1000 awesome things

I love this website. Anytime you feel low, check this site out and remember that bad days don't last! There is always something good in your day!

http://1000awesomethings.com/

I love this lady...

My brother introduced me to this video. How great!

Whole lotta shakin going on...

So, yep. We are fine. Nice to see so many people worried about us way down here. Nobody takes the term earthquake or tsunami lightly ever since 2004 eh?
Bryce and I were watching TV when we felt a massive jolt (biggest I've felt since being here) and then some shaking afterwards. It was all over within about 10 seconds though. Eddie sure wasn't happy about it. She jumped up real quickly (from being lazy in front of the fire) and her ears were pinned back with a thick tail.
It turns out to have been a 7.8 earthquake down in Fiordland, which is to the west of Invercargill (the southern most city in NZ). They have been having lots of aftershocks but not too much damage. One guy said that he was sleeping in his campervan and thought some young punks were standing outside shaking his caravan. He was yelling at them and when the shaking stopped, he realised after when checking outside that there had been no one around! Some other guy said he was in the bath and the water was sloshing from side to side!

This is a seismic graph from last night that shows a big shake on the drum at almost 10 pm. The red area means that the shaking was so much that they block it off from shaking too much and wrecking the rest of the graph. As you can see, the shaking has continued since. We haven't felt anything else since though, up here in the BIG P!

The reason why I ride cautiously...

Cyclocross

Bryce rode in a Cyclocross race this past weekend. Pretty cool race; ride a short 1km (or so) lap around a park, with lots of little descents and climbs, and some barriers that you need to get off your bike and jump over. Seems inconvenient but a fun challenging race. Especially for the spectators who were able to see the riders several times on each lap. Carl and Denise (and their wee one Liam) were here for the weekend too, so Bryce had lots of support as he rode 16 laps in 45 minutes. He was not too pleased about the mistake he made by sprinting to finish in front of some other guy, only to find out he had one more lap to go after that. So displeased he was, it went internal and Bryce actually vomited in his mouth. He was able to swallow it, but that probably didn't help the last lap either. He was shattered at the end. An hour later, with a coffee and a brownie in his tummy and he was a fresh kiwi again!

Still here!

Haven't updated for a while. I guess married life has been pretty busy and fun and I just haven't been getting around to catching up everyone on what's going on. Its winter here now and we are having to crank up the fireplace every night. It is nice and cozy inside though. I miss summer and I miss having Mom and Dad here. I was so lucky to have them here for so many weeks in this year, over two trips! Next exciting thing is to head to Canada and Vegas for our trip in September. Until then, I sit in front of the fire, with my Clamato (a treat from all the Canadian visitors I have had over the last few months)!

More photos again....

More wedding pics

I have a husband!

So as you can imagine, the last few months have been a bit busy with being the first term of school, new roles at school, volleyball season, and also a wedding. But the term is over, and the wedding was Saturday, so I am now beginning to reap the rewards of all of the work we have just done!
And yes, the wedding was awesome. An absolute perfect day, with stunning sunshine, no wind and just fantastic company! We had so much fun hanging out with everyone and just enjoying a special day. The ceremony was pretty special, and very beautiful in the middle of the garden. More pictures will follow, but here is the first one.

Beach Volley shot from last weekend

I took some students to the Beach Nationals last weekend. Check out this shot I got.

We are engaged!

We are very excited! More to come...




The ring is just a fun ring until we find something better for PE teaching.

Working the camera

More from Marty and Jess' wedding

I like this one...We were having fun cranking out all the poses we could think of and work the camera for Carl and Denise.

Wings over Wairarapa

As I said in the last entry, we went to an airshow this past weekend. Here are some of the pics from the day. Fun stuff! Most of the actual things in the air were too hard to catch on camera, and if I did get them, they looked too far away to really show how close they actually were to us. They had a lot of army-ish stuff on the ground (tanks, infantry doing a mock battle), parachuters in the sky and heaps of explosions going off to make it feel like the planes were shooting at the other planes. Here's a glimpse...

Marty and Jess' Wedding

So Mom and Dad left, but with not so many tears as we have had during departures before. We are getting better at it, I guess. It also helped that Mom and Dad had access to the VIP lounge in Wellington due to their business class flights (from using their AIRMILES points). They got given some special treatment in the lounge and as it sounds, they got special treatment the whole way back to Canada. Except from Mother Nature, however. They left us at 25 degrees and got welcomed home to -25, black ice and lots of snow.

We have been having great weather and this past weekend was no exception. We were invited to Marty and Jess' wedding in Napier, so we headed over and spent the weekend with Carl and Denise, who also went to the wedding. Marty is a winemaker and the wedding was at a beautiful vineyard, with some amazing wine to drink all night long. I may have had a wee too much of the red stuff, but it was hard to resist when it was free and oh, so good.

It was a beautiful wedding, with the ceremony outside, and the hills and vineyard in the background over a terrace. They had a massive picture frame hanging on the deck of the nearby cottage, with a digital camera (on a tripod) set up facing towards the frame. The idea was for all the guests to sit behind the frame, over the course of the day and have their photo taken.

Another exciting moment in the day: Bryce ate fish, and liked it. For those who don't understand about Bryce and fish-->This is huge.


Denise is due any day now and looking glorious in her 9th month. She looks absolutely normal except for a big basketball-looking lump that she tucks under her shirt. Not really, but you could believe it. We are awaiting the phone call...

Bryce and I got out to the Wings over Wairarapa airshow yesterday. I had never really seen an airshow, not that I remember anyway, and really enjoyed it. They had WWI and WWII planes having dogfights and doing aerobatics, helicopters with people abseiling out of them and picking up and dropping cars, then there were jets that flew just above our heads, and even a war re-enactment with tanks and infantry pretending to shoot each other on the ground while planes cruise super-low over our heads. I am not keen on war, in the least, but I understand more now what kind of fear this type of environment would have created for everyone who had any type of war going on around them. Not really, but kind of...

Today we had a public holiday for everyone in Wellington (as it was Wellington Anniversary Day). Every district in New Zealand gets their own long weekend. Nice, isn't it? We slept till ten then gardened all day, followed by some bike rides and a fantastic creamy blue cheese rigatoni combo that topped off the day. I can't really believe school starts again so soon. It will be hard to adjust back into the real world. For now, I chill.....and celebrate living in Wellington.

So much to do, with so much vacation to do it in, how nice!

So, as I write this, Mom and Dad are down the hall in the midst of packing up the entire country which they have bought and are trying to cram into 3 luggage bags. It has been a fabulous visit with them, and the weather has given us many treats with which to enjoy their company.
After the buried village, we celebrated my birthday with mountain bike rides, big dinners, another visit with Pam and Andrew, a super yummy cake, some games with Michelle, Nathan and Clare, and came back to Pram feeling like we had done heaps in the week away.

Bryce had to go back to work for the middle of the week, but still got along to the museum with us one night to see the exhibit of the colossal squid they caught in New Zealand about a year ago. It was massive and not something I would want to find myself swimming beside at any point. They have a beak, if you can believe it, which they eat their prey with, after the long tentacles with rotating claws grab the prey. The esophagus runs through the brain so if the squid eats too big of a bite, it can have some severe head pain (or maybe what we call "a brain freeze?").

We had a great long walk to see seals (which were on vacation until May, oops) but got to explore the south coast of Wellington, nonetheless; and had numerous lunches out including one that involved Dad and I splitting a milkshake that was made up of a Moro bar (like a Mars bar) and chocolate icecream. Oh, snap. That rocked.
This past weekend, we went to Napier to show Mom and Dad the beauty that it is; vineyards, Te Mata Peak, Carl and Denise (who is in her last days of pregnancy), great Thai food, and my favourite memory: getting up at 5am to watch the sunrise with Dad. How special that was!

We got a chance to visit Trish and Craig (Bryce's cousin's) on their site at a campground right on the beach as well, and had a really nice lunch with them. Unfortunately, the weather was pretty chilly and windy and the waves were crazy, so we didn't get to have a "beach day" with them. Mom, Dad and I made up for that yesterday though at Scorching Bay in Wellington. Still a cold wind, but a nice chill-out on the beach. Hard to imagine them not being here tomorrow. Sad, but I have a feeling they will be here again soon. I think New Zealand stole a little more of their hearts this time.


Sunrise photo (Dad took an hour long video!)

Bryce enjoying some of Mom and Dad's stories of sticking their tongues on cold poles in the middle of winter...


Scorching Bay

Mom and Dad, fully relaxed

More of our trip...

Carl and Bryce at Zippies; Mom and Dad at the Buried Village (which was buried in ash from the 1886 Mt. Tarawera eruption). And a nice pic of Mom and Dad.
I am no longer 30 (and therefore close to my 20's) as of 1 hour from now. Yikes.

Luging