The Lazy Hazy Days of Summer
Now Playing: Eskimo Joe - Older Than You
Apparently each year in Auckland there is about a 90% chance that the hottest day of the year will be within 5 days either side of the end of January/beginning of February. I guess it's a bit strange that summer is consistently at its strongest within these ten days, but it is without a doubt (I imagine) that this year will be another one within that 90%, as the weather has been abnormally warm in the last few days.

I generally don't get too annoyed at hot weather, at least compared to how many other people view it. For some reason feeling cold has always bugged me more than feeling a bit too warm, which is probably not particularly conducive to Auckland's climate as, at least in my opinion, it's a bit colder than I would like about 75% of the year, just right for most of the rest, and generally only too hot on fairly rare occassions. Although intense heat at night is particularly annoying, I must admit. Perhaps I just feel the cold more easily than most other people, as I know when I was younger I would always find swimming pools and the sea freezing cold when other people seemed to have no problem enjoying themselves in it. Although wetsuits having greatly helped that situation when swimming in the sea, I still find it very uncomfortably cold at first, and very rarely do I find it actually warm. If I'm saying "oh wow the sea's really warm" I'm probably actually meaning "it's fucking freezing, but not quite as freeeeeeezing as it normally is". Fortunately it never really gets over 30 degrees in Auckland, largely due to sea breezes that exist in some form or another on about 99% of days here, which means that I haven't had to experience particularly unpleasant hotness, as it can occur in other places around the world.

However, back in January and February 2001 I spent 26 days in Sydney - not long after the height of their summer. I had been told my many people that it was a pretty big risk going to Sydney at that time due to the oppressive heat, but it was my only real chance to spend more than just a week or two there, so I figured that it would be an experience and I headed off 'over the ditch'. In the couple of weeks before I left, however, I did begin to get a bit freaked out about what might happen with regards to the heat there. Sydney got caught up in a heat wave, temperatures reached well over 40 and I started getting a tad worried whether I would be able to cope with that kind of heat. Fortunately by the time I got there things had cooled down a little.

But only a little. On the day I arrived the plane landed at Sydney airport, as per usual, and things seemed fairly normal while I was safe inside the air-conditioned aeroplane. One my way out, I wandered along the tube that takes you from the plane to the terminal, and at one point there was an opening for people to do maintenance on the tube I guess. Walking past there i felt like I had opened the door of an oven! I suppose that all the concrete there reflected a lot of the heat back and it would have been much warmer than usual, but heck I was pretty worried about the heat now. I was staying about a 10-15 minute walk from the Stanmore train station, at a friend of Jannatun's place who so enormously kindly let me stay there for the whole three weeks without charging me a cent for accommodation. As I had just arrived I had an enormously heavy bag to lug from the train station to where I would be staying. This turned into the most epic 10 minute walk ever - taking at least half an hour from memory as we would walk about 20 metres, start sweating like nothing else, stop for a few minutes to catch breath, and then get going again. I was so stuffed by the time I reached the place.

Yet that was possible the hottest day of my entire stay. I think it reached somewhere around 35 that first day, whereas for most of the next three weeks it was on the high 20s. Warm, yes, but not exasperatingly boiling. In fact, after I got used to it it was awesome not to ever feel cold. I never needed more than a single sheet when going to bed, I would wake up in the morning and go outside at about 8.30am and it would be as hot as Auckland at midday, but many of these thigns I actually found quite fun. Sure, you waited for the next train if the one that came along was one of the "old ones" without air-conditioning, but in Sydney waiting for the next train generally didn't mean it was too far away. However, there was one day when it was almost unbearably hot. This was the day Jannatun and I went out to Wonderland, the big theme park in Sydney. Although it was an awesome day, and I was thoroughly impressed by the place, damn it was hot! Waiting for some of the rides to get started I could feel the sweat literally dripping off me, even though I wasn't moving at all. When we found a shallow pool with rain dripping over these umbrella things I just about jumped in head first, and did eventually get myself quite wet. But it didn't matter because I was dry in minutes - it was a kind of drying heat that you just never ever get here in Auckland. Later that day after Jannatun had gone home, I took a detour to see Sydney's Olympic Stadium and surrounding area, which only a few months before had hosted the Olympic Games. Once again I was thoroughly impressed by the place, but the train that took me out on the short loop to the stadium was an old train, and I just say in it dripping with sweat for the 5 minutes I had to wait before it departed. I have rarely felt more hot than I did at that exact time.

Yet overall I think I enjoyed the heat of that trip, which just added to an awesome holiday. Being able to comfortably go swimming at the beaches without feeling a tinge of coldness was great, and it just hammered home to me that indeed I was not in Auckland any more. Quite often I would stand at the train stations each evening watching the weather forecasts and actually hoping for a really hot day - just so that I'd know what 37 degrees actually felt like. Not for too long, but just for one day. I guess that day out at Wonderland theme park I got my wish.

Take 2
Now Playing: The Killers - Smile Like You Mean It
I wrote a really awesome and long post yesterday, it linked together everything I had been up to over the long weekend - exclaimed how great it is to have three day weekends, how much fun Amalia had been on Saturday, what we had been up to on Sunday and Monday and many other things. Then my browser decided to crash and the whole document got eaten. I was actually slightly surprised by how much that upset and annoyed me, as I couldn't bring myself to updating again yesterday. Leila quite correctly stated that if I wrote the post again straight away I would probably be able to remember most of it, but I just didn't have the heart - I couldn't quite face sitting there for half an hour writing out the same thing that I had been doing previously, it would have been just far too depressing.

But it was a good weekend, in saying that. From the time with Amalia on Saturday, the fact that Leila and I went out on Saturday night together with just the two of us for the first time since our very first date in August last year, to our nice day on Sunday when I drove up to Shakespear Regional Park at the end of the Whangaparaoa Peninsula where we relaxed on the beach for a few hours in the shade of an awesome Pohutukawa and enjoyed a particularly nice and sunny day. Then yesterday was the perfect blob day, lots of playing Sims, doing music stuff on the internet (managed to add about 20 songs to my iPod which was great) and watching some TV in the evening.

After such a good weekend work today has seemed to be very difficult to get myself back into. Projects that I felt totally "onto" only a few days ago I really have to now think about in order to remember all the little details that no matter how hard you try to get down on paper, are still only properly stored somewhere in your head. Perhaps my brain just really decided to shut down over the three days, and is going to require an extra day to kick back into action. I find that's often the case with me, that the more I do the more onto things and less lazy I am, but at the same time I can very quickly become accustomed to doing hardly anything, and once I've slipped into that frame of mind getting anything done at all seems like an enormous mountain to climb.

The time when that appeared most obvious to me was when I had just finished my Bachelor's Degree, back at the end of 2002. It had been a pretty hardcore year, first full year away from home and stage three to boot. After a tricky first semester where I only just managed to stay on top of my university work, I really sussed things out in the second semester (though it helped I was doing one less paper) and got some really good marks. I felt like my brain was really humming, had figured out a lot from that time and could suss out university work a lot better than ever before. But as soon as I finished university and no longer had all of these things floating around in my head, and could actually have a break from things (although I was working at McDonald's that's not particularly mentally stimulating), it seemed like my brain truly went on holiday. I kept of forgetting things and messing up things that I could do just fine only a few weeks beforehand. Although it was annoying at the time, it now seems quite interesting that I fairly much caused this to happen by letting myself go on holiday. More than that I think it's often the habit I get myself into which determines how easy or difficult getting a task done actually is. For a long time I didn't think I had the time to actually have breakfast in the morning before I left for work, but now there's an easy 5 to 10 minutes in the morning where Leila and I have toast together and I have a chance to read the newspaper. I guess it's the case with so many things, that if they're not a habit, or not something that you're used to, then doing a task can seem quite difficult. But once it's become a part of my routine then it appears quite simple, and I wonder why I thought it wasn't possible to do that beforehand.

I know that my mind will eventually fully kick back into work mode. It's still probably slightly on holiday from my big break a couple of weeks ago, and is also realising that in not too long I have yet another break, although shorter this time. Once it becomes a habit for me to get my mind fully into working it won't be quite so difficult to abandon the webpages I use to give myself short mental breaks from time to time, and to drag myself back to the excel table or word document that I happen to be working on.

Self Awareness
Now Playing: Eskimo Joe - London Bombs
I have thought about how to put together a post about this for quite a while. A way to eloquently detail a series of thought processes that I have had for a great deal many years now, but have never really been able to put into words that make sense to anyone whatsoever. It probably won't work, but I think that it's worth giving it a shot anyway, hopefully at least to some extent other people might read it and think "hey... I've had something similar to that feeling before at some stage in my life". I felt inspired to at least attempt to blog about it last night after a chat with Leila, about how weird it can seem at time when you externalise yourself and actually look upon yourself as if you were just another person out there in the world.

OK so I'm starting to make no sense at all already. Let me try to put together what I really mean in a way that at least makes some sense. All around us every day there are hundreds, if not thousands of "other people" - those you see walking along the footpath, those in that annoying car that cut you off on the way to work, those on the TV, even those who you know really well indeed. But they're all "other people", they're all living beings that aren't you. Of course this is totally obvious, but I have often gone from that feeling to one where I'm almost surprised that I'm not just another one of those "other people", but in fact here's a body and a mind that is actually mine. The idea has been rather freaky to me at times, a realisation that I'm incredibly lucky that there did happend to be a creature that was created and it ended up being me, it hadn't happened before and it probably won't happen again (unless you're into reincarnation ideas), and in a lot of ways I'm pretty damn lucky I didn't end up being a cabbage or a dung beetle (the odds are far greater surely).

This may seem so damn obvious it's not really worth thinking about in too much detail, but it makes you think that "what if there hadn't have been a me?" What if the billions of little mini-events that led to someone actually becoming me, where I actually had control over a body and had the opportunity to have a life, had been ever-so-slightly different, and some other bozo had ended up being in control of Joshua Arbury and I had ended up being a dung beetle. It's a pretty scary thought. I think often I'm freaked out by this thought because I'm truly analysing something that I obviously just take for granted the rest of the time, that of course I happen to be in control of this mind and body and I just go through life doing life things, but when I sometimes sit there and let myself actually think about the chances of actually being able to have a life here it's all a bit disconcerting, but cool at the same time.

I guess for many people this whole idea seems a bit weird and obvious to really warrant too much thought - it's like "well of course I happen to be me, big deal!" But I like to occassionally think that isn't it strange that every other person around you in life is so obviously "other", but that seemingly randomly one being appeared and you happened to be the one sitting in the drivers seat and being given that particular life. I find myself almost stupidly sitting on the couch at times repeatedly saying in my head "it's me.... me.... me" and wondering what it would be like if I was another person and cam across Joshua Arbury on the street on day, how I would be if I wasn't myself - if that makes any sense whatsoever.

Last Person Turn Out The Lights
Now Playing: Pluto - Dance Stamina
In the last few months it seems like a great number of the people Leila and I know well have disappeared off overseas. Ella and Pete started off the trend, Sue-Li continued it on, and now Leila's sister Bernice has headed off to the other side of the world for a six month exchange to Italy. I feel excited for all these people, heading off on amazingly interesting and eye-opening phases of their lives, where they're come back with experiences that just couldn't have been gained any other way. Yet at the same time it's all a bit frustrating for me (and for Leila) that we're stuck here in New Zealand continuing on with very much normal lives, and added to that all these really cool people in our lives are no longer there. I suppose that the next few months will be exciting enough for us, as we finally move out into a place of our own and do the whole house establishment thing - but at the moment I suppose that it just seems like everyone else is having all the fun.

I had a fun night last night though, as Leila's family, Amalia and myself all got together for one last dinner before Bernice heads off on her flight today. We went to a pizza restaurant quite near where Ella and Pete used to live, and stuffed ourselves on enormous amounts of some of the best pizza ever. At a place like that you can share the large size pizzas among two people - as Leila and I did the previous time we were there - and still be stuffed. With six of us plus Amalia we had four pizzas, which meant a great deal of stomach stuffing. Amalia was remarkably easy at the restaurant, although it greatly helped we were upstairs and had a whole area almost to ourselves, and she definitely ate her fair share with a couple of quite large pizza slices. Then for dessert we got a variety of yummy things, even though we were getting so full by then that the thought of more food was becoming quite scary. One of the desserts included a raspberry sorbet, which was seriously one of the nicest things I had ever tasted. Compared to normal ice-cream, the flavour was just way more intense, and of a sweet raspberry that was just divine. One day I'm going to search and search for either a recipe for making it, or for a massive tub of it that I can slowly work my way through. It was a good way to say goodbye to Bernice, at least for the next six months. In some ways I suppose that doesn't feel like too long, but when I think about it by the time she gets back Amalia will be 3 and Leila and I will be living in a place of our own it makes me realise that indeed that is quite some time. So Leila and I will both be sisterless, at least in New Zealand, from today until August.

On a more positive note it's now only just over a couple of weeks until Leila and I go on a holiday of our own. It's been 15 years since I went up to the very northern tip of New Zealand, Cape Reinga, so it will be cool to head up there again with Leila and to have a holiday that isn't just Mangawhai Heads. And this coming weekend is a three-dayer thanks to Anniversary Day!

A World Of Dreams
Now Playing: The Album Leaf - Eastern Glow
I am often equally amazed and frustrated by my dreams. They open up a whole world to me, one that's consistent with past dreams on many occassions, which now makes enough sense to me that I don't find myself questioning its differences with the real world but instead navigating around from memories of my past dreams. Yet at the same time they're so infuriatingly frustrating, because I just find myself forgetting so much of that "dream world" the instant I wake up in the morning. The consistency of my dreams often amazes me, that I have a dream-university, a dream-school, a dream downtown Auckland, a dream motorway system, a dream map of the city, a dream map of the world even. It's rather weird though that all of these "dream worlds" are recognisable to me as normal and I can navigate myself around the different places - whether I'm driving a car or catching a bus or train - yet they're so different in many cases to how the real Auckland is. I have a specific central motorway junction that for some reason begins near the Morningside train station, and a dream harbour bridge which is fairly similar to the real one, but for some reason I'm often able to walk or run across it without getting run over. In the case of the harbour bridge it's not that there's a footpath or anything, but just that the cars keep on managing to miss me.

That seems to be a running theme in so many of my dreams these days. In the past I would struggle with the issues thrown up by my dreams. I would find it really difficult to run away from things when I had to, it was almost like my legs just couldn't find traction with the ground to force myself forwards and I would expend so much effort and yet hardly move myself forwards. It seemed the only way to actually move forwards was to to dig my hands into the ground like I was climbing, and to gain enough traction that way to move myself forward - I think almost walking ape-style. The other trick I seemed to find that worked was to walk backwards, as somehow that meant that I was able to get to where I wanted, although obviously it would be at a slower pace than if I was running forwards. In dreams like this a few years ago I would keep struggling to run or walk normally, before finally working out that I needed to use my hands to help me, or that I needed to walk backwards. However, these days I just seem to naturally use these tricks, to not be worried that it's really odd to use them. It's really strange in many ways that my mind is just so much more accepting of the oddities of my dream world and that I'm less worried about it.

I also seem really confident of my ability to "get through" my dreams, even when something really freaky is happening. It's like something in my mind does actually realise that I am in a dream, and not reality, or at least in some sort of "other world" where the normal rules don't really apply. For example about three nights ago I had a dream where at one point I was at the edge of a room, which I could see had a lion and a tiger - I was freaked out because the door to the room was open and there was no reason the animals couldn't just wander out and maul me to a long and terrible death. Yet my concern was to close the door really quick, rather than to just get the hell out of there. Although my logical mind said that this was a really dangerous situation, I somehow realised in my head that I would be OK no matter what happened and that I had some sort of weird sense of invincibility.

When I think about most of my dreams the many aspects of them aren't particularly unusual. It's quite rare I dream of being able to fly, or having giant weird animals. Normally there are a number of fairly normal things, but they're just thrown together in an incredibly weird and bizarre manner. For example, two nights ago I had a dream which I managed to remember in unusual detail. I was sitting a university exam, in either Russian or Irish history I think. It was one an exam for a university paper that I seem to find myself quite consistently and commonly doing a bit of. Quite often I'm really stressed out about these exams because it seems like ages since I did anything for the paper (which it normally is... the time since I last had that particular dream), but this time I actually felt OK about it. It was a two hour exam, and I had to write three essays - which is the normal format for a geography exam rather than a history one, but anyway. I found it a bit tricky getting started on my writing, and for some reason the solution to this was to start writing my first essay on a part of Leila's skin - I know this seems really really strange but to me in the dream it just seemed only slightly odd, yet I was reassured that for some reason it had been given the OK, and that I even knew that I would be able to have it marked. Goodness knows how though! After writing a bit there I migrated on to writing the remainder of my first essay on seemingly random bits of paper - like the ones I had torn out of my exercise book and written on. Eventually I found myself running out of these random bits of paper, and then worried that I wouldn't be able to organise them all into something that flowed from one bit to the next, so that the marker would actually be able to piece together what I had written. Then I got worried about the first bit of my essay (the part that I had written on Leila) because it was starting to smudge, and I also managed to realise that it was totally stupid to expect the marker to actually be able to mark this bit of my essay (heck I didn't want them to be checking out my girlfriend's skin!) By now time was slowly starting to run out - I think that I had spent over and hour writing my first essay when I should have been onto the second after 40 minutes - so copying out what I had already written another time just didn't seem like an option. So I magically waved my hands over the writing on Leila, then waved my hands again over a piece of paper - and it just seemed to magically transfer onto the paper. I wasn't surprised to much extent, as I knew that it would work, but at the same time it still felt a little bit weird.

After a little while longer, the setting for this exam seemed to magically change from my parent's bedroom to the backyard at my place (settings for things in my dream are always weird, once the All Blacks played a rugby test in my lounge). Then Natalie, who also was in this dream and sitting the same exam, wandered up to me and asked me to check over something that she had written. I was saying to her that we couldn't really talk in the exam because it was an exam, but once again for some reason we could get away with it. I had a quick look over her answer, which must have been to a short question because she had only written two lines. She then explained to me that it was obvious nobody had done anything about the talking in the exam because the same magical thing that had allowed me to transfer the writing from Leila's skin to the paper meant that for some reason people just didn't notice anybody talking during the exam. After that the dream sort of slipped away, but I remained quite excited by my seemingly magical powers. It was also rather unusual for me to remember so many details about a dream.

I think many of my dreams these days do reflect me being more comfortable with my life, and less worried about things. I seem to have a "she'll be right" attitude to my dreams, that pretty much no matter what's happening that I will be able to deal with it. There's still the odd exception, such as a dream I had a few weeks back when Amalia seemed to go missing where I totally flipped out, but that's quite understandable. Sometimes I think people can read a bit too much into dreams, but obviously they're a window to your subconsious so they tell you what you might truly be thinking or what you might truly want in a way that you can't quite access consciously because you have all this logical thinking clouding the issues.

Back to It?
Now Playing: The Killers - When We Were Young
There's an oddness the the first weekend after a long holiday. In many ways this has become my normality, and returning to being able to sleep in, not going to work, having Amalia during the day, going over to Leila's house for lunches and so on doesn't really feel like a weekend, but rather just how things normally were any day of the week. I was almost having to remind myself that today was indeed a Saturday, rather than just reverting to some sort of extended holidays for myself. I've had a reasonably good week at work actually, although in many ways it has seemed really weird and surreal. One of my bosses is now in Singapore, and not only does that change everything in the office, but all the work that I've been doing lately has been for him, and now I'm the one who needs to organise everything that happens next. It's a challenge that's for sure, but I suppose it has the potential to be really interesting in the end as I get the experience of being a lot more independent. At the moment however, while we get everything set up and organised it's just rather annoying. However, I'm sure over time things with smooth themselves out.

Over the years I have found myself commenting quite often on the Big Day Out on this page. This is despite the fact that I've never gone, and that I've never actually been particularly interested in going. Generally it's a little bit too 'hardcore' for my tastes, and the idea of spending the day crushed with millions of other people listening to music I wasn't really that keen on didn't exactly float my boat. However, yesterday's event was probably the one I perhaps should have gone to, but only realised a bit too late the number of bands playing that I actually liked. So often in the past I haven't been particularly interested in any of them at all, or only interested in the New Zealand bands - and even then mainly because they're from NZ rather than because they're any good. Yet this year when I think about it, there were many bands which I would have really enjoyed seeing live. A look through the songs on my iPod show a great deal of Evermore, Eskimo Joe, The Killers and so on. But as per usual it didn't happen, although as I said this year for the first time I actually feel a tad sad that I wasn't organised enough to get my ass into gear and get tickets. Ah well at least I have the knowledge that I'm going to see Snow Patrol in February.

Wow... looking back at January posts in the past has made me realise how much this blog has changed in the 6 years it's now been going for. My first official post was made on January 12th 2001 - and I talked about going shopping, getting a $2000 cheque for my university fees, and actually quite liking a Britney Spears song (oh the shame of it!). My early posts are just so different from how I view and use this blog now, with just short little one line parts to the entry - often just a random little message of what I did or my opinion on something in particular. Some of it is just painfully embarrassing for me to read in many ways, but on the other hand it just shows how far this site (and obviously myself) has come in this time. In some ways I do kind of wish that I had written entries then like I do now, so that I could have a much more detailed record of my life back then. But thanks to the snippets supplied from my blog I can at least go some way towards putting the pieces together, and my memory can often fill in the gaps.

January 2001 was actually a pretty cool month for me, when I look back on it with six years of hindsight. I had just finished my first year of university, and was feeling much more comfortable at figuring it out. I had a computer at home for the first time over a christmas holidays, I was saving like crazy to go to Australia in February as well as pay my half of my university fees, so it was a pretty insane month all round actually. An awful lot of my time that month was spent either on the computer in Yahoo Chat - via Cheetachat client which I knew back-to-front by the end of that time - or at work at St Luke's McDonald's. By January 2001 I had been working at McDs for a year, and had become one of the more "experienced" people. Yet I still felt reasonably "new" in many ways. I had only learned how to serve of front counter and drive-thru a couple of months earlier, and was still perfecting them, but overall in some ways it was definitely my happiest time at that store. By working pretty big hours there I felt a true part of the place at last, rather than just some person who came in for a couple of shifts a week occassionally, and learned things but never really felt "part of it". I got to know everyone well, there weren't many faces I didn't recognise in the staff anymore, and it just felt a lot more homely. At the end of the month I was in Sydney, enjoying the first week of my longest ever stay there - at three weeks. I thoroughly enjoyed being able to have such a long time there, as it meant that for once by the end of it I actually felt quite familiar with the place. I could remember where all the train lines went, I could find my way around the inner city without any problems and it was all just a really nice feeling.

I challenge you, my readers, to recall your January 2001s, and to share your overarching memories of that month.

Oh.... Dear...
Now Playing: Brooke Fraser - Seeds
I think I managed to achieve something in my blog post yesterday that I have been aspiring to do for quite some time - to find a way to work in my "comment" on something I know quite a bit about, and feel quite strongly about, into my blog without it feeling wrong, and out of place. Most blogs, as opposed to online journals, are obviously people's opinions about stuff that's going on around the world that is of interest to them - rather than just a running commentary of their life. In some ways this page is much more of an online journal than it is a blog, although it's highly public nature means that it's hardly the "tell all journal" that something more private might be. As I've mentioned in the past I think that I would abandon a more private diary type thing pretty quickly anyway - and in actual fact I don't have particularly much to moan about anyway, which is what those kinds of diaries are generally for.

But I digress. After boring all those non-planners out there to tears with yesterday's post, I'm afraid that I am once again inspired to act similarly. I am normally very reluctant to randomly link to new articles and comment on them, as there are so many other blogs out there that totally overdo it - to the point of driving me nuts and actually offering very little comment of interest on the topic from their own perspective. Google is out there to help you search for interesting things, and you don't need a blog to do that for you. So I'm going to only mention the one article, and even paraphrase what it says so that you don't need to go read the whole thing yourself (although it is quite a hilarious read). Anyway, the point of the article is that the National Party has finally realised that rising house-prices is a major concern for them, which I guess in many ways is completely fair enough as they're a pretty major concern for me as the chances of me being able to afford to buy a house any time in the next... well... ever seem incredibly remote. So they're sending some guy around the world to see what other countries are doing, and to come back with some ideas about what can actually be done to stop house prices spiralling upwards even further.

The problem is that the National Party sees the cure for spiralling house-prices as being rather simple, by opening up more land for development. The Auckland Regional Growth Strategy has placed limits on how far Auckland can spread, in order to curb the urban sprawl which causes nasty things like horrific traffic congestion through car dependence, the loss of fertile farmland to development, and most of all the boring homogeneous types of development that I talked about yesterday. What the Regional Growth Strategy has also obviously done is restrict the supply of developable land within the Auckland Region, therefore bumping up prices because the demand is still there. One project I did last year showed that only 11 out of 40 odd new subdivisions around the edges of Auckland would be able to supply a house and land package for less than $450,000, a pretty scary thought for someone like me hoping to one day think about buying a house. According to the sharp thinkers of the National Party, if the balance of demand and supply can be found once again by allowing more supply, then surely house prices will come down to more sustainable levels.

Well, I guess that makes some sense. However, the problem is that the urban limits are there for a reason - and the perils of not having limits is plainly evident all around us in the mess that everyone in Auckland lives in today. From the end of WW2 until the 1990s there weren't really any growth limits on Auckland, so the place grew out at all angles to end up having an area about the size of Greater London (with about one eighth the population) - people needed cars to get anywhere because everywhere was so far away, so we ended up with car dependency higher than Los Angeles. There are so many reasons why a metropolitan urban limit is utterly essential, and although it may contribute to rising house prices this doesn't necessarily have to be the case. On our great voyage around Auckland yesterday, I was talking to Leila about how there could be easy alternatives to just letting the city spread and spread, while also providing enough units to keep prices down. The solution appeared fairly simple actually. Most homes in Auckland these days have about 70% of their value wrapped up in their land. In some areas it's way more, while I guess in other spots some idiot has built a huge house on a crap piece of land next to a main road and has most of the value in the house. So if land's the most valuable part of the equation, and if it's the land that seems to be pushing the price of each dwelling up so high that houses are their most unaffordable since the early 1990s, why don't we reduce the amount of land per dwelling to make things more affordable? If a larger number of attached dwellings and townhouses were built, with significantly less land per unit, then surely these would be way more affordable than the typical house built on the edge of the city these days - a single level house taking up as much as possible of a 400 square metre site with completely useless narrow yards all around the house. Furthermore, by getting more dwellings on the existing land area, the city wouldn't have to keep spreading to provide the supply of properties that could rebalance itself with demand.

The most hilarious part of the whole article though, one that actually made me crack up laughing involuntarily, was the plan to visit Houston, Texas. Houston is quite possibly the worst designed city in the world - with enormous spaces of motorway yet still having chronic traffic congestion. According to one book I read last year, due to its horrific vehicle usage and lax emission standards, Houston emits as much as the whole of California. "Although freeing land is not necessarily a silver bullet, I want to visit places like Houston, which has no urban limits," says the article. Well.... yeah... if you really want to find out what NOT to do, then Houston is probably a good place to go.

Anyway, that's enough planning rant for today. I promise that I'll try to get back to more normal stuff in the next few posts, I think it's just a combination of being back at work and my mind clicking back "into action" and various events such as yesterday's drive and that newspaper article have meant that my mind seems to be focusing much more on planning stuff in the past few days. Anyway, it's always good to have a bit of variety in this blog.

Auckland's Planning Failure
Now Playing: Snow Patrol - Chocolate
I spent about four hours today driving around Auckland taking photos for a project we're working on at the moment. In the end it was for only 38 photos which is slightly depressing, and even more depressing when I had about 37 of those photos taken after an hour and a half at the most. Yet the last photo that required taking was all the way out in Pukekohe, which involved a rather long drive out there and back. In the end I had done about 150 km for the day, which is quite a lot of driving no matter how you think about it. While I can't divulge much information about this project, it does involve taking photos of quite a few different houses, which can be rather interesting at times - such as if the occupant happens to be standing outside collecting their mail for example. Or if the house is down the end of a rather long driveway. At the end of last year, when I took the bulk of photos in a couple of mad days (the ones that are left are those spread far and wide... such as Pukekohe), there were quite a few occassions when Leila and I would roll along to photo a certain house only to find that the occupant was collecting their mail, or washing their car, or just randomly standing out the front of their house. By doing a quick 'round the block' we managed to come back and photograph most of the places eventually, but I felt strange doing so in some ways. Almost dirty in a way, that I was prying in on their lives and taking away all their privacy by photographing their house.

I guess the good thing about getting 'out in the field' and driving around parts of Auckland I don't normally get to, to take photos for projects such as this, means that I end up with a far greater knowledge of the city, and feel like I know the place a lot better than before. As with any large city you live in, there are parts of Auckland I visit almost daily - like the trip between home and work, work and Leila's, over to pick up Amalia or drop her off; then there are the occassional trips - like out to see my grandmother in Highland Park, or the route up north to Mangawhai Heads or from work to Manukau City as I go on one of the many voyages out there. Yet before I started in this job there were some fairly massive tracts of Auckland that I had never visited. Yet slowly, bit by bit, throughout the last year and a bit my job has taken me to the places I had missed before, for some reason or another. That's not to say I've been down every street in Auckland, or know my way around no matter where I am without the need for a map, but today as I took a look through Wattle Downs I ticked off the last suburb in Auckland I know of to which I had never been before.

Yet the whole process was so intensely underwhelming, even depressing as I mentioned to Leila as we were leaving the place. I should have guessed from looking at the annoying buzzy bee on the website for the place, but it turns out that Wattle Downs is the most sanitised boring suburb to have ever been built in Auckland. As we drove down the boring new street, complete with street-lights designed to look old-fashioned but ending up just looking dumb and out-of-place, the whole area - street after street - just looked like a clone of the last house, or of the last street. Complete with seemingly perfectly mowed lawns, nicely tended roses, it all looked like a scene taken from some stereotypical suburban nightmare TV show. Most houses were totally practical, brick-and-tile on a concrete pad, single level so that the old people (which surely were the target audience for a place like this) wouldn't have to walk up stairs to get to their bedroom, but just so damn boring! There wasn't a shop in sight, the only open space was really there just to ensure that when it rains the stormwater can be dealt with effectively, and (of course) just about nobody walking anywhere). Yet the thing that got me the most was thinking about all the other parts of newly developed Auckland (with some exceptions) are built exactly the same. New developments out near Henderson - the same, in Flat Bush - the same if slightly bigger houses, in south Mangere - exactly the same, and so on.

While the urban design part of my head was appalled at this realisation, my planning knowledge led to me thinking that after all it wasn't really that surprising. Each house complied with the minimum site area per unit with probably a bit to spare, each house was built to maximise the size of the house without having to be two storeys high, but still complied with the building coverage limits. Each house was thankful for that one or two metre sideyard to keep a small distance between their house and the one nextdoor - presumably so they can haul their lawn-mower back there to do their little 80 square metre lawn and to ensure that "horror of horrors" they weren't a 'townhouse'. With the possible exception of Waitakere City Council, every District Plan that I've come across seems to actively encourage this kind of bland suburban growth. Almost every part of these houses would have just sailed through the resource management process, easily complying with the rules set out to ensure that "residential amenity is maintained while providing for a variety of housing requirements" - which appears as an objective just about everywhere in the District Plans I read. If this is the residential amenity that councils really want, a homogenous bunch of low-slung houses where all you can see from a distance is a sea of roofs and garages, then they've surely got a different idea about what amenity means to me. Surely these aren't "features that increases attractiveness or value, especially of a piece of real estate or a geographic location".

Ask anyone which parts of Auckland would have the highest amenity value, the most pleasing, agreeable and attractive parts of the city. You're most likely to be responses such as Herne Bay, Ponsonby, Parnell, Mt Eden and other older parts of the city. The council strongly agrees with this, and has ensured some sort of heritage protection for these vast swathes of older Auckland. Yet the ironic thing is that nobody could build another Ponsonby, Herne Bay or Parnell these days - not because there isn't the demand there or the will to do so, but simply because council rules strictly fobid it in a vast number of ways. The houses would be too close to the street and each other, the streets would be too narrow, the houses would overshadow each other and break 'recession plane' rules, there wouldn't be enough off-street parking, maximum height limits would be exceeded by anything that dared to be higher than a single level (mainly because villas and bungalows aren't built on a concrete pad that sits at ground level).

To not bore everyone with anymore planning jargon, it just seems nonsensical that just about every rule in the planning book encourages a Wattle Downs over a Herne Bay, even when it is so basically obvious which one has more 'amenity value'. Believe it or not, it is the narrow streets and the closeness of the houses that provide these areas with such a nice, intimate feel. When I wrote my thesis back in 2005 one of the main points I stressed was that although intensification isn't something we particularly want to do, it's something that we kind of have to do these days to avoid more sprawl, and therefore we need to do it well. A little over a year later I think my point of view has changed slightly, and I find myself very glad that Auckland can't keep growing outwards, glad that more Wattle Downs are now frowned upon for increasing traffic, increasing servicing costs and removing precious open space. If a vast sprawl of many Wattle Downs' was to be Auckland's urban future, a featureless suburbia reminding me of the "somewhere in America" where ET was set, then any reason to avoid that happening has to be a good thing. Perhaps eventually I can help ensure that this is not the case, that Auckland's future is in creating suburbs of interest, and that although it's impractical to replicate a Herne Bay or Ponsonby on the city fringe, that there is an alternative to the bland sprawl of Wattle Downs. Maybe that can be my professional goal to some day eventually achieve.

Normality
Now Playing: The Doves - Here It Comes
It's funny how quick life can return to normality after a holiday. It's not like you forget that you've had a break, as (especially at the moment) everything at work "before the holiday" still seems like an age ago, but very quickly being at work just appears so very normal again. It's been a bit of an odd week so far, trying to get things worked out so that I'm not going "argh... need to ask Pete about this... ah that's right he's in Singapore." With so many little odds and ends to be tied up still it's probably going to be quite a while before things really kick on, and 2007 actually starts to feel like a different year, rather than just an extended end of 2006. Annoyingly one thing that hasn't begun to felt like normal again is waking up at 7.30am each morning. At the moment whenever my alarm goes off it feels like I'm being very rudely awoken from a deep deep sleep. Last night was the first night in a while that wasn't boiling hot, and I think that my body must have been joyously celebrating the fact by having its deepest sleep for a while before - BANG! - alarm goes off. I guess that eventually my sleeping patterns will revert back to normal - for a while during the first week of the holidays I was waking up around 7.30am even though I didn't have to!

I watched the pilot episode of the new series Heroes last night. I had missed seeing it on TV on Monday night, but thanks to the joys of the internet I managed to watch it last night. Just to show that advertising campaigns can work quite well, I first noticed this programme through a giant billboard seen from the Victoria Park on the way to pick up or drop off Amalia throughout the last few weeks. It was a different billboard, in that it had four people and the line "Ordinary People, Extraordinary Abilities" on it, but no sign of what it was advertising. Leila and I suspected that it might be a TV programme of some sorts, and sure enough a couple of weeks ago all was revealed. A TV show about superheroes sounds like it has all the ingredients to be an utter cheese-fest. At the very best I guess that I expected something like Roswell - interesting, but most definitely aimed at the teen market.

Yet I found myself surprisngly impressed by it. It was different enough to be interesting, but had enough of the 'typical interest bits' to not be "too" different. Some of the bits I found particularly awesome, like when the Japanese guy makes the time stop on the Subway, or when the cheerleader girl pushes her rib back in, not noticing that it had been sticking out of her stomach before because she doesn't notice pain. The Japanese character seemed particularly interesting, and it was good that he was realistically speaking Japanese to his friend. The characters all seem linked together through bizarre circumstances, which is interesting and almost "Lost like". It's very unusual for me to see the first ever episode of a TV show, as apart from sport I'm not really a particularly avid TV watcher. In fact I think the last programme that I followed particularly closely right from the start was Third Rock From The Sun. Normally I find myself coming in halfway through them and having to catch up, or watching a few of the early episodes but then forgetting about the programme or just not maintaining interest in it. It would be quite nice for once to actually follow a series the whole way through, and hopefully this will prove interesting enough for me to do so.

Wow .... 700th post since the start of 2002. Now that's impressive.

First Day Back
Now Playing: Salmonella Dub - Push on Thru
So here I am, back at work, staring out the window at a beautiful hot and sunny day - quite typical really after the so-so weather than seemed to dominate much of my holidays. But anyway, it's too easy to start feeling negative about things like that, and overall it hasn't really been all that depressing being back at work today. Having my alarm go off at 7.30am was a bit of a shock though, after many days of doing the whole wake-up, back to sleep, wake-up, back to sleep routine until about 11am, or a nice "wake up Daddy" from Amalia on the days she was here. But work has been fairly easy-going for the day. Some of the time has been spent relocating my computer into the office vacated by my boss who's now in Singapore, which has left the office feeling a bit empty with just the two of us now, but on the bright side means that I do now have my 'own office' rather than just a corner of the main room.

On the work side of things I am having to jump very much straight back into a huge pile of work. The end of the year came at a rather annoying time in many ways, as we were almost finished a giant project that has been going on for months, but due to things such as infrastructure reports taking longer than we had originally thought they would, there are still quite a few odds and ends that need to be tied up. This is a tad challenging when the person who had been organising everything is now on the other side of the world, but hopefully everything will fall into place reasonably easily and I can take on the extra responsibilities. In many ways this should make my job a whole heap more interesting, as client meetings, project organisation, brainstorming about how to go about doing things, as well as bringing the many bits and pieces of a project together into a whole are the bits of my job I find myself enjoying the most - rather than the grinding out endless excel tables and the like. So my job should get more interesting as time goes on.

In a strange way it felt quite nice to get back into the pattern of things. Although the unstructuredness of holidays is awesome in so many ways, my mind seems to crave some sense of pattern in my ways of things. So it was nice to, as per usual, drive to work the way I did and to head down to Avondale to get my lunch - the way I normally have. The three weeks since I was last at work really have felt like an age - probably the longest three weeks since I had my last decent holiday in June/July 2005. I just know that the next three weeks will disappear so quickly that I will be quite amazed at how those two lengths of time could possible be the same. I do have another week's holiday to look forward to some time in mid-February (after all the kids are back at school, and hopefully when the weather's at its best), which isn't actually too far away.

The End of It
Now Playing: Oasis - Champagne Supernova
Well in a way I hadn't quite been looking to this day. The end of my holidays, back to work, the return to early-morning wake-ups and routines. But I guess I always knew it was coming, and in many ways I'm going to be fairly excited to get back to work. The problem with holidays that are too long is that they start to feel like 'normality', and then when you do return to something rather less awesome it's a real drag. I'm really just quite emotionally-neutral about the whole thing - somewhat typical emotionally-neutral actually. The last few days since my previous update have been fairly non-eventful. The weather in Auckland has finally figured out its summer, at least temperature-wise, but that's been undermined by rather wet weather - typical muggy sticky weather. This has put limitations on what we have been able to do, but I have managed to get up to some reasonably exciting things.

On Thursday Leila and I went out to the Hunua Falls, a fairly decent drive out to the southeast edge of Auckland City. I showed Leila the rather bizarre Addison development in Takanini, which has popped up in my work repeatedly throughout last year, and is actually a preferable means of urban development to the homogeneous sprawl which dominates the rest of newly developed areas of Auckland. We then went along a rather freaky windy road through the Hunua Gorge, then down a couple of side-roads before getting to the falls. The last time I was out in this part of Auckland would have been for my intermediate school camps, which were both at the same Camp Adair in Hunua. As part of one of the camps (or possibly both, they kind of merge in my memory) we did the typical 'bush-walk', which inevitably turned into a 6 hour hike up vertical hills and through muddy creeks, before finally finishing up at the Hunua Falls. While slightly smaller than my memory (not surprisingly really as I'm quite a bit bigger than I was then), the falls are still a pretty awesome sight. There had been quite a lot of rain in the previous few days so the water was a bit brown, and also very high as we noticed quite a lot of grass underwater that wouldn't have normally been. We got quite lucky with the weather out there, actually having to worry about sunburn and overheating rather than raincoats and umbrellas for perhaps the only time in the last week. Leila and I had taken a couple of books with us, so we very peacefully just sat at a picnic table for a good 2-3 hours reading our books - it was an incredibly nice and peaceful way to spent the afternoon.

On the way back we took an interesting cross-country route so that I could show Leila some of the areas in Flat Bush that I had spent quite a bit of last year looking at for various jobs. It is a pretty bizarre place when you think about it, a 10% complete new town in many ways with large roads seemingly in the middle of nowhere, four-storey apartment buildings next to farmland, whole tracts of developed land on the non-city side of an even larger area of undeveloped land, and just a really surreal feeling of an area that really didn't quite feel like a suburb of its own quite yet. We then headed up to the Botany Town Centre shopping mall for some afternoon tea, and I had a good chance to actually see the nice side of this place for once, rather than the giant carpark and supermarket side which is its most obvious frontage to the busy intersection of Te Irirangi Drive and Ti Rakau Drive. Don't ask me why you'd put your ugliest corner on your busiest intersection - maybe just to show off the acres of parking?

Since Thursday life has been fairly quiet. I had Amalia from Friday night until Saturday, but once again the weather frustratingly meant that she didn't really get the chance to go out anywhere. We ended up reading a tonne of books during most of the time she was here, either at my place or at Leila's - where all her old books have been uncovered for Amalia's literary benefit. It's really fun reading her books that I myself remember from when I was little, whether it's my old well-loved Spot books, or the awesome Hungry Little Caterpillar story. She seems to have got back into a 'book phase' at the moment with a vengeance and is always bringing out books from her book-case for us to read. When it's bed time I jump in bed with her and read her a couple of stories to settle her down and to also have some really nice time when it's just me and her, but often it's quite difficult to leave her to sleep as she's always asking for one more book, or to read this one again. On Saturday my mum had just spent a good 20 minutes to half an hour reading through Amalia's favourite book at the moment - the Christmas Jolly Postman, which has all these envelopes in it with other little bits such as puzzles or board-games - including doing the puzzle of Humpty Dumpty a good five or six times. Eventually they made it to the end, somewhat exhaustedly, for Amalia to immediately announce "again... again!" Fortunately we managed to direct her onto another, somewhat shorter, book. Nevertheless, it is very heartening to see her interest in books, as they're a fantastic way to build her language skills and - eventually - to get her into reading the words herself.

So today is the end of one phase of my life and tomorrow the beginning of another. A chance for me to no longer be the "graduate" planner, but rather one with some experience and to begin to really grow myself in my profession. As I said on New Year's Day, 2007 is a really exciting year in a lot of ways, and at least as far as work is concerned, it begins for me tomorrow.

Playing Cricket
Now Playing: Counting Crows - Round Here
Playing beach cricket at Mangawhai Heads, and cricket at the outer oval of Eden Park the other day, has made me realise in many ways how much I do miss actually playing the game. The nice feeling when the ball I bowl lands exactly where I wanted it to - drifting nicely, pitching on a great length, turning past the edge - or playing the perfect cover drive or flick through midwicket, drives home how much I really do enjoy the game of cricket.

It's now almost seven years since I last played a competitive game. Before that I had played 10 seasons of cricket - from the early days of compound rubber balls, no pads and batting for four overs with a partner no matter how many times you got out (from memory they took off four runs every time you got out so it was possible to end up with negative scores), to the last year of playing in a rather mean 4th grade men's level - for such a long time Saturday was cricket day for me. In my later years I would be playing First XI cricket for the school in the morning before heading across Auckland to play for my club in the afternoon. Of course it wasn't always great - the times when your team got bowled out for 35 to lose a match outright were shocking - but most often the highs outweighed those embarrassing times to a great extent.

My greatest day came on November 22nd, 1997 (I think). It was the weekend before my School Certificate exams, and I had been studying pretty hardcore throughout the week beforehand. So it was really nice to put that behind me and head off to Victoria Park in the centre of Auckland to play against Waitakere. Because school had finished for the year our Under 17 games started at 12.30pm instead of the normal 1.45pm - allowing an extra long day of play. The pitch we played at Victoria Park was located at one far corner of the park - nearest the corner of Victoria and Halsey Streets for those who know the place well - and had some particularly short boundaries behind square on the on- and off-sides. I was captaining the team that day - which was something I did fairly frequently but not all the time. We ended up batting first, I can't remember whether that was my choice or not. In any case we didn't do particularly well at first. I was batting number five, and although I got a few throw-downs from one of my team's younger brothers, it was on a pretty bumpy surface which didn't help things a huge amount.

In any case I was out there batting fairly early on. Our team was in a bit of trouble, but we were fairly confident about things as we had won our previous two matches - one by first innings and the other outright when I had taken my best ever bowling figures (at that point). The weather was fairly wet that day, and we occassionally ended up going off for rain. This turned into a bonus for us as our opposition's best fast bowlers weren't able to bowl, and we got to face the lesser lights. However, they were still a pretty good team, and at first we had to struggle quite a bit. Before long a couple more wickets fell, and a big Tongan guy called Tom Kalepo came in to join me batting. He was one of those awesome Pacific Island cricketers who had obviously never had any coaching, but had more natural ability in his little finger than I probably had in my whole body. He held the bat the wrong way around, ungainly crossing his arms over each other, as well as bowling pretty damn fast off next-to-no runup. But despite this boy could he hit the ball! As I slowly began to gain more and more confidence, generally by finding the short boundaries and just feeding Tom the strike through careful singles, I spent a lot of time just marvelling at his power and ability. He hit at least five sixes into the trees surrounding our pitch, with one reportedly landing on a bus that was travelling past at the time.

My highest ever score batting before this match had been 36. I had scored 36 early in 1996 in a school match, batting (I thought) as well as I had ever done. We ended up losing that match off the very last ball, one of the most exciting finishes ever for a match I had been involved in, but at the end of it I was so stoked at having made my highest score that I didn't really care that much. There was always a point to my batting where I reached about 20 and it was no longer difficult, that I seemed to be able to sit back and let my reflexes do the work for me. That was the part I truly loved about batting, the point where things came easily to me, rather than the early stages in my innings where I tended to have to work twice as hard as anyone else to get any runs. Anyway, at some point on this day at Victoria Park I edged my way to 37, ecstatic that I had managed a new best score. I had been pretty lucky to not be given out caught behind on 16, as I possibly hit one that went through to the wicket-keeper, but I had been given out incorrectly so many times in the past that I figured luck must have been on my side today. I had my batting totally worked out that day - I would mainly score through cuts when the bowlers were short, leg glances when they were on my legs, or little pushes and prods here or there. I didn't really have the strength and confidence to go for anything too much more than that, although they had a spinner who I felt confident enough to sweep when he bowled down leg side. A great proportion of my boundaries must have come down to the short boundaries, and everything just seemed to be going where I wanted it to for once.

When I was on about 45 I smacked a ball from one of the medium pacers back past him for four. It was one of those shots that I never played, one that required the kind of confidence that I never had with my batting, but one that truly made me realise that things were different today, that for once everything I tried was actually going to come off. Getting to 50 for the first time ever was fairly exciting, but to me nowhere near as exciting as getting to 37 had been. It was all new ground to me now. When I was on about 65 Tom Kalepo got out. By then he had screamed past me and got to 112 - the first ever century by anyone on my side in a match. Another player, Rowan, had scored 96 in the first match before running himself out, and it was really cool to share a moment with Tom when he made it to the magical three-figures. After he was out another guy, Mark Thompson, came in. Normally Mark was one of our lesser players, he was really keen and had nice gear, but always seemed to be not quite up to it. However, on this day he seemed to catch the same bug that Tom and I had caught, and played better than I had ever seen before. I knew that now it was up to me to take control of the partnership, and although I don't remember all the shots I played moving my score up, it all just seemed bizarrely easy to me that day. I would aim to hit a square cut and it would just race off my bat to the boundary. When I got an edge it would pass through the slips for another four. When I had reached about 83 not out it started raining again, and the opposing captain seemed pretty keen to just call it off for the day as the rain did seem fairly settled. However, my Dad was keen to see what would happen (as was I, although by this point I didn't really care that much as I was just so amazed that I'd done this well) and sure enough after only a short while the rain stopped and we got back on the field.

I was lucky on 88 when I think there were a couple of really difficult chances were dropped off me. I scrambled my way through to 95, when one of the opposing players (obviously sick of the sight of me) said he'd give me $5 if I would get to 100 in this over. I proceeded to then edge one just wide of him which screamed away for a boundary - which took me to 99. I had never dreamed of even getting to 99, as my dream about getting a high score realistically had me scoring about 65, so I don't think I was particularly nervous. However, I was pretty damn keen to get that last run, although the next ball bowled to me was tight enough that I couldn't score. All the fielders were quite chatty now, reminding me that I was on 99 and telling their bowler to try and get me out. I don't really remember my thinking immediately prior to getting that next ball, but when I smacked it into the gap on the off side and saw it run all the way out to the boundary I was amazed at what I had achieved. I shook my Dad's hand, who was umpiring, along with Mark's and a few of the opposing players. It all seemed so absolutely unreal, that I had managed to beat my previous best score by so much, that I had managed to get a higher score than just about everyone else in my team - even players much better than me. It was one of those situations where I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't been there to see it all happen. Some what understandably I must have got caught up in it all as the very next ball I didn't really see and I got out bowled. I remember at the time being petrified that the very same thing could have happened only the ball before, and how lucky I had been that I had got out to the ball which mattered the least. In the end, quite commonly for Under 17 cricket, my score had been added up incorrectly and I had actually scored 108, which meant that I had made it to 100 the over before all the drama happened. In any case, I had batted for about three and a half hours, hit 17 fours and had advanced the team's score up to over 300, the first time we had ever made it that far. We had about half an hour of fielding left at the end of the day, and although their batsman smacked it around a bit - emphasising how good the pitch was to bat on - I was buzzing so much that I didn't really care particularly much.

It was amazing the buzz that innings gave me over the next few weeks. It felt like truly the greatest achievement I had ever managed. It was awesome to finally have a top score that I was truly proud of, but more than anything else it was so fantastic to have those hours when everything clicked for me, when I felt like I was really good at this game, when all the confidence problems that I often had simply melted away. While overall my bowling achievements were perhaps more consistently great than my batting, and undoubtedly I did become a better bowler than I ever was a batsman, my best cricketing moment is undoubtedly of batting. Of that glorious day back in November 1997.

Holidays Drawing to a Close
Now Playing: Daniel Powter - Bad Day
On the one hand it's always slightly depressing when you look at the date and realise that your holidays are almost done. Two and a half weeks down, and only about half a week to go. I remember at high school enjoying my first week of holidays so much more than my second - largely because of the knowledge that they were my first week. But on the other hand I don't find myself getting that down about it. Maybe it's because I find myself actually enjoying my job a lot of the time, and going back there won't be such a downer. In fact I'm quite looking forward to some aspects of going back to work, such as shifting into a new part of the office and sorting out all my stuff for the year.

However, being on holiday in the last few weeks has really begun to feel normal to me in a slightly freaky way. Not having to really be anywhere at any particular time, being able to sleep in until whatever time I like (on those days when a cute little girl doesn't come running in going "wake up Daddy!!!"), and just being in control of what I feel like doing has gone from being something really novel during the first week of my holidays, to being something that's just the typical way that things are. In some ways it feels quite a lot like 2005 - my thesis year - because although I obviously had lots to do throughout that year it was always things I could do when I pleased, and I didn't have the set times of "I have to be there at that particular time".

These last two and a bit weeks have turned out to be a pretty awesome holiday. I think this is largely because there has been a really good mixture of everything that I've never got sick of doing the same thing again and again at any point. For the first week we were mainly up at Mangawhai Heads. Since then we have spent times at Leila's place, times at my place, times with Amalia, times without her, times when we've gone out to the beach or the zoo, and times when we've just had a blob day at home. I've played a reasonable amount of Sims on my computer, but not so much to the extent where I've felt overloaded, I've had some "bleah" internet time, but not too much of it, and I've been out 'on the town', but not too often to kill my bank account and to make myself worried about turning into a borderline alcoholic. In so many ways this is how a holiday really should be - a really nice mixture of all things. If there's one thing that hasn't really happened, then it's been a nice trip away from Auckland with just Leila and myself - but we've got that planned for some time in February.

During the last three days I have had Amalia, which has really been awesome to have her for such an extended period of time. It's such a great feeling when it's so normal for her to be around here and with me, when it comes to the day after she's been here and it's strange that she's not sleeping in her bed when I get up in the night. Unfortunately the weather contrived to not give us that "perfect day" I had been hoping for so that we could get out to Piha and go for a swim and explore around there - but we did manage to get to Campbells Bay on the North Shore for a short swim one day, to the Museum and Domain on another day, and then to have a blob day on my final day with her. Taking her to the Museum was particularly fun, as she was genuinely fascinated by so many aspects of the place. Some parts of the place were particularly dedicated to kids, and I felt a bit bad going there when we only had a couple of hours to get through the whole place as she could have literally spent a whole day there going from one part of the children's bit to the next. It felt good showing her all these amazing artifacts the museum has, and although she's obviously too little to fully understand the significance of the amazing Marae house or the enormously long waka, I guess there's always this feeling that she'll absorb some of the experience. She did seem truly amazed by everything from the crayfish in the natural history part to the World War Two planes on the top floor.

I've got a couple of blob days during the rest of this week, to truly round out my holidays. I honestly think that when it comes around to next Monday I won't feel too bad about going back to work. I will feel like I've had a good break, that I've recharged the batteries, and that I'm ready to get into Year 2 as a Planner.

Pathetic
Now Playing: Pearl Jam - Nothingman
Well I've been to some depressing cricket matches before, including some pretty shocking New Zealand performances. There was the first Chappell-Hadlee match against Australia last year when Brett Lee totally destroyed New Zealand with his pace. But that was somewhat understandable because it was Australia, and when a guy's bowling at about 156km/h I guess there's not much you can do about it. There was the 2000 match against Australia where they rolled us for next-to-nothing, but then again it was Australia yet again and when you're playing the best team in the world things like that happen. That second match was the first time I had seen Brett Lee bowl, and although we were only 5 minutes late on entering the ground New Zealand had already lost two wickets by the time we settled in our seats. I guess there was also the time when India totally humiliated us back in 1994, but at least on that day I got to watch Sachin Tendulkar play one of the best one-day innings ever as he creamed us for 82 off only 49 balls. And when I look at the New Zealand team that day I can see why we got annihilated.

Even though I've seen some pretty sorry New Zealand performances over the years, I am afraid that today's most definitely has to take the cake as the supreme pathetic performance from a New Zealand team in a game that I have been to. It didn't start off too badly, at least not compared to how things would end up. A whole pile of us ended up going to the match: myself, Leila, her Mum, Dad and brother as well as my Dad. The stupid ticket lady gave us the wrong tickets, directing us to the South Stand - but in the end the crowd there was so hopeless (only 15,000) that we could choose the seats that we really wanted without any problems whatsoever. Smart people those ones who decided to give this game a miss. Anyhow, I guess New Zealand didn't get off to too bad a start - things were pretty even after 10 overs when the score was around 48-0. Sure we hadn't taken a wicket but to keep the Sri Lankan batsmen quiet for that time was a pretty good achievement. Then Stephen Fleming gave Michael Mason one over too many, he got carted for three sixes in a row by the amazing Jayasuriya and Sri Lanka were away. About 20 minutes of carnage later he was out - for 70 odd and Sri Lanka had jumped to over 100. Fortunately for New Zealand they then proceeded to lose another couple of quick wickets, which slowed things down in the middle overs quite significantly. So the game kind of drifted for a while, as it normally does at those times - singles were got here and there, but we were all feeling pretty confident that our predictions of a 300+ score while Jayasuriya was going nuts, were a bit over the top. However, as is normally the case, Sri Lanka ramped it up towards the final overs and ended up with a 260+ score. I had said at the start of the day that if they got over 260 I would be rather worried, and although they just got there I figured that New Zealand would have to play very well indeed to surpass the total.

We played some cricket in the innings break (can't really call it a lunch break as it was around 6pm by then) on the Outer Oval, as we always do. It's a bit freaky playing there as there are about 500 different games of cricket going on at once, and you find yourself fielding at mid-wicket for your game, but a very silly mid-on for the next-door game, hoping the batsman doesn't hit a screamer at your head while you're lining up a catch for the game you're actually playing. On the bright side there's always plenty of fielders around, which means that no matter how far you hit the ball it always comes back pretty quick - unlike the beach where it seems like I spend half the time chasing after the ball downwind.

Somewhat unsurprisingly New Zealand got off to a pretty bad start. The policy of rotating our players to keep them fresh (if it works for the All Blacks surely it must work for the cricket team... surely) turned out to be a miserable failure as the 'rested' Stephen Fleming was out for 0, followed by a quick procession of other batsman leaving New Zealand quickly tottering at about 39-6 at one point. Normally this would be bad, but not hopeless as our lower order is well known for making runs when the guys who are meant to actually make them fail yet again. However, due to that stunningly awesome rotation policy all our bowlers who can actually bat quite well were having the day off (maybe to work on their batting?) so it was Shane Bond striding in at number 8, when he would normally be 10 at best, and usually 11 as long as the truly terrible Chris Martin wasn't playing. Bond's not a bad batsman, but seeing him come in with only 39 runs on the board was truly depressing, and after not too much longer New Zealand were all out for 71, our second-worst ever ODI score. I cheered loudly and ironically as we passed 64, the worst score ever made by NZ in an ODI.

So it turned out to be a rather mixed day I guess. The event of the match was fun, as they always are - hurling abuse as opposing players and watching the crowd antics. Yet this was significantly tempered by New Zealand's truly horrible performance, and the feeling that we didn't play particularly worse than normal, just that Sri Lanka seem that much better than us at the moment. The most amazing thing about the whole day was trying to understand how we were 2-1 up in the series beforehand, and how we managed to draw the test series 1-1 with a team that appears so vastly superior to us in all facets of the game. The batting techniques were woeful against what was, admittedly, top class bowling, while the selection of the team definitely baffled me a lot. It was all so reminiscent of... well.... England.

Mountain Biking
Now Playing: Brooke Fraser - Albertine
Yesterday morning I went mountain biking with Leila's brother and father, for the second time ever (I once went with my Dad through the redwood forest in Rotorua). I was going to write about it yesterday, but I wanted to post about how I plan to go about writing in this blog throughout the year - and trying to achieve too much in every post was exactly what I plan not to do this year. Anyway, although I hadn't been mountain biking for a very long time, I felt reasonably OK about it because I did used to ride my bike to school and back every day for about 4 or 5 years. However, it had been a few years since I even got on a bike in any shape or form, so I figured that it might take me a little while to get used to things again.

We drove out to Woodhill Forest, about half an hour northwest of Auckland, reasonably early so that we could avoid the worst of the day's heat. Leila's father and brother were both fairly experienced at the whole mountain biking thing, and at first I felt a bit bad about slowing them down, because a lot of the time I was still sorting out the bike's gears so that I did actually go down when I wanted to and not up. Fortunately I got that sussed (generally) after a while and could keep up with them a bit better. The trails were quite technical and tricky at times, with tree roots bumping you up and down a lot. There were a lot of jumps and other more advanced things on the trails which I carefully avoided - although at times there were unavoidable drops which I had to be very careful on to ensure I didn't go right over the handlebars. Towards the end of our ride I was starting to get a bit more confidence with things, and really let the brakes loose a bit more on the downhill straight stretches and enjoy the speed a bit more. With a bit more experience under my belt I think that I could really enjoy it more and more as I get better and better, as I would actually have the opportunity to experience the rush which riding fast through the forst gave me. However, I think that I was quite well justified in being extremely careful at times, as everywhere I looked the possibility of falling off or slamming into a tree jumped out at me. I did pretty well I thought not to come off at all throughout the whole ride, although I couple of jumps sent me off balance and required me to steady myself by putting my foot down on the ground. Comparing it to skiing, something else which I learned within the last few months, the chances of really hurting myself if things went horribly wrong mountain biking seemed a lot higher, but at the same time my experience with bike riding meant that the chances of coming off were pretty low.

I was actually quite surprised by how I managed to physically deal with the bike ride as well as I did. Although I found myself quite tired for the first part of the ride, after that by keeping within my limits I managed to only find myself hot and sweaty with sore legs, rather than really exhausted. My current lifestyle doesn't really involve as much exercise as it has in the past - thanks largely to owning a car, and therefore I thought there might be a good chance that I could struggle a bit with the exertion. However, perhaps I am not quite as unfit as I thought I would be. Perhaps it's something that I can focus on a bit in 2007, to get into a few more hobby type things - although whenever I think about how I can fit anything extra into my already quite busy life the logistics seem a lot more tricky than the mere idea of "hey... I should do this a bit more often" is.

Maybe less random interent time... updating my blog. Just to contradict my post yesterday. Ha!

Summer
Now Playing: Groove Armada - At The River
Today it seems like summer has finally arrived. Apparently December 2006 was the coldest December in Auckland since about 1962, and was the coldest in Wellington since a great deal before then. It certainly hasn't really felt particularly summery until the last couple of days - and yesterday was tempered by a rather nasty southerly wind which more than counter-acted the sunshine if you were caught in an exposed spot. My Mum, Leila and I took Amalia to the zoo yesterday, about the fourth time I have been to the zoo in the last year and a bit after not going there for about six or seven years before then (funny how having a child does that). It's quite awesome that every time I have taken Amalia to the zoo she has enjoyed it a little bit more than she did the previous time. She's always been really into animals, but each time she gets a bit older she has started to truly recognise how much fun actually seeing them 'in the flesh' at the zoo is. She seemed to enjoy seeing the kiwis, giraffes and seals the most - especially the kiwi for some reason. We got really close to the giant tortoises as they were right up next to the edge of their enclosure (the zoo doesn't have to worry about them running away too quickly I suppose) so we could really get a good look at them. I always find something really majestic about giant tortoises, the fact that they can live for well over a hundred years, and that they seem like really laid back animals - not concerned about taking anything particularly quickly, with their home conveniently located on their back and just really cool with the world. Perhaps it's from seeing the really cool sea turtles in Finding Nemo (the best part of the movie I think) makes me think that tortoises and turtles all have that kind of personality. Their sheer longevity is also pretty incredible - I remember seeing something on the news a while back about a giant Galapogas tortoise that was in Melbourne zoo which had been on Charles Darwin's ship as he came up with his theory of evolution - and the tortoise was still alive!

Apart from the zoo outing I've had a pretty gentle start to 2007 - exactly the way I have wanted it to be. It was slightly depressing yesterday realising that my holidays were now half over - but I suppose that I have truly enjoyed them so far, and that there is still a while left in them, so I shouldn't feel particularly bad about my looming "back to work" date. A lot of the work that I was doing in the last few weeks had actually been quite interesting, so it's not all negative feelings I have associated with January 15th when I head back. I still have over a week left before then, a cricket game to go to on Saturday and then three days in a row with Amalia from Sunday which should also be great - as hopefully the weather will finally be good enough to take her to Piha or another west coast beach for the day.

I have never really been the kind of person to have New Year's resolutions - at least not in a serious sense where I actually keep that resolution in mind to achieve some sort of goal for longer than the first couple of days of each year. There are obvious goals for this year, but they're the type that are just obvious and don't necessarily require anything like a New Year's resolution to make me want to achieve them. But perhaps one I can make is to focus on this site in the way that I have managed throughout the last six months in particular. Whilst this blog was reasonably neglected for the first half of 2006, in more recent months I have been quite proud not only of my update frequency, but also what has seemed to be a significant improvement of my post quality. It's probably fairly telling to compare the average length of a blog update in 2005, or early in 2006, with the length of my updates in recent times. Reading other blogs which I enjoyed, particularly Leila's (when she updates... grrr..) I kind of discovered that often I would skim over things too much in my own posts - that I would have a worthwhile and interesting thing to say but that I would dedicate only a couple of lines to it, and that reading back over what I had written I would wish that I had expanded this bit or that bit more. Perhaps it's because I often feel like my blog has to 'catch up' with what I have been up to - so that it's ultimate purposes of providing some sort of record of my life for me and other people - can be achieved, that if I was to expand everything I write to a level that was interesting and truly befitting of what I was trying to achieve with the post, I would spend about half my life writing on this site. No doubt that would be fascinating for myself, and all those avid readers out there, but often I am somewhat time-pressed with how long I can truly afford to be updating this blog.

So I thought that perhaps what I should be trying to do is to write more about less, rather than less about more. That I wouldn't necessarily try to cover everything that had been going on in my life, but to report on the interesting little parts of it which made me go "hey... I should blog about that" in a depth that would truly remind me of that moment as well as being a whole heap more interesting than just "yesterday I did this, then this, and then this". Bringing up past memories in my posts has proven to be really fascinating for my own purposes, so no doubt I will continue to try to incorporate those kinds of posts where it feels right. I think that in order to truly write "more about less" I will need to ensure that I am updating frequently, so that I don't feel as though I have a huge amount of stuff to write about and catch up on, but rather that I can write about fewer things but in greater detail.

I wonder if I can stick to this...

Unfamiliar Familiarity
Now Playing: Coldplay - Fix You
I had a few strange feelings on New Year's Eve wandering around town and then going into McDonald's where I used to work. Because these were places that I used to see very very often and spend an awfully large amount of time, the scenery was really familiar, but at the same time it felt almost distantly familiar because I hadn't really wandered around town particularly much since about a year ago, and I haven't worked at that McDonald's for about the same length of time.

Certain parts of Auckland's CBD are incredibly familiar to me, most notably the walk between university and the bus stop where I used to catch buses into town from. Frustratingly the Birkenhead Transport buses I always used to catch would have their terminus in Auckland City quite a long way from the university - so I would end up having to walk quite a long way down Victoria Street, along a bit of Queen Street, up through the 280 Centre, up through Khartoum Place, up the staircase past the Art Gallery, through Albert Park before finally arriving at the university. This trek would take in a reasonable, but quite particular, part of the city, which became enormously familiar to me over the years. The fact that my work-place lay about halfway along this route meant that there were quite a few different reasons why I would take the same route, even when I wasn't going on to university. Further to that, the scenery to me inside the Queen St McDonald's store where I worked was even more familiar. Throughout 2002, 2003 (in particular as I worked full time that year), 2004 and 2005 I spent a great many hours working in that place - and not surprisingly everything there had become so amazingly familiar to me.

So it felt kind of weird wandering around all these places half-drunk. Standing at the traffic lights at the corner of Victoria and Albert streets waiting for the pedestrian signal felt like this enormous deja vu, not from any particularly moment but just from the enormous number of times that exact sight had occurred to me in the past. I could tell the shops which had changed along the whole route in a millisecond - that a new kebab shop now existed right next to the bus stop, that the Starmart had turned into some city convenience store, that there were new paintings inside the McDonald's. Things change all the time without you really noticing it in more unfamiliar areas, but along this route I could idetify the most subtle of changes. It felt almost oddly nostalgic, not because I want to go back to catching buses from the Shore and having to walk 10 minutes across half of the CBD to get to where I need to be, but just in the sense that this whole route used to be such a common part of my day, each building a very normal part of my visual knowledge of Auckland's CBD to the point where it had become ingrained in my memory in a very deep-set way. I guess in many ways it was similar to returning to an old high school where you spent so much time a long time ago, and become so familiar with, yet you haven't been there for ages, or returning to a place where you used to live.

In many ways our lives are defined by those parts of it that we don't really focus on, but form a big part of our subconscious knowledge and experience of the world. The bus trips, the random walks from the bus stop to home, the walks from the bus stop to work or uni, the frequent car trips to work or school. The things that we do again and again, but don't really think about particularly much and in some ways don't really seem to notice anymore because of their enormous familiarity. Yet it is through their repetitiveness that we slowly become so familiar with those seemingly pointless parts of our day that we develop such an in-depth association and knowledge of that particular environment we can notice when something as minor as the colour of the seat covers at McDonald's, or the colour of its wall paint, has changed. Although I don't miss working at McDonald's, or walking through the city to get from the bus stop to wherever I was going, it's nice at times to wander those routes again, to enjoy the nostalgia of being back somewhere that is still familiar, but in a more distant way. Over time it becomes an unfamiliar familiarity.

2007
Now Playing: Incubus - Wish You Were Here
So it's 2007, New Year's Day. It's funny how our lives are divided so neatly into years, and that so much of what you remember from the past is categorised by "oh... yeah that happened in 2003" or something like that. I guess the fact that we do categorise the past so frequently into what happened this year compared to that year means that New Year's is quite a significant event. A chance to put everything that's happened in the past 12 months into some sort of big category and to somewhat separate it from everything that's in the 12 months ahead of me. There's still that disbelief that it's actually 2007 and not 2006, but that's totally normal and generally takes until some time in February before it stops feeling odd to refer to the year correctly.

When I think back at 2006 it was a pretty bizarre year for me really. For about 46 of the 52 weeks of the year life was pretty good for me - I had been unusually optimistic about 2006 last New Year's, and for the first four and a half months of the year my life seemed to follow through with that really well. I have many nice memories of last summer, and I managed to do many things that I had wanted to do for a very long time (like taking Amalia swimming with me in the sea). My job fell into place incredibly surprisingly well, I found a good place to live by the end of March, and things appeared to be going swimmingly well with Jess. Obviously things didn't turn out quite the way I had anticipated throughout May and June, as one event after the next seemed to slowly tear apart every little piece of this well constructed life that I had enjoyed throughout the previous six months. It felt at times that the world was most definitely against me, that I was sitting in something like the Truman Show and whoever was calling the shots had decided to play a bit of a game with my life for the entertainment of the viewers.

Fortunately things eventually managed to sort themselves out, and positive events actually started happening to me once again. The trip I took with my Mum to Mt Ruapehu in July seemed like the turning point in many ways, a chance to put the bad events behind me and look forward in a more positive way to the future. Within a couple of weeks I was going out with Leila, and since then life really hasn't looked back. It seems really bizarre and mixed to me that the way things have turned out in the last 5 months has not only been better than what would have happened if everything hadn't gone wrong in the middle of the year, but it all happened so well exactly because of the things that went wrong. I got the impetus to buy a new car because I crashed the old one; I started going out with Leila because Jess broke up with me; I got a nice new laptop way better than my old one because the insurance replaced it when it was stolen - and the same to some extent with my iPod. In the depths of my misery on May 29th when Jess had said she was leaving and didn't want to be with me anymore, the thing that upset me the most was a feeling that I would never be able to find someone who suited me that well again, someone who I could have a relationship that good with again. Yet the complete opposite has happened and the relationship I'm with now is significantly better, and I'm with someone significantly more suited to me - the very things I feared as not being able to replace are the things I have not only replaced, but vastly improved upon. So there's this enormous conflict inside me about how to think about the bad parts of last year: as on the one hand my heart still remembers the pain of it all, and remembers how terrible I felt; yet on the other hand my brain is saying that everything which has gone so well in the last few months is directly the result of all those things going wrong, so in an odd way I should be thankful that it happened.

Overall if I compare how I am now with how I was this time last year things have definitely moved in the right direction. I have a great job, a great girlfriend, an awesome daughter and life is looking pretty good. Although the road leading to where I am was at times definitely the windy hilly road rather than the dead-straight interstate, I feel that I've learned an enormous amount from 2006, that I feel more comfortable with myself and that I don't need to try to be anyone else - that the person I am is just fine. Watching Amalia grow and develop throughout the last year has been amazing. If 2005 was her physical change year, when she went from barely walking to a running, jumping playful little girl, then for me 2006 was definitely her language year. Throughout the year we marvelled as she picked up new words amazingly quickly, and went from using them separately, to stringing them together into chunks, and then on to saying complete and full sentences within a few months. Watching language development like that has been amazing, and seeing her develop into a really really awesome kid, someone who I'm enormously proud to call my daughter, has been a huge highlight. There are so many little things she does, showing her empathy and her love and care for things, that makes me know she's turning into an amazing person.

Bring on 2007.... it's gonna be great.

Holiday
Now Playing: Keane - Try Again
So it's back to Auckland for the first time since Christmas Day. It was great to get out of the city for longer than a couple of days, the first time I have managed that for quite some time. Throughout the week the weather has been a bit so-so, but we had enough fine spells to ensure that we had a really great time.

Going up north late on Christmas Day proved to be a really great idea, as it meant that we easily missed all the traffic of the next couple of days. In fact the roads were the quietest I have seen for some time whilst driving up there. We didn't get annoyingly stuck behind some truck through the Dome Valley, and ended up making excellent time up there. For our first night Leila and I had the place to ourselves, which was pretty cool as we knew it wouldn't be like that for the rest of the week. After an incredibly hectic Christmas Day it was good to really relax and know that we would be able to sleep-in in the morning.

And indeed we did sleep in on Boxing Day morning, which was really nice. It has been a really satisfying feeling every night to not have to set the alarm for 7.30am the next morning. Boxing Day was meant to have perhaps the best weather of the week, so once my parents were up at the beach house we wasted no time in getting down to the beach so we could truly enjoy the good weather. I found my wetsuit, and although it was a bit short for me (I hadn't worn it for over five years) being in a wetsuit made a huge difference between the sea being cold but bearable, and it feeling totally freezing. After a few minutes in the water the coldness generally went away (at least for a while) and I managed to do some body-boarding for the first time in many years. Although the waves weren't great, largely to due to westerly winds throughout the week, they were good enough to get some good rides - even if there were sometimes quite long gaps between the waves. So we enjoyed the sun, enjoyed the water and had a pretty awesome day down at the beach.

On Wednesday Leila and I decided that we'd have a day trip up north. I have wanted to go to Matapouri for a long time, as I have many memories of going there when I was much younger, crawling across rocky ledges and building amazing sandcastles beneath Pohutukawa trees on the beach. It took about an hour and a half to get from Mangawhai Heads out to the Tutukaka Coast. Although the tide was annoyingly too high for us to get around to the rocky ledges and the amazing rock-pools that I remember so well from many many years ago, we did have a really great time just lying on the beach and reading for a few hours. After a while we wandered back to the car and drove around the corner to Woolley's Bay, although it was a bit windy as the weather was starting to close in. Then driving from there to Sandy Bay (just around the corner) Leila noticed that her wallet wasn't in her bag where it should have been. So then we all panicked for the next hour, searched both beaches where we had been - amidst the weather that was definitely getting worse not better - but finally we called in at a local shop at Matapouri and someone had handed her wallet in. It was such a relief for us to find her wallet, as losing something like that can be incredibly annoying to replace everything and the kind of thing that can just take the edge off the day. After finding her wallet we drove from Sandy Bay to Hikurangi. The road was sealed the whole way, but very very windy. At one stage we had been winding this way and that way for about 20 minutes when we came across a road sign saying that the next 3 km would be quite windy - we wondered what on earth the last 20 km had been. Eventually we came to Hikurangi - which proved to be the most boring and run-down little town I have seen for a very long time - before continuing on through to Whangarei. We had a nice coffee there, then I bought a couple of DVDs with the money my Nana had given me for Christmas, before heading back to Mangawhai.

On Thursday we had a fairly quiet day. I read through a couple of the books I had got for Christmas, played some sims, and generally had a nice and relaxing day. It was the kind of day you think about and can't really remember anything in particular happening, but at the same time that's probably a really good sign that it was a day how holidays really ought to be. We got down to the beach for a bit of beach cricket, but other than that it was a pretty quiet day - largely because the weather was still not particularly great.

On Friday Leila's family came up from where they were camping at Tawaharanui for the day. We had a pretty cool day, having another swim and generally having a fun day. Once again the waves weren't huge, but when I first got into the water there were reasonably good waves with amazing frequency. I literally got about 5 rides within the first 5 minutes I was in the water, although by the time everyone else was ready and in the water the waves calmed down and weren't particularly great for the rest of our time there. However, they were still fairly reasonable and we all got quite a few rides. It was good to catch up with Leila's family for the first time since Christmas Day, and to listen to all their stories of how annoying their camping neighbours were being.

Then yesterday we came back to Auckland. Before then we managed to have yet another swim, and the waves were fairly reasonable once again - possibly the best they were for the whole week. However, the sun was dipping behind the clouds all the time, and there was a pretty nasty wind - which meant that by the time Leila and I got out we were pretty damn cold. After that we organised ourselves and then came back to Auckland to pick up Amalia. So overall it was a pretty awesome holiday, a nice opportunity to be out of Auckland for a few days and very good to be able to do some body-boarding for the first time in many many years. Being able to do something I used to enjoy so much again was really fantastic, and I'm looking forward to the chance to get some more body-boarding done again during the rest of the summer. It will also be fun one day to teach Amalia how to catch waves, to judge the best moment to paddle into the wave so that it's not too early for catching, yet again not too late so that the ride you'll get isn't as exciting as it could be.

So it's now the last day of 2006. At some stage in the next couple of days I'll attempt to put together some sort of "wrap up" post about the year, which has turned out to be a pleasant, but very bizarre year in many ways. It will be interesting to think of the year as a whole, that's for sure.

Christmas
Now Playing: The Pogues - Fairytale of New York
So it's Christmas. The day of so much anticipation has finally arrived - the day that always seems to be a surreal kind of dream, comprising of presents, lots of people, lots of food and so on. I have had a pretty cool day so far, flitting between houses picking up Amalia then dropping her off again. She has had a pretty awesome day so far, being totally buried by so many presents from everyone.

Leila and I are off to Mangawhai Heads until Saturday. It will be truly awesome to be able to have a relaxing holiday for this time, and to get away from Auckland properly. Hopefully the weather will be good enough for us to be able to get down to the beach regularly over the next week. Even if it doesn't we have got a pile of DVDs, books and computer games to keep us busy for a very long time indeed - but they're things that I could be doing back in Auckland so I very much hope to have the opportunity to go bodyboarding for the first time in YEARS and to play some serious beach cricket.

There's no internet up there, so I won't be updating until Saturday at the earliest. Merry Christmas to everyone, in particular to Ella and Pete on the other side of the world. I hope that you guys enjoys your Spanish Christmas - you were missed today - and that you try (at least make some attempt) to not drink too much of that cheap Spanish wine!