Hi, well I forgot to mention that a few weeks ago we were blessed with a visit from Jessica. Here we are together going for a swim on a crisp evening. She was only here from Sunday morning to Saturday morning, so we made the most of a few evenings together. She was here for a conference with her Grad School advisor from the University of Vermont, Cully. Cully is now at Virginia Tech, so one of his new Grad Student's came for the trip as well, her name is also Jessica and it turns out that we had a class together at Penn State back in 2001. Here are the two Jessicas:

One evening the Jessica's, Darrel and I went to Sumner, were supposed to go for a swim, but some crazy kelp/seaweed stuff was clogging up the shore, we all chickend out and just enjoyed the view.
Super early on Saturday morning, before Jess got on her flight home, we took a trip to the Botanical Gardens in Christchurch. We took these pics of tree ferms. I quite like the blurry one, but to get a better idea of what the picture is off, just look at the pic below it, they are identical, by the second one I used the flash. The brown bit in the middle is a new frond unfurling, just like a fiddlehead, but as big as your fist!

Thanks Jessica for sharing all of your photos with me and my fans, um I mean friends and family!

So here is an update on the house situation. We take possession on the 27th- so yes, If any of you know my sister she is going to beat us out because they take possession of their first house on the 20th. We are going to do a load or two after work each day, just so we can unpack and get settled over the following weekend. We can't really start packing yet, because our place is so small. The van is proving to be very handy these days. I picked up some free lounge chairs and a kitchen table last weekend (2 of the 3 items were injured in the process, but hey they were free and they needed some work anyways) so we just left the stuff in the van because there is nowhere else to put it.

And today we went to look at a second hand bike for Darrel and ended up at this big smelly guy's house. His entire yard is covered with bikes and other things, but mostly bikes stacked on top of each other. Most of them were locked together, so no one would steal them, but D and I figured that they were better off stolen than sitting in his yard for eternity because he couldn't find the key for half of them. Out of the whole deal, we spent $75 on a commuter bike for D, a hand push lawnmower, and a stepping stool.

The guy said that he moved to the house 17 years ago so he could take walks on the beach, which is literally 7 houses away, but he actually had not made it to the beach in 2 years. He was very interesting to say the least.

Then we hightailed it across town and bought a $140 Fisher and Paykal fridge off of an Indian dude, who I guessed to be an engineer. He had some great fridge advice and he was pretty clever at helping us fit the fridge in the van with all the other stuff we have been collecting.

We had been considering buying a new fridge and getting some deal where you have 12 months to pay it off interest free, but we decided the weekly mortgage payments were probably going to be hard enough to handle. I just hope the fridge is not an energy hog because it is 10 years old. At least it's a Fisher & Paykel, they are well known for energy conservation.

Not much else going on here. Oh, we had some viscous weather this past week. Three days of driving rain and a cold wind. It snowed down to 1000 metres. It's all mostly gone now, or else we would have been hiking this weekend to catch the first run of the season!

Hello! Darrel and I caught some great music over the weekend. If you are looking for some new tunes, then google Fat Freddy's Drop, Shapeshifter and Kora. They are all New Zealand bands that we saw perform at the "Cheap as Chips" concert. Chips are big french fries and they are really cheap. So that means the concert was pretty reasonably priced for 3 bands. It was a beautiful day, we really lucked out because this summer has been the coldest on record.

I think we are moving into fall now, or so I am told. I don't see much difference in the weather or the foliage though.

We have 12 sleeps till we move into our new house!

Guess what?!!! They accepted our offer!!!!!