dunedin

My youngest nephew and the cat, Mufasa. It's doubtful whether the cat enjoys Finlay's snuggles as much as Finlay does but I thought they made a very cute pair!
My sister and Finlay at my eldest niece's netball game.
Fin, at the netball again.
The University of Otago, the oldest university in NZ, has a beautiful section of older architecture. This is the most famous part of it - the Clock Tower.

Well, I have just spent a lovely five days in Dunedin (the fourth biggest city in NZ, in the south - slightly colder than Christchurch and the habitat of my sister and her husband and three children). I had the wisdom to avoid school holidays, which meant that during the day I was free to go and do whatever I wanted, and then when I got home I had enough energy to tolerate being ambushed by energetic children! It actually was very nice. I met up with a good German friend of mine who is studying at the University of Otago, I spent some time with Viv, my sister, at the uni where she works and watched a few movies with her in the evenings when the kids had gone to bed (Spanglish and Walk the Line), I spent a little bit too much money shopping, I visited the museum, I explored in general.

I loved the movie Walk the Line. (I also loved the other one!) It was such cool music. So I went and bought a Johnny Cash CD yesterday... sigh, his family must be raking in the royalties after this movie came out!

Photos: I apologise that it turns out that most of the only okay photos are of my youngest nephew Finlay. (He's just so cute, although he growls at you and sulks if he hears you saying that!) I did take some of the other two but the photos just didn't turn out so well!

question

My street, the day it snowed. This was by late afternoon and a lot had been washed or melted away but I liked how the snow sat on the fences.

Today I have only one thing to say:

Why oh why does it take the average male about five to ten years longer than the average female to grow up?

freedom

I had my history exam yesterday afternoon and now: I am free for about three weeks! It's so wonderful just doing whatever I want for a few days. Scary thing: I am now halfway through my degree. Eek.

So I went out with a couple of friends yesterday evening to celebrate. We went and had dinner at the Dux (great vegetarian/seafood restaurant) and then went to see A Midsummer Night's Dream - all slightly ironic because it's almost exactly midwinter. I've never seen the play properly before but I loved studying it so I really enjoyed myself. It was pretty well done, especially the Mechanicals, who were hilarious - especially Flute as Thisbe.

Then this morning I went swimming - something I haven't done for ages, and it felt so good. I'm going to go several times a week, I've decided, while my get-fit craze continues (hopefully forever). This afternoon I'm meeting someone for coffee, this evening I'm going to a welcome-back-from-Canada party, and on Monday I'm going down to Dunedin for five days to see my sister and her kids and a few friends.

SUDDENLY I HAVE A LIFE apart from study!

Photos: the weather's been absolutely horrific - cold, rain, even snow again yesterday, so I'm not quite sure how we managed to get several beautiful sunsets in the not-so-distant past. Both taken out my bedroom window; I'm not sure why I always take sunset photos out there but it just happens. :)

i won something!!!!!!

An illustration from my copy of Persuasion, by Jane Austen (my favourite book ever) - where Captain Wentworth talks to Mrs Musgrove about poor Richard, with Anne on the right.
Billy Blunt and Milly-Molly-Mandy in the three-legged race. (Milly-Molly-Mandy was one of my favourite books series when I was little... I used to copy everything she did!)
A sample of my handwriting. :)

That's right - I won something! And it's worth having! (For the record: I NEVER win things. At least, in the past. Perhaps now is a good time to start playing Lotto... then again, perhaps not.)

It's called a DocuPen and is a portable scanner! So exciting. It's literally the size of a pen and you run it over a page and plug it in later to the USB port on your computer. It was a competition through Canta, the student magazine at uni, and I had to email them saying why I deserved to win it... and I'd just written down seventy pages of notes for my history essay... so.... I won it!

It's only black and white so it doesn't scan photos or stuff like that at all well, but it's pretty good with text, or with drawings in black and white... as shown in samples above! I think it will actually be pretty useful too, when I take notes and things in future.

Totally made my week.

snow

The photos I was trying to post a few days ago. From the rooftop carpark of a mall.
My bedroom window this morning.

It is June, and it is snowing. This shouldn't be happening until September. Just before you start getting mental pictures of cute little red-breasted robins and Yuletide puddings and red sledges with bells and reindeer and roaring fires and roasted marshmallows and snowmen with carrots as noses... in Christchurch, the only snow we get is shlushy and wet and gross and ugly. It's quite nice for about two hours, and then the novelty wears off. And it doesn't take nice pictures unless you're not in the city, because there's only about half an inch of it.

Apparently this May was the coldest in ten years.

But it's made for good skiing in the mountains. I've only ever been skiing once but I really want to go again this winter. The mountains are only about two hours away, depending on where you go, but my family has never really been a skiing family, so... But this is my six-months-late New Years Resolution: I will go skiing this winter.

the bird in the commerce building

I hope you can see this; he was about to hop under the table.

High up, sitting neatly above people's heads while they drank their coffee... I was waiting for someone to get bird droppings on them - but unfortunately no.

This little bird was in Cafe 101 in my university's commerce building the other day; I think she and her mate live inside now, having once come through the sliding doors and never quite figuring out how to get out. They seem quite happy!

the da vinci code

Well - today I handed in my last two assignments of the semester; I have one exam in about two weeks but suddenly I feel free! My friend Katie and I thus went shopping, and we also saw The Da Vinci Code for the first time.

My review: I read the book a few weeks ago and thought it was one of the biggest let-downs I have ever had to suffer. Obviously, being a Christian, I was very skeptical of the content already, but I figured it had to be really well-written and very exciting to make up for the dodgy history, so I was looking forward to reading it.

What a disappointment I underwent. The only thing that keeps the reader interested is the suspense. It is merely a page-turner and once you find out what happens - no more interest. The characters are either one-dimensional (Langdon) or totally amazingly annoyingly cliched (Silas); the writing style is just... I don't know how to describe it - a total lack of mastery of English prose. Maybe not total, but it is noticeably juvenile in its style. I just found it very annoying, the whole way through, that a book like this, which lacks the skill that really makes a book great, should be so popular and so widely-sold. It's depressing, from the point of view of someone whose dream is to be an author, but not to sell out to sensationalist audiences by writing crap.

So I did not expect much of the movie. To my surprise, I enjoyed it better than the book. In a movie format, a page-turner works much better. I thought the acting was generally pretty good, although Tom Hanks disappointed me a little, as I usually expect such a high standard from him. It was the kind of acting that we've seen him do very much in the past; just a little bit been-there-before. Tom, if you're reading, I think you're wonderful, and you're one of my favourite actors ever - I would love to ride off into the sunset with you You've Got Mail-style if I were not only nineteen - but please, please, go back to roles like your ones in The Ladykillers or Road to Perdition! (Well, not like them as such, I'm meaning more unlike them, as in just as original and surprising and amazing and three-dimensional.)

Audrey Tautou I thought was wonderful, as always - I've only seen her in Amelie before but I was not surprised to see her as charismatic as always. Jean Reno - well, I have a secret crush on Jean Reno and think he can do no wrong so I was always going to approve of him. Paul Bettany is someone who is impressing me more and more lately with his versatility; his Silas was a much more interesting character than I ever expected he could be. Ian McKellen of course was technically great, as usual; I especially enjoyed him yelling at Robert Langdon as he got taken off by the police, and his slight sleaziness. All the same, Ian McKellen is the sort of actor I can get sick of - he seems slightly predictable. Eg, I've always loved Judi Dench, but in the latest Pride and Prejudice I felt it was just more of the same from her in the role of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

I didn't think Langdon's speech at the end was selling out to Christians, as some people have accused the movie-makers of doing. The book itself includes positive aspects of Christianity, and I quote (roughly): 'no one can deny the immense good the Church does in the modern world in charities' (or something like that!), for example. I thought it was nice to see that despite this sensationalist tale (and sensationalists usually seem to me to go over the edge of reason, a la Sir Leigh Teabing), the people telling it were prepared to acknowledge they don't have a monopoly on truth. It makes me a lot more inclined to take what they say seriously, and research it for myself to make my own opinions on the matter. (Although, yes, the people telling the story don't necessarily believe it.)

Photos: something weird is going on where the computer will upload photos onto other posts but not onto this one. So I will put these particular photos up another time.

the end is in sight

Tomorrow: Linguistics test. Friday: History essay and creative writing due.

Aaand then - I am free!!!!

We-ell, free until the 22nd when I sit my history exam but the point is, this horrible fortnight of constant study is going to be FINISHED! In under two days! And when the test is over tomorrow - no more Syntactic Theory EVER!

I am going to have to celebrate somehow. I will spend all free time over the next two days devising a way to do it really well.

Photos: I took them before music last night. The Music Centre is right next to the Catholic Cathedral in my city; a rather nice location really.

car rally

Lucinda at the airport. The new Air New Zealand uniforms!
Jason and Pita washing my father's dishes.
Bill and Sati at Bill's organ.
Kirstie reading Pride and Prejudice.
Jason with the blue and orange wall.

We had a photo rally at youth group last night. It was pretty fun! I made up the clues for most of the teams, which were almost as fun writing as it was doing the actual car rally. The above photos were taken on my camera but by another team; luckily, they ended up with better photos than my team so I get to use them, heh heh. These are the clues:

- On a swing
- With a McDonald's worker... if possible wearing their hat
- Bill E---- playing his organ
- At Logoland in Riccarton Mall
- At the Princess Margaret Hospital entrance, looking ill
- Playing table tennis with Roger L-----
- With an innocent passerby and their dog
- With a poster of The Breakup, looking like Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston
- Washing David S------'s dishes
- With a Coke vending machine... somewhere
- At the Church Corner graveyard, looking ghostly
- At the entrance to Halswell Quarry
- With a blue and orange wall - hint: the mall
- With an airport official
- Reading Pride and Prejudice in Borders

I had fun putting my own little personal touch in there... hence the Pride and Prejudice cameo and washing my father's dishes. :) Some other groups did some cool stuff too - ie a sheet with which to look ghostly at the graveyard.

russian joke

In the car on the way back from Hanmer. The only photo in which I managed to capture the lovely afternoon light, which is the only reason why I am including it on here!
'Bridge' painted on the road on my Sunday morning walk - part of a 'one' 'lane' 'bridge' warning.
Outside the house we rented for the weekend.

I've been researching for another Soviet history essay, this time on why the reforms of Gorbachev led to the fall of the Soviet Union. I found this joke in one of the books - even if you have no idea who each leader is, it's still pretty funny, I think.

The five major figures of Soviet history were on a train together when it suddenly halted in a remote region where the tracks had abruptly stopped. What to do? Lenin was the first to speak, and in his revolutionary enthusiasm he issued a call for a voluntary day of work for local folk to extend the tracks. Stalin objected and ordered the leaders of the railroad ministry shot and the train engineer exiled to Siberia. The always exuberant and impulsively reformist Khrushchev had yet another idea: tear up the tracks behind the train and lay them in front and thus proceed to their destination. Brezhnev's contribution was to order the shades drawn while all the travellers rocked back and forth, pretending to move ahead. Finally it was Gorbachev's turn. The architect of glasnost had the windows thrown wide open and asked everyone to stick their heads out of the train and shout loudly, "There are no tracks! There are no tracks!" :)

Photos above: of our small group trip to Hanmer Springs a few weekends ago.

marriage

Beer bottles and hands and tealight candles!
Marielle and Nathanael. (Marrying on December 16)
Tealight candles make up a heart... although a few of us thought it looked more like a pacman. :)

Lately I have been pondering the idea of marriage, quite possibly because my friend has just got engaged (photos from last night's engagement party above). Obviously marriage can be a fantastic thing and I am really happy for Marielle and her fiance, Nathanael. All the same, I wonder if perhaps we Christians take marriage a little too far, especially when we're NOT married.

So many Christian girls I've met are so desperate for a boyfriend that I find it quite sad. They also seem to have the attitude that you can't go out with boys unless you know they're The One. I have a feeling that because these days you hear so much of the ideal of waiting for marriage or marriage is so special and so on that we get the idea that to be a whole person, we must be married, that marriage is crucially important to the Christian faith.

I have a feeling we need to have some more self-worth as separate, worthwhile human beings. A significant amount of Christian marriages break up these days - so what's left over of us if this happens to us? I think we should view marriage as a partnership focused on God and what we can do for him together. At the very least many girls are going to be very disappointed when they discover marriage isn't some constant paradise.

I know I'm good

I have written a wonderful story on my other blog - if you want to see it in its original context, This Is The Link (or it's also a link on the index of this page). It is so beautiful I just had to share on here as well. :)

Allie sat in the corner of the crowded bar, strangely detached from the crowd of dancing people. She sighed and bemoaned her fate. "Oh, woe is me," she cried to herself. "Oh, misery! Oh, calamity!" She watched the dancers, whizzing by, brightly coloured and enjoying themselves, ignoring the dark blighted shadow in the corner that was Allie.

Just then, her eye was caught by a tall mysterious dark cloaked handsome man (who looked peculiarly like Mr Darcy or perhaps Aragorn) who had stopped dead in the door, staring at her amazing beauty.

"Oh, he sees me like no one else sees me!" she cried. "I'm in love!!!"

They ran into each other's arms, pushing aside all else, and stood kissing passionately in the middle of the room while the dancers pulsed around them. "Oh, my love!" cried Allie, her voice breaking. "You have saved me from a fate worse than death!"

He tucked a tendril of hair gently behind her ear and kissed her tenderly on the mouth. "I would save you from thousands of fates worse than death if only I could hear you say you loved me!"

They left the bar, walking on air, entwined in each other's loving arms. He bent down on one knee, surrounded by the lights and noises and smells of the city, and gazed pensively into her face. "My love, I don't even know your name, but will you marry me?"

"Yes, oh yes!" cried Allie in raptures of delight.

But just then a black car with evil gangster druglord people in it drove past and shot him. He was dead!!!! "Oh, woe is me! Oh, misery! Oh, calamity!" screamed Allie, and in her anguish promptly shot herself with the gun the evil gangster druglord people had conveniently dropped out of their car. She sprawled on the street, and a crowd slowly gathered. Their blood mingled as their hearts bled and their souls floated away - together at last... together forever.

Doesn't that just make you want to sob with anguish??

paradox

I am swamped with work but feeling pretty good about life. How weird is that. Obviously I'm not happy that I have a test, an essay and a short story due in two weeks. Yet somehow I am thriving on busyness. I've been roped into being one of the new 'organisers' of youth group and suddenly find myself trying to start up a kids club as well but somehow I find it quite exciting.

I'm also enjoying the fact that I'm making a few non-school-related friends at uni. I actually see people around and say hi to them and even study with them or something now; would never have happened last year. The day before last, I actually sat down and had an hour-long conversation with a guy I've never really talked properly to before. Am I gaining more social skills or something? I used to be totally unaware how to meet people. I don't think I've gained much awareness but maybe everyone else is also sick of walking around uni alone without seeing anyone they know and has decided that desperate times call for desperate measures. :)

flat whites are the best coffee ever

I was shocked recently to learn, via blog comments, that Patty doesn't know what a flat white is!!!!!!!!!! And then I remembered that when my brother travelled round the States, he couldn't find a flat white anywhere. I feel very sad for you, Patty. :) A flat white is a coffee. It's got more expresso in it than a capuccino, but depending where you go, it can be very strong or only moderately strong. I like mine strong.

I had a lovely weekend in Hanmer with seven of us from my small group. The pools were wonderful, as usual, but we also got fantastic weather. It's really pretty there in autumn; it all looks very alpine. On Saturday, Amy (one of the leaders) and I went shopping while the others played mini golf, and the boys did some mountain biking. Then in the evening we went to the pools, and watched the end of the Super 14 semi-finals at the pub across the road (yay, the Crusaders won! Finals in Christchurch!). Sunday we just hung around and talked and went for walks and so on, which was also nice.

Had my Linguistics test today. Would have gone okay had I had time to finish the last question; isn't that just so annoying?! I think I'll still get a good mark but an excellent one - nope.

the springs

Weird photo I know! It's my sister's kitchen window from outside in the early evening with the flash turned off.

I am going to Hanmer tomorrow morning with my Navs small group. Hanmer's claim to fame is its heavenly natural hot springs, but as well as fermenting in hot water all day there's many other things to do!! (Within reason.) One of the boys is very keen on getting up early on Sunday morning and walking up a mountain to see the sun rise. It sounds nice but maybe not. :) It'll be nice. Most Navs small groups go to Hanmer for a weekend at some point in the year. Last time it was great, I felt like I got to know my group so much better, so fingers crossed for another great weekend. Only problem is I won't be able to study for my test on Tuesday but what the heck, there's still Monday, and I'm not that desperate to study!

nerves

I have spent an entire day at uni studying for my linguistics test and researching for my next history essay, on Gorbachev. (I find it fascinating thinking almost all this stuff I'm researching happened in my lifetime and I didn't know a thing about it at the time.) Now I am sick of that, and so am hanging around waiting the last couple of hours before my creative writing workshop at 6pm. Am nervous nervous nervous. I've written a story that is basically non-fiction with changed names, about what happened at the time of Mum's death. I'm not sure if it was just good therapy or if it's a good story as well. I'm unsure how I'll cope if they start criticising it or saying it's unrealistic or anything. Last time the teacher said she didn't think I knew my character well enough and why was I writing this? If she says that again I'll probably scream. :)

winter

The novelty of winter has already disappeared. We have had pounding rain all Sunday and today, Monday, it's continuing, and it also happens to be freezing. Yuck. Winter was nice for a while, being able to use electric blankets and dress up all nice and snugly. Then I realised it's also wet and cold and miserable and that I don't have enough nice snugly winter clothes and no money to buy new ones. :( At least Christchurch is generally so dry that it can't continue like this forever... *crosses fingers*

I played in a concert yesterday, a fundraising one for the recorder ensemble I'm in. It went really well, I think. I also got to play in a smaller group of Renaissance recorders, and other old instruments like the shawm (old oboe), dulcian (old bassoon), and cornamuse (I don't think there's any modern instrument like the cornamuse, or crumhorn - suffice it to say that it sounds like a duck). So that was fun! I was quite stoked because my sister and her husband and two boys came along, and my dad, and two people from church. Usually even Dad can't come along. It's really nice when people take an interest in things that are important to you, if you know what I mean. Sometimes I feel like I know some of my friends' interests in sports etc inside out but they're not even aware I love music so much.

Photos: some more from Castle Hill, on my trip with my father. Note Dad's shtylish mustard coloured coat; he refuses to get a new one.

long time no see

... well, not really, but it does seem like a very long time since I graced this blog with my presence... like a week, perhaps?

My week has been - interesting. Monday and Tuesday were absolutely frantic - I was basically only at home to sleep. At the start of the semester I thought perhaps I'd enjoy this timetable, with no early morning lectures and some evening ones; I have fast become velly velly sick of it. Tuesdays I am at uni from 10am to 5pm, go straight to Music at 5:30, from that go straight to Navs (Christian group) at 7:15, don't get home till 11:30ish. I feel slightly under pressure too, having been given the job of co-leading our church's youth group this year. The guy who's leading it with me is very enthusiastic about it, which is great, but it makes me worried about how much time I am meant to put into it.

Wednesday-Friday, by comparison, are very lazy, but I'm still recovering from Monday and Tuesday so I spend basically the whole week being totally exhausted. Next weekend I am going to Hanmer Springs with my Navs small group which I should be very excited about but I have a feeling it means I will have absolutely no rest from this Monday until next Wednesday.

Sorry to spend all this time complaining. It really isn't that interesting. Good things that have happened this week:
- I got to play volleyball at youth group last night. I hardly ever get to play my favourite sport so I had such a great time.
- I read The Da Vinci Code and realised that as well as being historically wacky it's very badly written; yippee! I was expecting it to be at least amazingly written, Harry-Potter-style - but no. Next time when someone treats the novel as if it's the gospel truth I will have actually read it and know what I'm talking about!
- On Thursday night my sister Viv rang up as it was her birthday and we had a really good, long talk. Yay!
- On Thursday the light began to dawn midst the darkness of Linguistics class. I am beginning to understand.
- On Tuesday night I got home from Navs and lay in bed with the electric blanket on, eating a chocolate bar and reading the first chapter of a Georgette Heyer novel. Heaven...
- On a similar note, today was an absolutely lovely crisp autumn Saturday after a Friday of pouring rain and I went for a stroll and had a flat white at the local cafe while reading another Georgette Heyer novel.
So there you have it, I have actually had a very good week if I just take the trouble to think about it.

Photos: university campus. I didn't do a very job of capturing how pretty it is at the moment, but trust me, it's lovely at university in autumn. The buildings are really ugly, having been built in the 60s or so when the uni moved from the central city to Ilam, and designed by someone who adored square blocks of concrete. But the grounds are lovely.

my computer is being repaired

Stupid laptops; they have to go and lose the screws holding them together... and then when I take them in to get the right size screws, they say there's actually a broken plastic bit inside which is why the screws fell out. Grr. It's the sort of thing that probably isn't under guarantee because Compaq can blame it all on me for dropping the computer or something (which I have NEVER done). So right now, no photos, because my laptop is unavailable and our home computer doesn't have a USB drive (it's oooold).

Interesting thought - remember the guy (let's call him Egbert) who said my writing was moralistic and conservative? The other day in a creative writing workshop we were all discussing some other guy's (Boris) piece of writing, and Egbert and I disagreed. Egbert thought the part of the story that was very socialist was very good - ie referring to the "hapless victim of humanity's progress huddled in a street corner" and people "conditioned by capitalism" and so on and so on - and I thought it was too political, a little preachy. This morning I realised that Boris's piece of writing was no different to mine if mine was moralistic; Egbert only called it moralistic because he didn't agree with me. Loser. :)

At church last night an old man stood up and started talking, and I noted down one thing he said: he referred to "angelic angels." :) Gosh, those angelic angels are so angelic compared to those human-y humans and demonic demons!

hmmm... yes

At Navs on Tuesday we found out that a girl in the group has just got engaged - so someone decided we should dress up some boys as brides using newspaper... Yeah. Tasteful to the extreme. At least the bottom photo isn't the one my group did. Agh. My group dressed the guy in the top photo (who WON!!); and for a dress made of newspaper, we think it actually looks quite elegant. :)

Do you know, I'm finding creative writing class very depressing at the moment. I got my mark back and although I never expected a good mark I still managed to be disappointed by it... sigh... but that's okay, I'm over it now. It's just that yesterday we had a workshop, and we had to critique three people's writing. One of them was just one of the most terrible things I've EVER read; I just can't describe it. I photocopied it before I gave it back to him just so I could keep a memento of how absurdly terrible it was. He actually managed to use the word 'somnambulistically'. But the teacher and several others in the class loved it, and got all these extremely profound things out of it! Go figure. I just feel, at the moment, like this class wants us to write a certain way - you know, very postmodern and unintelligible and plotless. I just want to write things that people take pleasure in reading.

musica generica

Does anyone else find so-called 'worship music' insufferable? I call it musica generica because it is so boring and generic! Just had to vent.

I went to a big crusade-type thing last night in my hometown, with the evangelist Greg Laurie of the Harvest church in California. It was very very cool. Hundreds of people responded to the altar call; I've never seen something on as large a scale as that before. There were several bands there like Audio Adrenaline, the Katinas, and Steven Curtis Chapman, and an extremely cool guitar player called Dennis Agajanian (???? spelling ????) who used to play for Johnny Cash. The message was good, really sound and interesting, which was nice to see when the word 'evangelist' often means 'wacko' to people in my culture.

But the worship music! There was a band put together from different churches throughout Christchurch. It was so loud it was actually unbearable at points, worse than any of the real musicians who played; all the singers were gyrating around to these immensely predictable and boring songs with words that don't quite make sense because the person who wrote the lyrics can't rhyme and that are the most modern songs out so only people from "cool" churches know them. Sheesh. To me, worship music has got to be the most boring style of music ever created. Sure, some people can do good stuff with it, but in the main it seems to me to be tuneless, repetitive and immensely predictable in its chord structure etc. Why can't we take a leaf from African Americans' book and do cool gospel stuff?

Sorry to complain. It was actually a great evening. It's just embarrassing that the only band/musician there from Christchurch was terrible. Usually I don't mind worship music too much, but this - this was different.

A very cool thing that happened yesterday, however - my friend got engaged. :) She and her fiance met us at the event and was waving her ring hand around with a big sparkly diamond on it. It was so nice to see because they were so happy; just grinning and grinning all night. Ah, young love... It's also slightly weird because it doesn't seem like people my age are mature enough to get married - it makes me feel old. But mostly, it's all just very very cool. They've been going out since they were about 16 or 17 so it's not like they're just rushing into it or anything.

(Just realised I've used the word 'cool' about a million times in this post.)

Photos: my dad yelled for me to come running yesterday morning when he spotted these hot air balloons out the window. It was great seeing them so close up/low to the ground.

essayed out

I have got two more days of holidays before I go back to university, and I'm spending them writing this blimming essay. It is quite satisfying when I finish a paragraph or section, I admit, but the rest of the time I'm either making myself continue working or feeling guilty because I'm not working. I think when I've finished it I'll have to post it up here as a trophy of my hard work over the last few weeks. :)

It was Anzac Day on Tuesday, which is, I suppose, one of New Zealand's two major holidays. Anzac is basically a mixture of the words Australia and New Zealand and is the name that refers to the Antipodean men who fought in the World Wars and other wars like Vietnam. It's our day for remembering their sacrifices. I like Anzac Day. I was planning to get up early (ie around 5:15am) and go to a dawn service, but when I woke up it was absolutely bucketing down with rain and somehow getting up didn't seem that tempting!

A couple of photos: Top, at a sister's house for a meal when my sister and brother-in-law came down from Auckland. Dad gazing at one of the outdoor candle thingys while Tony, a brother-in-law, cooks on the barbecue. Bottom, another brother-in-law, Mike, when we realised the flowers were right behind his head.

Milly-Molly-Mandy

The native bush on the Bealey Spur walk.
Dad, near Mt White - looking very Southern Man-ish.
Looking down the river from the railway bridge we walked over.

Has anyone read any of the Milly-Molly-Mandy books, by Joyce Lankester Brisley? I'm curious because I was basically brought up on them and for some peculiar reason, I've been thinking about them today. :) I loved all the little stories and the pictures. I used to copy the stories; eg the one where Milly-Molly-Mandy gets locked in her bedroom by mistake and she leaves a basket hanging out her window and her family leave little presents in it for her to pull up? That was a particularly fun idea!

Other books I got into when I was a little older (ie seven or eight) were Enid Blyton ones: the Famous Five series, the Secret Seven, Five Find-Outers and Dog... I was obsessed with Enid Blyton in the way I love Jane Austen now - something that is rather embarrassing to admit, when I flick through those books now... I don't think Enid Blyton was ever popular in the States, or at least not with my generation, because most Americans I talk to don't have a clue who she was. Not surprising I suppose, because she was very British!