A post from Charisa!

Below is a post written by my dear Charisa. I figured instead my writing a blog entry and her sending out an email, let's combine forces.

Kiwis like to take long holidays, so our company along with most of the country shut down from Dec 22 nd and started back Jan 8th. The bummer was that you had to take 6 of your annual leave days during that time. The standard amount of annual leave (vacation) a year is 20 days.

The summer here is currently looking very similar to fall/winter in Seattle. Unfortunately for our company, Mark's sister Teresa and my parents, we didn't have the nice warm summer days over the Christmas holidays that everyone was hoping for. We had the log burner going most of the time and my dad was trying to figure how to equip our house with central heating after he had been there an hour! Sigh. We did get to take everyone to the beach Christmas morning and there were a couple days of o.k. weather that were used to explore the countryside. We had a good time indoors reading, catching up, and going to a couple of movies. It was a good break and great to have family with us for our first Christmas across the world. Of course now that we are all back at work again, the weather is warming up and turning beautiful….sigh!



My parents were in New Zealand for about 5 weeks for which my father fly-fished with great perseverance. Apparently the locals gave him high marks for being the last man standing (fishing) in the wind and the rain. Poor dad! For one week of their stay, we rented a caravan for and tootled around the West Coast of the south island. We had excellent weather there and the scenery was stunning. We discovered that Henry does not get car sick, even under the greatest provocation (the passes are VERY curvy, steep, and have very narrow lanes with one lane bridges), and Mark drove so that he didn't get sick either. We also brought back a few reminders with us, mostly in the form of bites. Sand flies are the bane of existence on the west coast. They are a little bug that likes to take little nibbles of you. The bites then wait 24 hours before itching like crazy and driving you batty for a week. Fun times!

At work, things are starting to settle a little bit. The former Canesis staff returned from the holidays as AgResearch employees, though without access to much of anything. After two weeks, most of us have new computers, email and phone numbers. I also didn't loose any data as far as I can tell, so I consider the transition to be successful. Mark is also settling in at his new position at an advertising company called Time Zone 1. He is currently free lancing there and has the opportunity to move into a full time position. Yeah!!

Well take care and continue the communication. We love to hear from everyone.