Look round rocks! Lots of them.
Where's the ball?
Ahh I love those eyes and everything attached to them.
Lydie. One of our old roommates.
And Vincent, her partner. Both from France.
One of my good shots from the photoshoot at Mt Hutt a few weeks ago.
Me and my lady at rugby.
Wow. It has been two weeks since I have updated this here little blog. It's amazing how time flies when you are sleeping in and staying up late. Things are progressing nicely here. We have purchased a car finally. We have were blessed big time with a good, solid, if not exciting or sexy, car for a very good price. Our friend Adam is a panelbeater (English - bodyshop tech) and he also sells cars on the side. A friend of his was looking to reduce his five cars to four. It is a 1996 Toyota Corona. It's a model no longer in the US market. It's pretty 105% size Corolla. It has really low Kilometers and is spotless. We have named her Florence, Flo for short, because it is a bit of plain old grandma car. From what we can tell we got the car for about $2500-3000 less than market price. Not bad.We have already taken her to Dunedin and back, about 4 hours south of Christchurch. We visited an American couple that we met before they moved over here last August. They have a house really close to the ocean. We had a good time relaxing and catching up with them. We "hiked" into a very beautiful beach on the peninsula near Dunedin. Charisa almost had a run-in with a very large seal. She was bent down looking at some shells or rocks or something and heard a noise from the surf. She looked up and a seal was making its way onto the beach right at her. She had a bit of a scare and scared me as well as I heard here hollering at me to grab my camera. We have also moved in with our friend Bruce. It is so nice having a big house to ourselves, he is rarely there. My computer is all set up now too, so I can work on my photography. I have already had a couple of late nights working in Photoshop. And most importantly having the toilet down the hall. We miss our roommates though. Timmy, the German, leaves for Australia and eventually home tomorrow, so he is gone anyway. We have been getting along with Vincent and Lydie really well though, so we need to keep in touch with them. We all went to lunch today to say goodbye to Timmy. A little German restaurant opened a couple weeks ago and it is oh so good. The guy is from a city very close to where Timmy is from. Small world once again.On the job front. Charisa has one official offer from a company in Lincoln, a little university town outside of Christchurch. She is at a second interview right now with the School of Medicine. Once guy wants to hire her, quite fervently actually, but he needs to convince some folks to move some money around so they can. I have nearly talked to everybody I can talk to in the design biz. I have one pseudo offer. And they are two other places I have spoken with that have just had people leave, so they are deciding what to do. I have to admit I am getting a little discouraged, but I just keep reminding myself that God knows what He's doing. The pseudo offer is from a place that wants someone of my caliber, but is not willing to pay for it, not even close. The guy actually said he wouldn't take the job if it were him. Even if they did come up with more money, I didn't get the feeling that it was a very good place to work. He said they would like to relieve the workload of a gal and I could do that, but they weren't willing to do what it takes to do it. So I wasn't really impressed overall. I know it only takes one yes, but the nos are still hard to take. Please be praying that I get the right job with the right people and the right money. We are wanting to base our budget on me only working, so we can start making babies in the next year or so.
I realized I haven’t shared any of the funny things that we are needing to relearn down here. So here is a few.
- My new name is Maahk. (Mark pronounced by a New Zealander or Australian) I keep thinking people are saying Mike so I don’t answer right away.
- We went to go see MI3 at the movie theatre a couple weeks ago. We got out tickets and the dude taking our tickets told us which screen to go to as well as which seats we were in. Huh? They have assigned seating here. You can request a seat when you buy the tickets, but that is an interesting thing.
- They don’t have Subaru (Soo ba roo) cars here they have (S baroo). Hard to type out. They just have a short ‘s’ sound in the beginning, no ‘soo’. It’s a bigger deal than you think when you are shopping for cars.
- As stated earlier, a panelbeater is a guy who works on at a car body shop. It just struck me as a primitive sounding name for an occupation that is pretty high tech.
We went to our first live rugby match a couple weekends ago. Interesting game. It’s pretty much run with the ball, pass the ball, then get tackled and piled on. American football but no plays or strategy and lots of cauliflowered ears. I am not sure how they don’t have many more injuries. Most of the guys played the whole game – 80 minutes. If you substitute out you don’t come back in. They are tough guys for sure. Our home team actually won the league championship this past Sunday as well. Not a bad way to get started learning to enjoy a new sport. We watched the game at the home of one of the couples in the Bible study that meets where we now live. I learned more that night than from gal with the whiskey in her sock at the stadium two weeks before. The league is the Super 14. It is made up of teams from cities in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. The final game was so socked in with fog though that only about 25% of the people at the match could even see the field. TV coverage was just as hard to see, but it was rather funny. The commentators on TV had fun with it as well. Good game, what we could see at least.
For those of you who haven’t heard, Charisa is coming to Seattle this August with me. We decided we weren’t going to have this opportunity for a long time so it would be good to make the most of it. Thanks Nate and Anne. I am thinking we might have an informal get together somewhere, so we don’t try to run all over town seeing people. Oh here is a favour we need help with. Does anyone have or know of a car that we could borrow for the time we are in Seattle? I have a lot of errands to run to prep for the wedding and we do need to drive a bit to see our families. Even a car for part of the time would be great.
With my computer back in my company, I have really enjoyed getting back into my photography. I am still working on how to make that a money making venture. I am trying to develop my own style and figure out which type of photography I am best suited and talented at. I know wedding photography is one part of it, but I think I need to develop some other areas as well. There certainly is the scenery in NZ to photograph.
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