Jordandchan

yeah so - on the way to work this morning i hear on the radio that its snowing in Dunedin (home of the Cadbury Factory and Speights Brewery) its only mid-april so kind of looks like a chilly one this coming winter…

In other news - Back at work and glad its Friday already - short week next week for ANZAC day (yes the NZ in ANZAC stands for New Zealand and we do get the day off) so its going to be nice to ease back into it with a 4 day week next week.

My first project back at work is writing profiles for staff members for our new website and i’ve discovered how hard it is to get some people to talk themselves up… and other to stop, i guess it all comes down to personality but wow, its hard work.

Ok, so the deadline for tax has come and gone, but i decided this week that i should go about seeing if i can sort out our Australian tax while we are still over here.

It turned out that God had us well sorted out.First I found out that our normal tax agent (H&R Block) does online tax returns, and a quick email confirmed that there was no problem with us doing it from over here, without meeting anyone face to face. Keep reading…

In a few weeks time, i will get to see Helvetica (A documentary film). Turns out it is doing a world tour of screenings, with the director Gary Hustwit doing a Q and A afterwards. So geeky, and so wonderful. (Thank you to chan for agreeing that i should go)

I am employed!!! While temping I interviewed for a full time position somewhere else last friday. I was offered said job at 5pm today. It is a lot closer to home with a much nicer salary and shorter hours than the temp work I have been doing. I will be starting on monday with Eliot Sinclair and am looking forward to all aspects of the job.

Another added bonus is that I will be only a few blocks away from where Sarah works, so hopefully we will actually get to see each other.

In celebration my lovely husband took me out for dinner at a place called Piranha. I had chosen this restaurant shortly after we arrived to be my “once I get a job” place to go for dinner. We even managed to be done in time for bible study.

We are both very excited and the place I have been temping are very sad to see me go, but wish me well.

Ok, well I don’t actually believe in karma, but God sometimes has a funny sense of humour/way to teach us a lesson.

Saturday morning we were out looking for a bed for the spare room (in order to accommodate the first of our overseas visitors, em and dan) and were looking around a second-hand furniture place down the south side of the city. We were sorting through all manner of mattresses, trying to pick between size, price, whether we wanted a mattress with a base or just a frame, all important decisions. We came across a double mattress and base which caught our eye. It was a non-matching set (who cares) and was in pretty good condition and on sale for $69. A perfect fit for us. Keep reading…

Its been a little bit of a quiet week, so I thought i would post a few photos. Please follow the link to the full post, so you can check out all of the photos.

Pants!?!!!! (that one’s for you lukey, actually a shop over here, classic)

Keep reading…

The current temperature (on our website, but i double checked it with the newspaper website) is -4 degrees. It’s 8:50 in the morning and a beautiful sunny day, but it is literally freezing cold. Every car I passed on the way to the bus stop had white windows, any patch of grass was a silvery green colour, and crunched when you walked on it. Its apparently going to get to a top of 9 degrees today. Welcome to winter.

hey everyone, head over to www​.cabbagetree​.co​.nz/​t​o​u​r​i​s​m​-​o​n​l​i​n​e​/​t​e​am/ and look for the pink…
I guess they have to keep me now.

A few thoughts and snippets from this week…

* I hadn’t realised how much I had missed watching Rugby League until we watched the State of Origin on Wednesday night.

*One of the best things about nz is coming out of  a night at the pub and not smelling like smoke. You’re not allowed to smoke anywhere indoors over here, so you just come out smelling like.… normal.

*Kiwis are, for the most part, very courteous on the road, but today it seemed like all the idiots were out, we were almost backed into on 2 separate occasions.

*Very excitingly, we bought a shelf today, meaning we can store some of our stuff in it, instead of on the kitchen table, on the kitchen bench, on the v, on the couch, and wherever we previously found anywhere.

*We also got a stereo for the car ($35). It has an analog radio, and even a tape player. Rock On.

*We remembered today that we are actually allowed to wash our car. We got so used to just dealing with it back home, because of water restrictions we didn’t think about it. Till we realised we had the dirtiest car on the road.

We headed to the hills on Saturday, for a day in Waipara, home of a whole bunch of wineries. Our first stop was actually a Salmon Farm, which anyone who has heard the story of our honeymoon will know was very exciting for both of us. But for very different reasons.

After that stop we drove the hour or so north to Waipara. The first winery we stopped at was called Mt Cass, and was a fabulous little place. The owner had to come out of his house to open up for us, and we spent a good 40 minutes there talking to him and his puppy Cass, a very large Giant Schnauzer. We also tasted 4 wines, and ended up coming home with a bottle of two of them.

The day turned into a slight comedy of errors from there as we visited another 5 or so places, including 2 olive farms, and all of them were closed. We stopped off at anothe winery called the Mud House, which was a lot grander affair. We got another couple of bottles and headed 10 minutes down the road to have our picnic lunch at the beach.

We continued back to Christchurch and stopped of at a little place called Brew Moon. Its a little micro-brewery and cafe and we has some fantastic afternoon tea, and some average coffee… We also grabbed a 640ml bottle of their Pale Ale to give a try, a bargain at only $6.

We thought we were safely on our way back home until we spotted Prenzel a bit further down the road. We first ran into Prenzel on our honeymoon. There was a shop down in Cromwell (down south) that stocked a few of prenzel’s products.They specialise in liqueurs, schnapps, olive oils, dahka and the like. On walking into the shop we were offered a glass of mulled wine (which was incredible) and given about a 10 minute introduction to their products. We wandered for a while and left with a bottle of the Mulled Wine mix (you make it up with boiling water) some Schnapps and a bottle of lemon infused rice bran oil (it has a higher flash point than olive oil, so you use it for cooking).

We finally headed home after an exhausting but enjoyable day, with a lot to show for our efforts.

As always, you can see all the photos in this flickr gallery.