My Wife Is AWESOME! (Star Trek Edition)
This morning, at around 10:30am, as we were both working hard at our chosen professions, Sara suddenly asked me if I wanted to blow off our work and go see the new Star Trek movie at the The Embassy in a half hour.
Wow, that’s a tough one.
So we’ve just returned from a completely spontaneous visit to the gorgeous movie palace where Lord of the Rings premiered to see a fantastic re-awakening of the whole Star Trek universe, and well, I just want to say:
I love you, Sara.
ps When I say “palace”, I mean “palace”. Just to give you an idea: here’s a snapshot of the restrooms I took from wikipedia:
Labels: Wellington
A Quick Re-Cap
I’m about to send out a mass-email to a bunch of old friends and I directed them all to this blog, so I’m thinking it’d be smart to write a quick re-cap post for those who’ve not been following along for a while:
#1. Marriage: Sometime this February, Sara & I passed the (Good Lord) twenty-year mark of being a couple. And I can honestly say we’re still going strong. If it weren’t for these annoying middle-aged bodies we’ve somehow been saddled with, it’d be just like it was when we first met.
#2. Kids: We have three girls: Katie (15), Megan (9) and Alison (2). All of whom are bright, beautiful, fun, above-average, and could beat up your honor student / cocker spaniel.* We love them.
#3. Jobs: Sara is an associate professor of criminology sociology, concentrating in the criminal justice system, at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Dug’s career has veered in so many directions that it’s difficult to keep track of, but has mostly involved computers, politics, and games of late.
#4. Home: Although Boulder, Colorado is our home, we’re currently living in Wellington, New Zealand for Sara’s septi-annual sabbatical. We’ll be back in Boulder this August. This blog is a journal of our time away.
I think that about covers it. Questions?
* This is a somewhat obscure reference to “My child could beat up your honor student” / “I (heart) my cocker spaniel” bumper stickers. If you’ve not seen the bumper stickers, it’s probably not that funny. Actually, it’s probably not that funny if you have. But in any case, I want to make it clear that my children don’t usually beat up cocker spaniels. Or honor students. Usually.
Labels: Wellington
Wellington Bridge Club
Despite my interest in games, I’ve never been to a bridge club, or even played duplicate. But last night I decided to give it a whirl here in Wellington. I mean, I’ve played bridge since my parents taught Mark & I during the New York Blackout of 1977. (My mom complains that I don’t remember anything from my childhood, but what she doesn’t realize is that I just don’t remember anything not game-related from my childhood. Duh!) And I played in college, and for a year or so in my first job right after college. And that was only (good lord) almost 20 years ago. But I’d been reading the newspaper bridge column in Boulder for the last year or so, and I needed to get out & meet some people around here, so why not?
There are actually three bridge clubs in Wellington, a city of around 350,000 people. One is over in Miramar (about 20 min from our house) and the other two are within 500 meters of each other on the same road here in Thorndon. I chose the Wellington Bridge Club because I’d been invited to their open Tuesday tournament by the former renter of our house. I’d called the day before and arranged to get a partner; the woman I talked to (and the former renter) told me that it started at 7:30pm, but I needed to make sure I was there by 7:15 or so; which I was.
Good thing too. Partners had to be seated by 7:20p and my partner, a lovely lady with a goodly amount of bridge and bridge club experience, needed to check on my experience with Acol, the preferred bidding system here in NZ. Since it’d been so long since I’d used any bidding system, I figured I might as well try a new one. As it turned out, it also gave me an out for some pretty poor mistakes, only one of which I could really pin on my switch from Standard American.
(For you bridge players: the differences between Acol and the American system are pretty interesting; mostly they come down to Acol being more oriented towards limit bids. For example, 2C after 1C means “that’s it, we’re done” rather than “I’ve got weak support, carry on”.)
In the end, I didn’t fair too horribly; which is to say nobody had to call the director because I’d done something completely stupid, and that’s basically the bar I’d set for myself. My partner deserved better, and I hope that coming in 14th out of 17 doesn’t screw up her standing too much. But I had fun, and I suppose that’s what counts. I’m not sure if I’ll return, but only because I don’t know if I really enjoy bridge all that much. And when you’re playing at a bridge club, it’s all about the bridge. I’m glad I had the experience, though, because it made me think some more about what would need to happen to get a regular games group going again in Boulder, and that’s something I really do want to make work.
But that’s a subject for another post.
UPDATE: I meant to mention that we had 18 tables playing (ie around 70 people), and there were probably another 10 tables taking lessons in the next room. Well over 100 people playing bridge, and they told me that the really heavy night was Thursday, when the intermediates play. Combine that with the fact that I walked by a very busy Victoria Bridge Club on my way to my club, as well as who-knows-how-many over in Miramar, and I’d estimate there are well over 500 people playing bridge at least once a week in this city. Considering I have a hard time scraping together six people for game nights in Boulder, I’m very, very impressed.
Labels: Games, Wellington
Wahine Memorial Park
Sara asked me to post a few pictures of our trip to the shore the other day, so here goes. But first, some context.
Wellington proper (or “Wellington CBD”, which stands for Central Business District, as they call it here) is in the upper part of the pic above; we live in Thorndon, which is at the very far north of this picture. As is pretty obvious from any overhead map, the big blob to the right, Miramar, used to be an island until one of the late 19th century earthquakes (and, I believe, some bull-dozing help) turned it into a “peninsula”. The airport is located on the connecting land. We took our lovely walk in Wahine Memorial Park, which is at the southern tip of Miramar (near the Googly “A”).
Below is an overview of the whole area. You can see the meadow, the rocks, the water … even a few visitors you might recognize (click the picture for the large version).
And here’s a little wildlife. Sara thinks the bird is a “shag”. I do not think that word means what she thinks it means.
Here’s a (very short) video of the waves. I love the way that the water cascades off the rock.
To see all the good pictures from that day (with captions), you can check out the album at Picasa. Or just watch the slideshow below:
Labels: Wellington
A walk on the shore
It is a stunning day here in Wellington, and it’s Sunday, so we headed out to explore new territory. We went to Moa Point, which is the South east corner of the city. While it is only ten minutes from the heart of downtown, it feels like a national park. The ocean is on one side, green hills on the other, not a house in site. The road around the peninsula on which the point resides was filled with bicycles today, and the few cars that wandered out that way went slowly and were respectful—it seems like the road belongs to the bikes. We saw some beautiful birds, found an assortment of Paua shells, and Ali played in a meadow right next to the shore. Meg suggested that a sheep belonged there, and that felt right. Apparently you can sometimes spot penguins there, so we’ll go back at dawn or (more likely) dusk one of these days. The ocean crashed up on some of the beautiful rock formations just off shore. It was a perfect morning (hopefully Dug will post some pictures to accompany this entry soon so that you can enjoy it as well).
Labels: Wellington
Botanic Gardens
Since I know my mom won't consider my tremendously long post about New Zealand electrical outlets as fulfilling my duties to keep her posted about the important things (read: her grandchildren), I offer her (and you) some pictures of the Wellington Botanic Gardens.
We've lived in cities with gardens, zoos, etc before and we've always visited and been impressed and such, but Wellington's Botanic Gardens is something special. Perhaps just because we take Alison there almost every day, these gardens feel more "ours" than pretty much anywhere in Wellington (save our house).
And these gardens are impressive: huge and quite beautiful. The land was set aside for this purpose in 1868, which is particularly amazing considering that Wellington was settled by Europeans in 1840. They have beautiful flowers (of course), but also a fantastic playground, duck pond, treehouse-based visitors' center, and even a cable car that takes you from the top of the gardens (with a fantastic view of the city) down to the quays. I think my favorite part of it all are all the paths that wind through the garden, with nooks & crannies just waiting to be explored. At this point, most of my "exploring" has been limited to the path that takes us from the main gate to the playground, but I'm hoping for more time to explore on my own. Maybe when I take up jogging again.*
In the meantime,
a few snapshots to sate your appetite, Mom:
* I'm joking. That won't happen.
Labels: Wellington
Neighbors
I know that I've mentioned this to many folks already (you among them, I imagine), but I can't help but add a post about it because it's so freakin' unbelievable to me.
On the right, you can see a few shots I took this morning of our neighbor's house. In the top photo, you can see that our fence is the dividing line between the properties and though I didn't take a shot of it, the fence ends at the inside corner of our TV room, which means that the back window of that room is also a dividing line and if we could open it (which we can't) we could crawl through onto his property. In the bottom photo, you can see how many windows of his house are visible from our bedroom window. The bottom building is a garage-like out-building, but the top windows are part of the house proper.
None of this would be worth commenting on, were it not for the fact that our neighbor is John Key, current prime minister of New Zealand.
Frankly, this blows me away. Having just come from doing political work in the states, it's seems absolutely insane. We are living quite literally a stone's throw from the leader of the country and we've not heard a peep about it from anyone in the government or security or anything. To be fair, it's not his primary residence (that's in Auckland with his family), but supposedly he spends nights here during the work week.
What's it mean? I have no idea. But the fact of it has been driving me crazy. So I offer it to you.
Labels: House, Wellington
The Sevens
Unbeknown to us, our first weekend in Wellington contained a conflagration of two rather major events here: Waitangi Day and The Sevens. Waitangi Day is something like New Zealand's Fourth of July: it's a celebration of the day that the Treaty of Waitangi was signed and New Zealand was founded. It's also a bit of Columbus Day, seeing as how the treaty reads differently in English and Maori, which has unsurprisingly led to protests centered around the day itself. But it seemed to be your typical public holiday: schools out, festivals in the city, politicians speaking, corn dogs, activist booths and so on. Lots of people and a little bit crazy.
The Sevens, in contrast, are a lot crazy. They're centered around an annual international tournament of a popular variation of rugby called "sevens" because there are seven players instead of the standard fifteen. Ten years ago, Wellington was one of the first cities to host the tournament, and somebody got the idea that people should dress up in costumes for the game and/or the parties surrounding the game. And as often happens with things like this, the costuming has now almost outstripped the games.
At this point I imagine that our American friends and family may be imagining some US event that involves costuming... like Halloween maybe, or St Patrick's Day in Boston. But I gotta say that the people of Wellington were downright impressive with their commitment to A) costumes and B) partying. We spent parts of the tournament days wandering around downtown and I'd say that people in costume outnumbered those not in costume by maybe 10 to 1. Furthermore, the costuming was almost all group-based: dozens of Flash Gordons or Duff Beer guys/girls or Waldos.
As for partying: there were several reminders in the paper and around town that the downtown business district is "liquor-free". This, we decided, must not include beer, because the number of people (mostly college-age guys in this case) wandering around with beer bottles at 10am on the first day of the party was a little scary. And according to the newspaper the official downtown party was to last until 6am on Sunday.
Well, this was obviously something that we needed to part of, so on Saturday afternoon we put stuffed animals on our heads, wrote USA on our faces and ventured out. We got enough strange looks and attention to satisfy the girls and then we headed home to watch rugger on the telly. A fine day, to be sure.
ps Sara & Katie were downtown today and discovered they're also celebrating Chinese New Year this weekend. Just what hungover Wellingtonians need! Fireworks!
Labels: Wellington
Jan 8-13: First Days in Welly
After our excellent beach adjustment time in Fiji, we had about 5 days to start learning about Wellington. Those were 5 pretty busy days: we saw our new house and the girls' new schools, got a bank account, bought a new (used) car, got insurance, learned how to drive on the left side of the road, etc, etc.
Our new home (photos on the right) will be let unfurnished. In the pictures, as someone pointed out, it's more
overfurnished. The current tenants are serious collectors of stuff. Nice stuff, but stuff nonetheless. Each of the girls will have their own rooms, Sara & I get the top floor to ourselves, and there will even be an office leftover. Not bad at all. Of course, since the whole thing will be furnished entirely with bean bags (thanks for the idea, Rich) the effect may be a little off.
As for schools: the girls' schools are right next to each other (even sharing some activity areas), and they both look great. We'll get more details once we get back to Wellington, but for now you can see on the right some pics that we took when we wandered over uninvited to get an early look.
Labels: House, Wellington
This morning, at around 10:30am, as we were both working hard at our chosen professions, Sara suddenly asked me if I wanted to blow off our work and go see the new Star Trek movie at the The Embassy in a half hour.
