Parenthood

I got an email this morning from my sister, discussing Obama's speech in a rare quiet moment from her two kids:

"It was gorgeous. held the audience without any metaphor or glib catch phrases (save for Eight Is Enough - poor Dick Van Patten) clean, tight and answered all of 'the questions' without getting into too much detail. Full of feminist references as well as some bones for Katrina, I thought it was amazing and
Shit - bike chain off. Screaming.
Bye"

Classic.

Wow.

I skipped class today to watch Obama's speech and it was totally worth it. I am SO queer -- I got all teary-eyed as soon as he got on stage. It was phenomenal.

Although, what was with Michelle's dress? C'mon, honey. You can look better than THAT!

Cats

It's POURING rain right now and has been since 6:00 this morning (it's 11:30am now). The cats are like little kids, pacing around, bored, just wanting to go outside and play. But every time they went out, they'd come running back in, soaked. So, I made up a little bed on the sofa for them to sleep in. Pictured is Tama, sound asleep with his head cradled in Blue's huge back rabbit foot.

Lunch in the city!

To continue the celebration of having nothing to do, Iain and I drove into Auckland for lunch, drinks, and a long walk through the city. We wandered around the waterfront and up towards Vulcan Lane. Iain was craving sushi, so we went into one of those conveyor belt sushi places and ate WAY too much. Oddly, we gravitated towards all of the deep fried stuff - tempura, etc. Aw - I just realized I forgot to get seaweed salad - dammit! I knew I was missing something! But it was really, really good and filled us up for more walking around. Every so often we'd stop somewhere and have a drink, which was really fun.

We realized how suburban we've become -- we used to walk all over Philly and then stop and eat somewhere, but now we usually just drive, park, eat, then drive home. We decided to do more walking around-- it's so much fun and then you don't feel as guilty eating like this:

We ate a LOT! But it was completely worth it! Here's a view of Vulcan Lane from inside the sushi place. Across is a Belgian beer place, where we had to stop.


There's loads of super cool gift shops and clothing stores that I will have to go back to when I'm not with Iain.

These were parked in the waterfront harbor, next to the super gorgeous yachts and sailboats.

Playing hooky

The blog is finished! I posted it online yesterday at around 12:30pm! To help me celebrate the end of another daunting school project, Iain took a half day and we both drove into town for a few drinks (or, in this case, one large Belgian beer). It was so much fun! I love doing spontaneous stuff like that.

Then we settled in for an evening of season 6 of The Sopranos and homemade spaghetti sauce.

(please ignore my hair - I really need a trim!)

Working! From Home

So I've actually been WORKING! From home! Man... I thought my blog was almost finished... just a few bugs to work out, but no. Everything fell apart on Wednesday because the files I thought I'd saved onto my flash drive after class on Tuesday weren't saved, so I had to go back and re-do a whole day's work. This lead to even more problems, lots of glasses of wine, bitching, and a small nervous breakdown yesterday afternoon. But there was eventual success as I debugged the files one by one. There are 26 scripts total so it was completely annoying.

But this morning at around 11:17am victory was mine: Iain was telling me something and I wasn't really listening. I was glancing at my code while he was talking and it suddenly clicked. Awesome! (the problem was an extra comma -- TWO DAYS of debugging and it's a bloody extra comma!)

Working From Home

I'm working from home today, Thursday and Friday. I'm trying to avoid the temptation of television. My blog is due on Friday, bugs and all. And there's plenty of them, thanks to crappy code given to me by my TEACHER. This "How come my code doesn't work? Oh wait -- this is the script we got in class..." has happened before. It's really frustrating for someone like me who actually trusts the code provided by my teacher. The geeks look at it and go, "Yeah, this won't work." and then find their own way.

So I have a bit of work to do still, but I hope to get it up and running shortly. Still no image uploading, though. Damn! That's the best part of a blog!

I'm trying to keep out of Iain's way -- both of us in the same house all day has lead to trouble in the past. I'll be "working" in the living room with Lifetime or Law & Order on, and Iain can hear the TV and wants it turned down, or worse, wants to change the channel to rubgy for a few minutes while he eats lunch or has an apple break -- it gets pretty ugly, and we don't like to fight in front of the cats.

This morning we went to the hospital so I could get my left foot x-rayed (bunion). I was amazed at how efficient it was. We walked into the radiology department at around 8:00 and were back in the parking lot by 8:15 - it was incredible. And even if there'd been a wait, it would've been fine because they had a TON of awesome magazines, which is a real change from my doctor in Philly who had subscriptions to Golf, Parenting, Highlights, and Men's Health. WTF?

Tonight we're going to our favorite Belgian place for dinner, then home for more of The Sopranos.

Heroes

Here's a statue in front of the Aotea Center in downtown Auckland. (I admit that I don't know who this is or what he did). No wonder Iain thinks he's such a bad-ass!

More pictures from Natcoll's annoying posters

Yeah for Iain!

Iain is ecstatic. One of his favorite shows has come to New Zealand! Gossip Girl premiered last Friday night. He's so excited! Ed Westwick is his fav, although how can you not love Blake Lively? And what makes Iain happy makes me happy!

(commentary: the cool thing about Gossip Girl is that the characters who are supposed to be hot actually ARE. This is a huge relief after growing up with shows like 90210 and Saved by the Bell, where the alleged hotties weren't*. Like, at ALL.)

*exception: Jason Bateman

Almost over...

My hellacious PHP project is almost over with. It was originally due tomorrow but our teacher has extended it to Friday.

My blog is almost finished, save for a few minor (hopefully) glitches. It doesn't look as cool as this blog, but what do you expect? I haven't figured out how to upload photos yet, which is a big deal. I hope to have that completed by Friday.

In even better news, my teacher is away in Wellington from Wednesday - Friday and is allowing us to work from home. I have to leave the house at 10:15am to make it to class by noon, so any day where I don't have to do that is an awesome day. I cannot wait!

I don't know how psyched Iain is to have me in the house, though. He made a comment like "Well, you still might need to go in..." Poor Iain. He also has my cold -- he's upstairs hacking away right now. Hopefully it won't get as bad as mine was.

HAPPY 40th BIRTHDAY JAMIE!!!

Jamie, mom-to-be in November, turns 40 today! Here are some pictures!

Go Kiwis!

While having dinner and many drinks at Claudine and Glenn's last night we watched New Zealand's most successful day ever at an Olympic Games, namely "the twins" Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell win the gold by, like, a millisecond second in womens' rowing against the snarky Germans (who looked PISSED!) Up until yesterday, my only exposure to the twins was in a national commercial for beef & lamb where they dance around after tauting the benefits of meat.

NZ prime minister, Helen Clark, was out hiking with her husband and a friend and the friend had a heart attack and died. Sad as that is, I have to say that it's nice to hear stories like that instead of "VP Cheney was out hunting and shot his friend in the face".

Dinner. Party?!

Here are two horrible pictures from our dinner party last Saturday. Everyone looks totally bored -- we really had fun, I swear! But you'd never know it from these pictures... These aren't even the worst of the lot -- I deleted those.

I always try to take lots of candids when we have people over. And they always turn out like these.

Anyway, the woman with the little boy is Gill and her son Ben (who also looks miserable, even though he wasn't). Next to her is Toni, and the guy glaring into the camera is Toni's partner Max. Gill's husband Vernie (not pictured) was seated next to Max.

Auckland is a cool city after all

Class ends at 3:15 and my bus leaves at 4pm, so I always kill time wandering around the city. Yesterday, I took a different route and stumbled upon the COOLEST area: Vulcan Alley and O'Connell Street (and some other street that I can't remember). It's these narrow little side streets crammed with super cool shops, clothing, restaurants, cafés, etc. and it's all old architecture. It's really pretty. I was SO psyched to discover this because the Auckland I've seen (I'm talking downtown, center business district) has been pretty dull -- convenient stores, cheap clothing shops, tourist shops, lots of fast food and cheap Asian restaurants (catering to students, probably). Really, really dull. Granted, the CBDs in most cities are pretty boring, but I thought this was Auckland. As in, this is it.

It totally reminded me of when I moved to Philly and was living off City Line Avenue and thinking "This is Philly??? Philly SUCKS." I'll never forget seeing Rittenhouse Sq for the first time, or Northern Liberties. It was awesome. That's how this felt.

Of course, until I start working again, I won't be able to actually enjoy any of the awesome ckothing stores and restaurants, but it's really nice to know they're there.

Sunday

I worked on my code for a few hours on Saturday and was getting no where. I started again on Sunday, it was generating a bunch of error messages, and staring at the screen wasn't getting me anywhere. Iain suggested we take a day off from chores and school work and enjoy the day.

It was absolutely GORGEOUS outside -- it was such a great reminder of why we moved here. We drove over to Devonport (kick-ass seaside town -- I've written about it before). Everyone was out sailing. We went for a long walk up this really cool hill before wandering back into the town for brunch. Our waitress could barely speak English, so you can imagine the fun we had trying to order a Bloody Mary and a Virgin Mary. She had NO idea what we were talking about. The manager had to come over, and he was just as clueless -- he kept asking if a Virgin Mary was just another name for tomato juice, and then insisted on calling it a "spiced tomato juice". It was infuriating. NZ really needs to step it up in the cocktail department...

But it was a perfect day otherwise -- especially since it's supposed to be the middle of winter over here! We got some ice cream after brunch (see 'Gay Time' ice cream cone) and sauntered around looking at houses. It's such a beautiful neighborhood.

When we got home we settled in for a late afternoon of The Sopranos on DVD, leftover bread & cheese, and wine. Awesome. It was exactly what we needed.


That island over there is called Rangitoto Island -- apparently it's all native bush and owned by the Maori. I think.
Shot of Auckland in the distance and the beaches of Devonport.

Latest ad campaign for my school

These hip posters are plastered all over Auckland AND all over school. Obviously, my age group is roughly 15 years above their target market, though who are they looking to attract? You can't really tell from this picture, but they cast the ugliest models EVER. Zits? You bet! Short and dumpy? You're hired! Ugly? Perfect! I wouldn't find it so irksome if I didn't have to stare at these every single day.

Who says that 11 is "middle aged" for a cat??

Cops

Last night was like a little taste of South Philly. Three drunk people stood on the sidewalk at 1:30am having a screaming match. Awesome. It was a huge Polynesian guy with no shirt on doing most of the yelling, while one of his friends held him back. From what we could gather, "Stephanie" is a "ho" who "f*cks " all "her ni*gers". Classy. We called the cops. Sadly, Stephanie is quite the ho -- this is not the first time we've been treated to one of her late night sidewalk discussions.

Dinner Party!

We're having our friends Toni & Max and Gill & Vernie over for dinner tonight.

Gill & Vernie's babysitter crapped out on them, so they're bringing their kids, Ben & India. This should be interesting. The cats have NEVER been exposed to children. I predict that the intro will last exactly .004 seconds.

I'm spending my day writing code and setting up databases. I cannot WAIT until August 19th -- the project due date.

Iain has had to take over all house duties. He took a half day yesterday to clean the house, do laundry and go grocery shopping. Now he's cooking.

We're having:

1. fried oysters on mesclun with strawberry vinaigrette
2. pumpkin and bleu cheese risotto
3. ziti with homemade duck ragu
4. sorbet
5. BoOzE!

Blog

For our latest class project we're hand coding a blog from scratch. Our teacher seems to think this is an easy assignment, which of course is totally not the case. It's clear that I'm either the dumbest kid in class or the most vocal. I met with the teacher before class this week, and he was telling me about some "cool trick in PHP" (translation: something really hard that he'll explain in 15 seconds that none of us except the REAL geeks will understand). He actually said, "It's easy -- I'll explain it once and everyone'll get it. Well, I'll have to explain it TWICE to YOU, but you'll get it." I wasn't even offended. He's right.

So, for the next week and a half I'll probably have to neglect THIS blog for my other blog.

Sorry it's been so lame lately -- they've really ramped it up at school. I'm hoping it calms down after this assignment.

HAMBURGERS!!!

So far, Dunedin is the only place we've found in New Zealand that makes a decent hamburger. Our flight was at 1pm, so we went to the restaurant at 11am and begged the cook to make these for us before the lunch menu was 'officially' available. (if you look closely, you can see the slice of beet. Beets are HUGE over here)

Fambily

So, two weekends ago we flew to Dunedin for what was supposed to be a big family celebration. Unfortunately Iain's mom, Pat, caught a horrible case of the stomach flu and was totally wiped out the entire weekend. She was devastated. The good news is, we live here now so it's not like we were here from the US or something -- we'll be getting together again when they come up in November. But it was a shame to miss the big dinner. We're glad that Pat's fully recovered!

In lieu of a classy dinner, Iain and I headed to the local pub with Iain's brother Gary, his wife Carol, and Gary's daughter Andrea and boyfriend Dwayne. We had entirely too much to drink.

We spent the weekend threatening everyone with the DVD slideshow of our USA/NZ roadtrip. After a few drinks at Gary's, we finally brought it out, only to discover that the DVD wasn't in the case. It was really funny -- everyone was SO relieved (except us!)

Happy Birthday Barack Obama!

Dunedin!

Here are some pictures of Iain's hometown, Dunedin. It's:
1) on the South Island
2) a lot colder
3) prettier than Auckland