As the title suggests, it is Jo-anne's birthday today - so all of you who done forgot - you hopefully still have time to drop her a quick mail or make a call to wish her a marvellous day! On that note, since I wanted to send a little gift from us, I had the opportunity to try out the NZ postal system and have been really pleasantly surprised - not only is postage not too exorbitantly expensive, but it appears to be really efficient too! Evidently, here in NZ the fastest way to get documents from one place to another locally, is via the dead ordinary postal service - if you post something in town today, it will be delivered to it's destination in NZ tomorrow - quicker than the average courier service - how cool is that! From here to Scotland, ordinary mail, was guaranteed less than 10days, as it turns out, it took 5 which is really great and so has arrived in time!
The only trick involved with the postal service, is the fact that most of them have now moved from being 'independent' stores, to being 'attached' to something else - in our case, the postal service operates from a corner of a video/stationers which is in the little centre about a kilometre from our house. It was a bit of a case of finding out where the nearest one was, but once there, they have all the boxes, envelopes on hand so posting stuff is really easy.
I was really glad about getting some flak about blog posts in Afrikaans - just makes me feel better to know that there really are folks who are interested and who are reading all the bumph that we put up here! It is a case of trying to keep all the folks happy all the time, which is a virtual impossibility - so we are settling for keeping most of the folks happy, most of the time.
We've had a 'stay at home' weekend this past weekend - there were a few things that we wanted to do in town on Saturday and then there was a braai organised for the 'manne' on Saturday afternoon. We ended up strolling around some of the shops that we hadn't yet been into on Saturday morning and buying a whole lot of 'stuff' - the rule of thumb has been to try really hard not to buy anything that closely resembles anything that we know is in the container so that we don't end up with a lot of duplicate things - we have been threatening to buy an outside umbrella for the patio for ever ( since Kroonstad days) so when we found one on special on Sat, we decided to pay the dollars and load it into the car. Our patio area outside our house is really very open to the elements and we are thrilled that we can now sit out there even when the sun is baking hot - it also somehow gives a much more lived-in look to our back garden so we are really chuffed with the new aquisition! We are not shouting too loudly about the fact that this particular umbrella has teeny tiny fairy lights (just a few mind you) along the wooden struts up inside the umbrella, so at the flick of one tiny switch on the main pole, voila, you have kitch personified! Even more spectacular, is the fact that these fairy lights are, wait for it, solar powered - I kid you not - the very top of the brolly pole has the little solar panel to recharge the lights! Who would have ever guessed that someone would dream up something so incredibly technologically advanced and mind blowing - I would really like to know if there is anyone in the whole universe who would actually buy this particular umbrella BECAUSE it has fairy lights?
There is talk of starting a Youth Team at the church - young people aged between about19 and 30 to get a Sunday evening service up and running - in English I might add, and with all the bells and whistles that the more progressive among us have come to sort of expect. This will naturally require that a group of young folk get going on the guitars, keyboards, basses, drums and mikes that go along with a service of this kind and so to cut a long story short, and to the enormous surprise of everyone who knows us - I'm sure - Jo and I appear to be being considered to take a sort of guidance and leadership role with this group of young folk. As a result, there is talk even now of starting to take lessons on at least keyboards and guitars - although our instruments are all still many miles away, we have managed to borrow two classical guitars (which were sitting around gathering dust) and there is talk of a keyboard or two appearing so that I can start to get my act together. I have absolutely no idea what private teachers of music in this part of the world charge for their services, but have put a couple of lasses onto the task of making a few calls to find out - the plan being that I can slot my fees in somewhere in the middle and not put anybody's nose out of joint. The only music teachers I have come across thus far, are attached to a school and so teach from there and are not doing so 'privately' as it were. The minimum wage in NZ has recently been upped to $12 an hour, so hopefully, I will be able to generate a bit more than the minimum - if we can, we want to save a dollar a day at least for the 'ticket fund' and so hopefully, before we know it, we will have amassed a whole lot of money for whoever to come over and see us! So, the sooner I can start earning something, even if the container isn't here yet, the sooner 'whoever' can start packing for a trip to NZ!
For the file on 'things different' - 'wh' here in a Maori word or name is pronounced - F. So Whangerei is pronounced Fangeray. The 'a' in a word like 'car' is pronounced like the 'a' in 'fact' - so 'car park' is 'ca pack' with the 'a' sort of stretched out and longer than usual.Us being the folks we are have Afrikaanerised this weird way of saying an 'a' and extended it to words like 'snaaks' still keeping the kiwi long 'a' as in 'act' - gets a laugh every time!
Dis al!
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