Friday 27 February 2009

Swing a cat

I just learned this mind-blowing fact. And it's so mind-blowing I just had to share it with you.

If Stewart Island was divided into squares of 50cm by 50cm there would be enough squares for every single person in the world to have one. Put another way, every person in the world could stand on Stewart Island.

See, I told you it was mind-blowing.

For those of you with NE Lincs geogrpahical knowledge, instead of NZ graphical knowledge, that's pretty much like drawing a pentagon where Grimsby, Scunthorpe, Gainsborough, Lincoln and Horncastle are the corners and standing every person in the world in that shape. Market Rasen would be even busier than race day.

Sunday 22 February 2009

Dancing dragons

Every year Christchurch City Council along with the Asian NZ Foundation organise a Chinese Lantern festival. It started in 2006, I think, so last weekend was the fourth annual running. I think it started originally as a sort of celebration of the Chinese New Year and Chinese culture with a few lanterns down by the Avon in Victoria Park but has grown into a whole cultural experience. As well as the lanterns, some of which are pretty amazing really, there are Asian food stalls and Chinese entertainment, such as dancing, music, singing and traditional puppet and face-changing acts. I think the highlight for me was probably the face-changing thing or maybe the face-changing puppets. That was an impressive combination.

The lanterns were really quite impressive too. I'm not quite sure what I expected but maybe the traditional type lanterns. You know, the sort of pop-out corrogated paper ones, with a candle inside. In the end, they were really amazingly detailed, as you can see from the photos. Well worth a wander round to have a gander. It was pretty busy though. Some of the biggest crowds I've seen in Christchurch.



Another totally original act, the like of which I've never seen, involved this elaborate crane-like contraption and a whole load of ropes, and dancing orange dragons. Hopefully you the video will give you a bit of a taste of what the show involved. I still cannot figure out how they turned the dragons round to make them go back to their house. And I'd hate to imagine the hassle it would be sorting out all the ropes if they got tangled.

This weekend has been quite a social weekend. On Friday night we had those involved with the Exploring Discipleship course over to ours for a bit of a debrief about how the course went last term and how we might tweak it going forward. Then yesterday we had a pot-luck lunch over here for Joanne's indoor netball team and their other halves, while today, after church, Tim & Christine had us and a few others over to their new place for a barbecue to thank us for helping them move back in December.

Wednesday 11 February 2009

"While the cat's at home with girlie mates trying on clothes...

...the mouse goes out taking photos."


On Monday Joanne hosted an Undercoverwear party at our place and had ten girlies over. I was duly banished from the house. So after I finished playing touch rugby at about 8pm I went for a drive and found myself at New Brighton. I had only ever been during the daytime and I'd been told that at night the pier lights up in pretty colours. I wasn't disappointed. It gave me an excuse to play around with some night-time photography and shutter settings and stuff too.

Monday 9 February 2009

The square of the hypotenuse


Usually I ignore those T-shirt ads you see in the sponsored bits down the side of websites. Most of the time the designs don't do anything for me, but this one tickled me particularly. You might have to be a bit of a maths geek to get it, mind.

If you don't get it, trust me, it's funny. And clever.

Sunday 8 February 2009

Those magnificent men in their flying machines



When my dad was here last year one of the things we did was visit the air force museum at Wigram. Today they held their annual open day. Part of the programme involved an air flying display. I've always like planes (wanted to be a pilot in the RAF for a while, until poor eyesight ended that idea) and used to go to air displays with my dad as a kid. As a result I couldn't pass up the opportunity to go along to a display only a couple of kilometres from home.

The display wasn't quite what you'd see at a big European or American air display but it was still good. I was always going to enjoy it, I think. I'm always so impressed with what the pilots can do with their aircraft. You never expect helicopters to fly almost vertical or large planes to perform the tight banks and steep climbs that they do. And the close-quarters synchronised stuff is pretty special. The highlight for today for me though was probably what the pilots of a Boeing 757 and a Hercules managed to pull off. Just amazing.

Saturday 7 February 2009

The best seven

There are certain moments when it's good to be an Englishman in New Zealand. This is one of those moments. This weekend the IRB Sevens World Series has reached its Wellington leg. New Zealand were at home, favourites and looking to retain the trophy they won last year. 43 games passed. Two teams remained - New Zealand and England. New Zealand led 17-5 at half-time. As the hooter sounded to end the second half New Zealand led 17-12. But unlike football play continues at the end of normal time until the ball goes out of play. So England had one last chance. Which they took. A try under the posts, duly converted. England win 19-17. In the Kiwis backyard. Ouch! :)

Yesterday, making the most of the lovely weather and the public holiday that is Waitangi Day Joanne and I took our bikes up to Bottle Lake Forest Park for a ride around. It's a lovely place on the northern edge of town, with tracks and paths where people ride horses, walk, cycle or run or whatever. It's so nice to get out and do some outdoorsy stuff whenever we can.

Last night we went round to Jona and Jane's, friends from church, for a bit of a party type thing, which was nice, to catch up with a few people. And this morning we went round to Dave & Kylie's for morning tea. Dave is the new assistant minister at St John's and one of his responsibilities is Bible studies and that includes the Christianity Explored and Exploring Discipleship courses. It was really just an introductory thing so we could get to meet them and so that he could hear from us about ED and from Cam & Jo about CE and stuff. If you are after prayer requests by the way, it would be great if you could pray for the Christianity Explored course that starts at church a week on Wednesday, that people would come along and have open hearts and minds to what they'll hear discussed from Mark's gospel. We're not involved in leading at CE any more of course, with our involvement in ED, but it'll still be great to have you joining us in prayer for the course.

Wednesday 4 February 2009

Whoops

I'm not quite sure how I've let over a month slip by since I last wrote something. A bit slack of me, I know. I guess the month's just been a bit full on really and I've not really felt like sitting in front of the laptop of an evening when I've got home from being in front of a PC all day. Poor show, eh?

Well, what's happened since January 2nd? I guess it's worth mentioning the rail trail. The weather this summer has been pretty awesome. One day it wasn't quite so awesome was a Sunday a couple of weeks ago when the middle of the afternoon saw rainfall and thunder and lightning and hail storms and more rainfall. This was the day that Joanne & I and Blair & Amy had decided to try the Motukarara to Little River section of the rail trail. We'd heard forecasts of bad weather coming in but it was sunny when we left home. Even the 'omen' of me blowing a valve on my bike tyre wasn't enough to put us off. We set off and then the heavens opened. We put a brave face on it and cycled probably about 7 or 8km of the 20km section. It wasn't cold or windy. Just wet. Very wet. A little short of halfway we all kind of decided we'd call it a day and save the rest for a nice day. Three of us turned round and headed back to where we started, and the car. Blair carried on. The other car was at the other end you see.

Maybe if it's nice weather this weekend, what with it being a three-day weekend and everything, we might try again. We got a towbar fitted on the big car today and I plan to buy a bike rack tomorrow so at least it means we don't have to mess around taking off the front wheels to load them into the car anymore.

The main reason for the towbar and bike rack is so that we can take our bikes when we have weekends away. We've not really taken many weekends away since we've been here but we've recently planned a few for the coming months. First up, next month, we've got a weekend in Tekapo planned. April sees us head up to Auckland for Easter to catch up with Jo's family. And then in May we've got a weekend in Wellington booked. Air New Zealand recently had a sale on internal flights too. $49 one way to Wellington. Can't go wrong, eh?

This Sunday just gone saw the annual church family sausage sizzle. As I mentioned last year the sausage sizzle Sunday always takes me back to our first ever experience of St John's four years ago now, when Joanne and I visited Chch for a weekend. This time Joanne and I were in charge of cooking the sausages. We had 420 to cook. They were the pre-cooked variety you can buy over here though so at least there was no risk of giving anyone food poisoning.

It still amazes me sometimes how Nuzziland cannot quite let go of the reins that keep it tied to the motherland. News over here quite often picks up something news-worthy from the UK, you see. Like the recent snow over there. Sure it's some heavy snowfall and stuff but if we'd had similar record dumps over here I don't think it'd make the BBC news would it?

I am so looking forward to the football season starting again this year. The first game is at the start of April. I really enjoyed playing last year and as fun as the summer league has been, it will be good to play teams a similar level and not come up against teams from divisions way above ours. I want to reach my twenty goal target this year. I'm determined to do it but the matches missed due to the Wellington weekend away and the UK trip in June will mean less matches in which to achieve it. We'll see.