The Past Few Days

I am sorry that I haven't posted in so long. I have been quite busy, and very caught up in what I was doing. I confess that I got all the way through Friday, and almost all the way through Saturday, without even realizing that I was supposed to write a blog post. Although I realize that that is somewhat irresponsible, it is also nice to be happily involved in my life here to that extent.

On Thursday, I was awakened at 7:00am from a dead sleep by the phone ringing. It was the builder who was supposed to come next week to fix our windows and doors. He said, "Change of plans, can I come and work today?" I said yes, thrilled that he would finally get this work done, since we've been waiting since we moved in. His response, however, was, "Good, I'll be there in 10 minutes." Yikes! I catapulted out of bed, and managed to get dressed, wash my face, and clean up the house by the time they got here. Two men were at the house all day, working on three windows, both doors, and the shed. Amazingly, they got everything done, and now everything works properly, which is so lovely! I spent almost the whole day feeling unsure of what I was supposed to do while they were there, because they kept having questions for me, so I felt that I needed to be accessible, but I didn't want to hover. I decided that just reading in the living room would be okay, so that's what I did all day. Since I was in the middle of a very interesting book (Hagar's Daughter), I was happy to do so, although I would have preferred to do it without loud hammering, drilling, and power sanding going on all around me.

On Friday, I spent the morning volunteering at an early learning centre, and had a really wonderful time. I didn't get to spend much time with the children, because the director wanted to spend some time showing me around and telling me about the centre. I would have thought that this was not as good, but I was wrong. As it turns out, she and I have a lot in common - she took over this centre when it was not being run very well, much as I took over my centre in Canada. She is having many of the same struggles that I had, and we had a long, wonderful conversation about dreams of improvement and the importance of best practice. It felt amazing to discuss theory, design, curriculum, and teacher training with someone who is as passionate about it as I am, and I feel that we really connected. I will definitely be going back there in the near future.

After that, I went and bought a bunch of gardening supplies at Mitre 10. By the way, Mitre 10 is the NZ equivalent of Lowes or Home Depot.

This is the Whanganui Mitre 10. As you can tell, it is quite big - in fact, much bigger than it looks here. They even have a little restaurant inside, next to the greenhouse.

Their motto is "Easy As." J and I saw commercials for it on TV at the hotel, and they said "Easy as" at the end, and both of us came to the conclusion that someone had messed up the commercial, and cut off the end, during which they must have explained "easy as" what! Then we started hearing people say, "Sweet as!" This was a bit disconcerting for me, because it sounds like "Sweet ass!" and was being said by preschool teachers to children! As it turns out, Kiwis say lots of things that end in "as," with the implication that it means "... as can be" or "... as heck" or "... as all get out" as we Kansans might say. Anyway, you can say, "Easy as," "sweet as," "hot as," "stupid as," etc. Well, Kiwis can. I haven't been able to integrate that into my rather rigid sense of grammatical correctness yet, but maybe I'll come around.

Anyway, I bought some plants, a spade, weed mat, etc., at Mitre 10, then came home and worked in our back yard for hours. We have nice soil, but it has been neglected, so it is packed down, hard, weedy, and full of broken glass, nails, trash, etc. I worked all afternoon, and successfully dug up, cleaned up, and planted one section, with a weed mat underneath. Unfortunately, I realized the next day that I'd put the weed mat way too deep, so I had to dig it all up and start again. But now it is done properly, with several pretty little plants, and it looks very nice.

Speaking of working outside, I am getting a kick out of talking with people about the temperature. It has been 25-27C (77-80F) all week, and people are stunned and slightly appalled that J and I work outside in this heat! Everyone seems to be complaining about how hot it is, and saying that they just get exhausted being outside at all, because it's so hot! I hate to be prejudiced, but I just can't understand it. On a day like today in a Kansas summer, everyone would shift around their schedules to be able to do all of their outside things while it's nice and cool, but here they all want to stay inside under the fan! It is so funny to me how much everything is relative. I wonder if J and I will feel like 27C (80F) is hot by next summer, when we've acclimated?

After working outside, I cleaned up and started on my other new project - recording audio books. There is a website (librivox.com) that organizes volunteers to read books out loud and record them, and then they make the available as audio books online for people to download and listen to for free. Of course, this is only books that were written 100+ years ago, and are therefore in the public domain, but it is still really cool. I love reading out loud, and I think it is a wonderful service to provide. I have been interested in doing it for a while, and I decided to just go ahead and do it now. So I spent then entire evening recording and editing, and I got two chapters done, which felt amazing. They were my first ones ever, and when I uploaded them, the coordinator for the book said that they were wonderful, and I did a great job! So that felt good.

On Saturday, I went out to Jan's house for the first time. Jan is my friend who owns the café, and I have still been visiting her and drinking chai at her café every week, but I hadn't been to her house. She lives out in the country, and I brought Holly out to meet her dog, Buddy. He is a very nice dog, too, and they got along great. Jan also has some pretty sheep, and Holly could barely contain her enthusiasm for them. She wanted to get into their paddock so badly, and she was smart enough to find the gate and figure out how to pull it open! Fortunately, it was bolted, so she couldn't pull it enough to fit through, but it was a close call. What a smarty!

I had a wonderful time with Jan and her husband, sitting outside drinking juice, watching the dogs play and chatting. It was the picture of a beautiful country home, with perfectly lovely people in it, and I felt calm and content.

After my visit with Jan, I went and fixed my work in the garden from the day before (as I mentioned), and then cleaned up and headed over to my friend Anna's house for une soirée française. I met Anna at a barbecue we went to at J's colleague's house, and we discovered that we'd both lived in France and were interested in speaking it to keep up our skills. She invited me over to spend the evening with her, as long as I promised not to speak English. That was exactly what I wanted, so it was perfect. She cooked a French meal, and I brought a French dessert, and we chatted away in French, and then watched a French movie. We have a very similar level of fluency - no problems with grammar or comfort, but with the occasional laps in vocabulary, necessitating an online dictionary from time to time. :) We had a lot of fun, and I know that it did me worlds of good to start thinking in French again, even just for a few hours. I am so happy to have found Anna, and we will definitely be having regular French nights, and inviting more people who speak French, as we find them.

Wow, that was a lot of updating! How nice to have so many positive things to write about! I have decided to aim for a post about every other day, but not to hold myself rigidly to that schedule, because I don't want to start stressing about posting when I am busy with other things. It will also, hopefully, keep my posts more interesting, which is better for everyone, I think. :)