GUITAR!!!! and the quotidian

Yes, we've bought a guitar! And yes, the only member of the band-without-a-name who doesn't play a six stringed instrument is going to try to acquire that skill while in NZ. We looked on trademe.com which is kind of like ebay for New Zealand, as far as we can tell, but we got outbid on the one guitar that Tom thought was reasonable. It turns out the shop in town had a pretty nice guitar at a reasonable price.  Here is our acquisition with Jasper:

20 minutes after picking this thing up, and 3 smarting fingertips later, it's in a corner while I recover. I'm still super excited about it and am looking forward to a solo career in Taupo coffee shops and bars. I'll let you know how that's going in a few weeks...


So, Tom and I are not competitive at all, but I'm just going to put it out there that I will not be the funny blogger - I'm happy to leave that to Tom. My posts will be more day to day - i.e. no epic cows. For more of that stuff, you'll have to wait for Tom's next post and I promise I am not at all offended.

I thought I'd write a bit about our lives here, as it's been a few weeks and we've had a minute to catch our breaths, both individually and collectively, I think.

I am working four days a week in a clinic in a town called Turangi. It's a rural and poor town and it's beautiful. I keep meaning to take photos for this blog and I will someday soon. The clinic is staffed by three physicians, two of whom are permanent. One is a man from Holland who arrived as a locum (temporary) physician six years ago and decided to stay. The other is an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia, like my dad, who arrived in New Zealand about 35 years ago and has lived in Turangi since then. They and everyone else who works there have been super welcoming and helpful -- they are driving me to work almost every day! When we had some issues with the heat in our home, one of the nurses gave us some electric heaters. Everyone is happy to give us advice about where to get our haircuts and where to buy a good kitchen knife and what to do on the weekends. I couldn't be luckier, really. Of course, I miss my coworkers in New York - but this work is so unlike what I did in Manhattan, it doesn't really remind me of my former job very much at all.

Generally our schedule has been that I leave the house around 8 am and Tom finishes getting the kids ready for school and drops them off before their day starts at 9am. School is over at 3 pm and I am home around 5:45pm.  I have been taking Wednesdays off while Rene is visiting family in Holland, but typically Mondays will be my day off. The boys don't have too much homework and I have no work in the evenings and we have been enjoying lots of family time. We've gone through brief obsessions with certain games. Currently, we are playing a game named "Egyptian Rat Sucka" by Tom's high school friend Neil. The name I know contains a word that we'd prefer our boys not using regularly. They are super happy with an excuse to say SUCKA! frequently so this works out for everyone. Here's a photo from tonight:

Tom has been doing a lot of the cooking, which has been wonderful. We had our first New Zealand fish tonight -- I really can't remember what it was - the only fish at the supermarket that we recognized was snapper and salmon. We bought a different fish, on the fishmonger's advice - with a crazy name -- that was delicious. All the dairy is organic (see previous post - with cows both prosaic and epic.) They just don't have feed lots here. They don't use antibiotics and growth hormone is illegal. We are buying "regular" milk. And we are buying beef! We haven't made the lamb leap yet -- mostly because Aidan can't get over the idea of eating anything remotely related to his lovie lambie that he still sleeps with nightly.Yes, they sell a lot of kiwi. We buy and eat a lot of kiwi. It's less than two New Zealand dollars for a kilo of kiwi.