Random stuff and Trey had a super excellent day!

Good morning from Glendowie! It's 9.45am on Thursday morning here, which means it's 5.45pm on Wednesday evening in the eastern US. Weird, right? I wonder if at any point during our six months here, I will stop regularly figuring out the time at home. It's funny how my electronic world goes dark from about 3pm until I go to bed and then wake up the next morning. Three pm here is 11pm at home. Facebook status updates don't change except for my crazy boys that I work with at the Ginn Academy who seem to be up all night sometimes :O) Maybe a few west coasters or insomniacs...

Well it WAS 9.45am, now it's 6pm, which has all you East Coasters at 2am. The day got away from me a bit. I was out and about and trying to find my way around and run some errands and after school, I was talking with one of the music teachers, a Ramones-esque sort of man, who ended up playing a little punk rock version of the New Zealand national anthem for us with one of the drum students. It was quite entertaining. 

Then Laurel had her first tennis class at the Glendowie Tennis Club. Trey goes tomorrow. We have a court at our house here, so we might as well learn to play. And in other sports news, the Churchill Park School basketball team needed one more member and the coach heard through the playground grapevine that Trey should be considered, so she let him practice with the team and he made it! He's sooooooo excited! For a kid that could barely talk about this without tears coming to his eyes when it first was decided, this has sure turned out to be pretty cool! They have a tournament next week and they practice at recess every day, from what I understand so far.

Oh, and at tennis the coach made everyone guess where Laurel was from. He asked her questions so they could hear her speak and they guessed Canada :o) Then finally someone said, the United States!! It was like this big exciting thing. So funny...


So I just have some kinda random photos right now. This weekend should be interesting with a rugby game on Saturday afternoon -- Auckland vs. Waikato, I believe. And we'll go to Piha beach on Sunday, on the west coast -- big waves, black sand. Can't wait! Until then here's the random shots. 

This is our backyard again. Been spending a lot of time there... There are ferries and boats and sometimes flocks of sailboats that are always going by. I love them!!

Laurel has to wear a pedometer all week as part of Walk NZ, a health program at school. She apparently walks around 20,000 steps a day. Who knew? That brings up an interesting point though -- it's nothing for the people here to go somewhere that requires a full day of walking. Or possibly even longer! We knew this from the UK, and I believe they call it tramping. I have read about places (volcanoes, waterfalls, etc) that look amazing and it'll say that you must walk for many hours but it's worth it. Many hours? What? There's no train or ferry or ...something??? Seems so foreign to an American with three cars!

 If you look closely here you can see the rainbow over Laurel's tennis lesson. This is the second one I"ve seen in a week or so and Dennis saw a double one last week that he swears was so bright it was almost neon. A magical place, this New Zealand...