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Monday, November 29, 2010

Traveling Camera

My mother bought her first digital camera just before leaving for Australia. All 49 pictures from the memory card can be viewed by clicking right here.

These are a few of my favourites; if you knew my mother, you'd understand why.





I also like this one. My mother was once reprimanded at the San Diego Wild Animal Park for petting a giraffe while she fed it a carrot. (The carrot feeding was allowed, but for some reason you are not allowed to touch their heads.)


The last photo was of Picton. It would have been taken on Sunday (the camera says 10:46 AM, but I'm not quite sure what time zone it's set to).
You didn't leave me anything that I can understand

[Note to any customs or immigration agents that might be readers of my page: all of the items pictured below are used, and owned by me for more than 90 days prior to their arrival in this country. Nicole did not buy anything from zappos, and I did not go a little crazy over the last few weeks on amazon.]


I had asked my mother to bring a few hard (or impossible) to find items with her on her trip to NZ. As I got a little carried away on the things we just had to have (like a charger for my laptop, a flash for the camera, a tuxedo shirt, cleaning solution for my electric razor...the list goes on), I gave her a ranking of which items to leave behind if she ran out of room in her suitcase.

A few days before she left, she started worrying about whether her few electric items would work here (or rather in Sydney, as our house is well stocked with 5000W 240 to 120 step up/down transformers). She struggled to read the fine print on her camera charger, but eventually we decided all she needed was an outlet converter. I told her to bring a couple, as we always seem to be needing another one...especially if she wanted a lamp in her room. Four have now appeared here. As have a couple of tail lights for my PT cruiser that I must have mentioned to her the day before her flight. And a bag of tefillin that belonged to my great-grandfather that she found in her garage during a recent clean out.

All packed nicely in a Holland America canvas bag...I assume she meant to give it to us when her ship docked in Napier today. We were back in time to see it off.


Nobody ever loves you like your mom.

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Today I stopped and shopped inside the walled city

Saturday drive out to Palmerston North to look at a sailboat. Palmerston North is the closest real city to us...and by real city: I mean there's a university and a shopping mall. It's been 9 months since I've been in a mall, and it sort of gave me a headache.


There really is not much going on in Palmerston. We stopped at the wind farm, as it's on the list of things to do. [I'll leave off the bit about the airport also being on the list...]


A nice convention of pre-1920s cars was driving around Woodville (a very small town on the way to Palmerston.


And yet another in the series, Nico having a pint (Note: I'm sure the Irish think Guinness anywhere outside of Ireland is bad, but it's just plain dreadful in NZ.


My apologies yet again for the lack of posting. I've been spending most of the time trying to tame the jungle that is our backyard. Here's a 200 kg weed that I have mostly defeated: