also great.    it turned out it belonged to the person who cleaned the car who was missing it.  i’d half hoped they would have said we could keep it.  but it was a nice soundtrack to the holiday

and if there’s anything that sums up wellington weather it’s this – a busted car windscreen wiper on a dry ground.  plenty of much rain and wind mixed with enough lovely sunshine.

hoorah for wellington.  we shall be back …