Wearing white

As opposed to last week's cultural Saturday evening of Hamlet, last weekend saw Bek & Si and Blair & Amy come over to watch the second rugby match between England and the All-Blacks. I thought I'd make the effort and wear my England. I was trumped by Bek & Si though. They painted their faces! And yes, England were given another kicking, the score being England's second worse result against the Kiwis ever. Not a good time to be English in rugby-loving Canterbury. If, as an outsider looking in reading this, you think that New Zealand is mad about rugby, consider the fact that Cantabrians pretty much put the rest of the country to shame with their rugby madness.

Add that to the fact that the Black Caps have started winning ODIs in England and you can see why I'm pretty much keeping my head down right now.

I had my mid-year appraisal today. Or I had most of it, at least. It wasn't finished in the allocated two hour slot my boss had between meetings so we've arranged another hour tomorrow to polish it off. It seems that I'm being appreciated though, which is nice, and that people feel I'm making a significant impact. It's always nice to get positive feedback, eh? There's stuff I need to work on too, like being more pro-active about some stuff and taking the lead with some stuff when my particular skills warrant it, but that sort of thing will come with time. It's difficult to step into a team and a company where people have been there years and suddenly start taking over meetings and projects and throwing suggestions around and stuff. But I'll get there.

Tomorrow night we're meant to be going to a ceilidh. It's an event being organised by St Saviours church, a plant from St John's. I'm sure you all know how Joanne likes a good dance. Any sort of dancing. And to be honest, I don't mind a bit of the old Scottish twirling and jigging too.

I think tomorrow I'm going to finally get around to getting my NZ driving license. I was able to drive on my UK license for a year but before the year's up I have to do the theory part of the NZ driving test to transfer to a NZ license. I've been putting it off and putting it off, but now, suddenly, I've realised it is less than a month until our one year anniversary of arriving over here. How has 11 months past already?