NZ Life

I spent a little less than 2 weeks in Peoria late September for work.  It was nice to go back home and check out the changes in Peoria.  It was also nice to visit friends and have a good chat.  I stayed at AmericInn, Peoria for a couple of days before moving to Anh’s house.  When the housekeeping helper started calling me “Hey babe!!”  that was enough.  I don’t need anyone referring to me as “babe” going through my stuff!!.  So I seek sanctuary in Chillicothe.  It was nice to stay with Anh, Robbie and Jim (Anh’s Jim not to be confused with my Jim 🙂 ). 

Dinner with Andy,Becky and family and Raj is always a delight.  Thanks for coming to dinner.  We’ll have to do that again next time I am back.  I am still anticipating Lauren to be almost as tall as me when I return next year!!.  As for Alex, I still think he is the jolliest baby I’ve ever met.

Dinner with Ioan, Ali and Rashina, and Huzefa at Flat Top was fun especially when we “married folks” get to pull Huzefa’s leg on “married life”.   He seems quite distraught when we told him that buying funiture online is coming to an end :-).

We completed the first part of our South Island road trip. We made stops at Queenstown, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Franz Josef Glacier, and Punakaiki. I must say the highlight for me personally is hiking up the Franz Josef Glacier. Even though it was raining the whole time we were hiking, the view and the experience of hiking on a glacier was still fantanstic. Half way hiking up the glacier, there were rocks falling off the opposite walls of the mountain. The noise that it made sounded as though a plane was flying right above us. We’ll have to post some pictures of the glacier soon.

Food stops on the way:

Our neighbors Ngaira and Keith invited us over for an authentic Kiwi dinner. We had an excellent meal of whitebait fritters, fish pie, silver beet, asparagus, carrots, and of course pavlova. And in true Kiwi tradition, we were also treated to a healthy dollop of dinner table sarcasm (we’re looking your way, Ngaira).

Thanks for a great evening, and I hope I don’t get in trouble like when I failed to publicly mention your New Year’s hospitality 🙂

So what if North Korea set off a nuke? The first NZ evening newscast did report the story, but only after they led with the death of V8 driver Mark Porter.

The night shift at CNN.com is a little slack too:

They could have at least pulled some archive footage of Ivy Mike.

Up until this morning I’d been using Blogger, but its ideosyncracies and failure to publish from time to time have finally driven me away. I’m now using the open source WordPress and it seems like a fine tool. It has some additional features and better layout control, but the big draw is that it resides right on the blog site which makes a lot more sense than the Blogger arrangement of publishing with FTP. It even let me import all of the Blogger posts and comments, but a number of them with images are a little out of whack. That can all be fixed, once I get around to it.

My friend Andi pointed me to this excellent, completely surreal movie of the Huygens probe landing on Titan. Beware of the file size (11MB) and of the audio/visual effect which might just induce a seizure. More information about what all the blinking and whistling is about can be found on the main page.

I was glad to find that “The Sopranos” is aired in NZ on one of their over-the-air network stations. I like the show, and I’ve missed it for quite some time after giving up HBO, so being able to watch it again (uncut, BTW) late in the evening was a good thing.

Last week’s “season finale” seemed really weak for a finale, so much so I went and checked the HBO site. Alas, it really wasn’t a finale, just a TVNZ “final episode”. It turns out there are still four more episodes to go in the Sopranos Season 6, but TVNZ has announced that those four will air in 2007?!? Continuity, anyone?

The weather is getting really nice now and losing a few hours of TV is a good thing overall, but I still have to wonder what the hell TVNZ was thinking with such bizzare scheduling.

We had fantastic weather last weekend. On Sunday we took a brief stroll up the Harry Ell Walkway which is only about 5 minutes from our house. The Port Hills offers a variety of walks mountain bike trails ranging from 30 minutes to all day+.

Links
Flickr photo set
Aerial view of the Port Hills (centered on the summit; we walked up from the top of the screen)

Well a lady found a 9cm chunk of the meteorite a bit southwest of Christchurch. You can read the full story here. It looks to be just a run-of-the-mill space rock, and not some deadly piece of plutonium from a satellite.

By this morning I noticed the story had been picked up by at least 140 online papers, which is about as big as NZ news gets internationally (provided it doesn’t involve Greenpeace 🙂