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i was wondering if we’d have some kind of xmas lunch at work for the people who sit in my area at work, but it didn’t look like anything had been organised.  but instead, in a typical kiwi “she’ll be right” kind of way we all ended up going out for a festive pizza.  which wasn’t quite like the xmas fish restaurant i attended for the last 7 years in London, but put up a good showing.

we also have an impromptu ‘morning tea’ today with cake which a colleague observed was “stucky but noys” (sticky but nice)

whilst i was at work jane and the girls seem to have spent the day at the beach.  or rather beaches plural as they did two beaches with two separate groups of friends morning and afternoon.  then it was the girls swimming lessons, before heading back home.

that’s about it us for today.

tomorrow we’re heading up to Warkworth for a mooch.  that’ll be the furthest north we’ll have travelled on mainland NZ.  exciting stuff ‘ey ?

hope you are all enjoying your british snowiness (ignore if you aren’t being snowed on).

Hi. Well it was the last day of term here and the girls had a half day. Just as well as they had an appointment with Santa at Dave’s office. We managed to get there fine by going on 2 buses. All the children of the department had been invited.

Here are the girls receiving their goodie bags.

This is Dave’s colleague Simon with an inflatable santa.

Then we went to see the Telecom tree. Here it is. Some might say it is  not actually a tree. Anyway, if you went into the phone box below you could phone Santa. Then you had to press “A” and then look upwards.

You could see your message going up the lights to Santa. May have been more effective in the dark.

You could sit on a funky outdoor beanbag underneath the tree.

We are still showing the flat people from America a good time. Here they are by the tree and in front of the sky tower.

We heard there was snow in blighty today, hoorah!

December is a weird time – it was always madly busy back in the UK with christmas concerts and wotnot. generally people didn’t go away at christmas in the UK, but everyone does here, so that’s another stressy thing to add in to the festive mix.

but imagine if you were also having all your summer term activities at the same time, like school sports days, and end of year activities like music concerts for orchestras etc.  luckily we’ve not had the latter this year as the girls don’t start up violin again until next year.

However, it’s also the end of the school academic year which runs February to December here. Which means school reports and the legendary prizegiving evenings. we can report that the girls reports were excellent.  which we were very pleased with.  hoorah

it was esther’s turn for prize giving tonight and i came home early so i wouldn’t miss anything.  it started at 6.30 in a hot stuffy sports hall where the doors were kept firmly shut so the aircon would work properly.  although i don’t think anyone had told the aircon that – it was concentrating more on the ‘con’ part of its name and providing no ‘air’.

what followed was 90 minutes of the sort of entertainment which only a parent could endure.  apparently it wasn’t as random as kezia’s one, but it still felt like a very long time. 

the problem with these communal school activities is each parent has an obligation to attend the whole thing, but they only have an interest in the 15 seconds when their son/daughter is doing something.

esther’s star moment was being formally ‘introduced’ as one of the 2010 Student Leaders which is a great honour apparently.  she’s got a badge and everything.

having been rather scathing about the evening, it was a really nice send off for the year 6 students, thanking them for their contribution to the school and wishing them well in the future.  it’ll be funny seeing esther ‘despatched’ this time next year …

tomorrow the girls break up for the summer holiday at lunchtime then come in to my office for some santa related shenanigans.  which will probably involve one of my colleagues dressing up as santa.  something he’ll do at the drop of a hat. especially a red one with a white bobble at the top.

I don’t usually do this, but here’s the talk from our church on Sunday.

It’s worth listening to just for our pastor’s kiwi drawl.  but also a very fresh way of thinking about the Christmas story:   Christmas: God in a Cave

The picture above is from our postbox.  this new ‘no junk mail please’ sign seems to be doing the trick.  we get so much stuff shoved in it that by the end of the week the back door won’t shut any more !  Hopefully that will also keep those pesky cockroaches out of there !

here’s a comedy thing.  i saw a tweet from my friend andy shudall this morning retweeting something one of his friends posted about a camera he’d found in the road.  Apparently the camera had fallen off a car roof further down the road in front of them.

(sweet)

the finder, being a thoroughly decent, as well as modern, man decided to test New Zealand’s famously small world and the 6 degrees of separation thing, and posted a picture from it via twitter and invited people to contact him if they recognised the people in the camera, so they could reunite him with the camera.

i didn’t bother to look at the photo which is a shame, because i work with the chap in the photo !  By the time i did look at it, he’d been contacted and the camera reunited.

And on Friday night at my office party i was talking to the person i sit next to at work and he revealed his mum is the marvellous Marge who picked us up from the airport when we landed in Auckland last Easter on our exploration tour.

so there you go, it really is a very small world over here and 2 degrees of separation is the real thing !

church this morning was very good.  I’ll post a link to the talk when it’s on their website – it’s good christmas listening.  we had crazy cakes after church as the church youth were fund raising for something or other.  Then we went back to some new friends from church’s house and had a great couple of hours laughing and swapping stories.

esther got this hat at her church club celebration, and she’s worn it all day long so far.  here she is at lunchtime and this afternoon on the trampoline.  it looks like she’s punching kezia in the face, but she’s not.

after yet more box sorting and guitar survival checking, we went to a nearby village to a christmas market which was very busy buy very good.  I was impressed with this sign shoved in to the open neck of a bollard.  i bought a new hat. no photos yet though

this evening we watched The Goodies and Piha Rescue (reality series about some lifeguards at one of our local beaches).

these jolly things were on sale at the Coatesville market – they are bits of corrugated metal roof painted up and stuck on a stick.  very popular in new zealand i believe.

 

Although we don’t seem to have done very much this weekend, we’re all absolutely exhausted !

first a little catch up on yesterday.  the day started with a company meeting in auckland which was actually very good.  then i whizzed across the road to meet Andy Shudall.  andy works for tscf and is a friend of the Em and Dave Bish for those that know them.

we met under the 20 metre santa.  i had some wigs in my bag which i was thinking of wearing when we met, but thought that might be a bit elaborate for a first meeting, so stuck to my normal hair !  We had a great time and he furnished me with a fantastic muffin and a bowl of hot chocolate.  We hope to meet up with andy and his family in the new year for some jolly times

late afternoon there was a general downing of tools at the office as people got dressed for the wild west theme xmas party.  this was the scene in our office before the taxis arrive.  not too dissimilar to a usual friday afternoon to be honest.

here’s what i needed up looking like as a ‘Westie’ (the slang for those who live on the west side of Auckland)

Our CEO played his electric guitar along with one of the bands at one point. He was also in demand for photos, as seen here with a normal sized cowboy and a chap wearing a horse’s head

i got home around midnight so that wasn’t too bad.

we’ve spent most of today working through packing boxes.  jane’s done great works in the garage whilst i’ve been trying to sort through various of my own boxes. 

Sometime this afteroon the girls went to play with some friends and had a great time

And I know some of you have been concerned about our christmas candles.  As planned they arrived safely via the container (rather than as melted or broken shrapnel in our bulging cases) and we’re rapidly progressing downwards

This evening we went to the cinema to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in 3D which we all really enjoyed.  we only decided to go 20 minutes before it started but being so close we arrived on time, had really big seats, popcorn, drinks and chocs.  It’s a really nice cinema with good visibility so we’ll be back !

tomorrow promised church, more boxes, and perhaps a trip to a twilight market.  see ya

Kezia took all these photos at the Kumeu Santa parade which she went to with jane and esther

 

Hello! This week I have experienced the Kiwi phenomenon of a school prize giving. It was Kezia’s and was the year 3 and 4 children. It started off quite well, with the national anthem.We all had to sing this. I still don’t know the words, especially not to the Maori verse. But then it went downhill.

Well, the bits when they gave the prizes out were ok, but each class also had to do a turn and what most of the classes did was a hip hop dance to a cd. They sang along as well. I didn’t think that this:

• showed  or celebrated what the children had learnt or achieved over the year
• showed what they could achieve at all
• justified the enormous amounts of time spent practising it.

My kiwi friends had to give me a de-brief afterwards.

However, Kezia did enjoy dancing around, so that was good. Esther’s is next week.

nothing too exciting to report today for me at least.  morning in the office then the afternoon downtown at my writing course. i decided to walk the 20 minutes to the training location which was all downhill but it took 30 minutes because crossing NZ roads is a very slow affair as a pedestrian.  it was the same in Australia. 

the problem is the the traffic light phasing which is so slow that it takes an age before pedestrians can cross.  and then you often get people turning left at traffic lights because it’s green even when the pedestrian crossing is showing the green man (hence the sign above reminding car drivers that ‘peds’ have priority).

now, in london I wouldn’t care and would just throw myself across london roads.  but everyone does it there and cars (generally) stop.  by the way, if you are a youngster reading it, that’s a very bad idea.  And it’s even more of a silly idea in new zealand as kiwis are very compliant and therefore cars don’t expect people to be in the middle of the road and drive wildly down their wide roads to reflect that fact.

the only good thing about using pedestrian crossing is the nice sound it makes when the green man pops up.  that already has a pavlovian effect on me as i feel my body jerk as my legs start to set off whenever i hear its distinctive ‘kerpoing’ noise.

 

meanwhile jane went to kezia’s prize giving which sounded like it was children singing along to CDs and vaguely doing dance routines to varying standards.  i’m not sure she was completely impressed !  It’s Esther’s next week which will be a bit different i think.  it’s in the evening so i should be able to go too.

tomorrow i’m meeting a chap who works for the UCCF in Auckland.  He’s a friend of a friend and we’ve only met virtually so far.  He played a big part in ‘praying us in’ to New Zealand, so i’m looking forward to meeting him in real life for the first time.  We’re meeting under the santa in the picture …

see ya