Exploring the Land of the Long White Cloud

BOOM, I showed you New Zealand Transport. If its on the road, I'll drive it.

Well there comes a time in one's life when his wife has produced hundreds of blog entries and he has done nothing.  Much to some surprise I don't even read them most of the time. Hey I'm here doing it, so I know about what's going on. Maybe when i am 60 I will look back and read them, and think how weird the stuff we did was. Don't worry I'm not going to ramble on like Katherine does with all the writing and detailed things that have happened. I am going to do one better. Pictures .  It is said that, "pictures say a thousand words."  Be prepared to have thousands and thousands of words thrown at you. And a caption or two under them. Won't be seeing Temps like this for a while Or have your eyelashes freeze shut So we decided to have a round of Golf for 8 bucks to warm up. This is true Not so true for travel like this. First one to see the sky tower in my blog post. A warm hut after 15km o...

I am quite excited to be living somewhere that celebrates National Alpaca Day! I was quite disappointed that I forgot about it and went golfing that day instead. Alpaca farmers open up their farms to the public that day (if they wish) and you can go visit them. If you don't know what an alpaca is, they are related to llamas and their wool is finer than sheep's wool so as far as I know they are usually raised for wool and not meat. They are quirky things and we had a chance to get closer to them back in March 2011 while staying at a B&B that kept two as pets. With a buck-toothed grin they would greet us as we approached with food, making little curious staccato groaning noises. Meeting those two endeared us to the species and the trouble is that we didn't even take photos of them! So I was looking forward to finding new alpacas to befriend but alas, we'll have to wait until the first Sunday of May next year. We did get a visit in with a trio of alpacas at the zoo las...

As another week creeps by I often forget that though this endless inertia feels like it's been going on for ages, to be fair it's only been about 5 weeks for real. (Counting from when we moved into our place.) So I should be cutting myself some slack as far as getting a job pressures are concerned. I mean if I wanted to, I could be a police officer in Western Australia. The Y was running a beep test on Friday night and although I had never heard of it, Dustin was well aware of it. Given that we are trying to be compulsive joiners, we signed up. Only after we signed up did I find out that it meant a 20 metre shuttle run test! He had done it once back when he played rugby in school but it is used as a standard measure of fitness. Basically you just run back and forth while a pre-set beep sounds. The interval between beeps decreases so that you have to run faster incrementally. There were 4 of us running and - spurred on by the thought "I can't let my wife beat me!...

I was making my afternoon tea today and decided to take out the camera. I'm such a food lover but haven't really started in on food blogging. So thought I'd take it for a spin. I was somewhat inspired to make my latte after finally deciding to apply for a barista position. It was a job I loved doing many years ago and have since developed a taste for coffee. At the time, I mostly drank tea or maybe only sickly sweet espresso creations that really didn't relate to the rich, beautiful thing that is espresso. However, I guess adding anything much other than milk or sugar completely changes espresso. After purchasing a lackluster chai tea brand (it's not spicy enough!) we decided we'd try to make chai tea from scratch. Thanks to Crunch Betty for this guide:  http://www.crunchybetty.com/the-epic-guide-to-making-your-own-chai-tea .Compiling ingredients meant a trip down to the Indian produce shop in town where the woman behind the till advised that she just uses c...

I'll get the bad news out of the way, I didn't get the hospital job. I called on Friday to ask and the manager said something along the lines of, "We had some unusually good candidates with some unusually specifically-related experience." So, although I was a "strong candidate" I was not selected. Take this as sour grapes or honesty - I do think it would have been a job that would have bored me quickly. So it's probably not the worst thing. Dustin had success on Friday though. Fed up with waiting on other jobs, he decided to apply within the construction industry. He dropped off a CV to a big local company and received a call not more than ten minutes later asking if he was still looking for work. Good thing he reined in his cheekiness and just said yes. They asked him to an interview on Monday. Later that day he received another call from a smaller company that he had applied for the day before and booked another interview for Monday. Then he got a re...

Would you like to know what's been keeping us sane and laughing these days? Yep this little football. We found it one night, lost in the gutter, a couple weeks back while we were walking to get milk. At first Dustin chided me for picking it up - his story was that some poor child was missing the ball. I reckon he's on board with "finders keepers" now. You see, due to it's small size and nerf-like foam, it can be thrown around willy nilly without injury! Up until this morning I would also have said without damage but after Dustin's patented ceiling-deflection shot.... Oops.. there goes the light fixture. Good thing it's just plastic. Anyways, it's a daily no-mercy battle. Whoever finds the ball takes the first throw and it's ongoing. Because we have the maturity of 8 year olds, one throw turns into a serious show of skill. Sometimes the dodging and faking and aiming and throwing and giggling goes on for fifteen minutes before it subside...