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.