Saturday, January 27, 2007

The Grace of Cheese

Things are starting to take shape now that I have finally restored order to the world by having four sorts of cheese in the fridge…

Here I am in wellington

- using computer at local library.
Telecom (national phone provider) is VERY slow at getting our phone connected and one of my flatmates WORKS for them!
Hopefully early next week!
We will get his work concession so will have a 10gig wireless broadband account or some such goodness! I will be download drunk!
Everything is going swimmingly well up here.The house that is next door to ours has CHICKENS! CHICKENS! can you believe it! ( it’s all hush hush. They don’t have a rooster so I only happened to notice them by total chance - apparently you are not allowed to keep chickens in the suburbs - i love them!)
We are quite high up so sometimes clouds engulf the house which is cool. We are near the Karori wildlife santuary (where Kiwi breed) so it is bushy and there are lots of interesting birds. We have punga trees in our jungle of a yard.
The house is kinda rough on the outside - unkept looking but inside is plesant enough.
The lads are ok. Looks liek I won’t see them much. On our first night we have indian curry for dinner (from the Yummy Curry shop) so that is great!
I found a little green shed out the back yard that i shall be able to store the stuff in that i have no idea where I will put it!
I have been in to work (spent a mornign there the day after I arrived). Had a tour ab out the place and met a few people. Lots of things different, some things same. My class room is full of individual desks - blech! will have to do somethign about that. Went out to find murray ( the caretaker guy, who has a harley and has just returned from a trip to puerto rico!) and asked him if there was a room somewhere with all the spare classroom furniture (which there really isn’t) but he said someone else wanted desks so I might be able to offload some. Then I went to the local sally army store and bought a sofa for the classroom for 10 bucks! now I shall have to find a flash bright purple cover or some such. They will deliver it on tuesday! everythign is so easy!
I live on the same street as the school. I live up the hill end though. Takes me a few mins to walk down and most excitingly the local Karori indoor pool is practically attached to my school! I knwo I said the teacher’s college was attached to the school but inbetween the teacher’s college and the school is the pool! (tucked in the back) - I have already been in a bought a concession card, the biggest one they had - 30 swims - and been swimming this morning. I figure I can go either on the way to work or on the way home. The pool is short (25m?) so you can do lots of laps and feel very successful!
I have been driving around a little and don’t seem to be having any problems with directions - the worst problem so far was when I was driving down the ramp to get off the ferry and the map book slipped off the roof of the car (where I had left it abotu a minute before while rearranging some gear so I coudl actually see out the left side of the car)! The man at the bottom of the ramp put up his hand to let some other cars go so I stopped nad leapt out of car and ran back up the ramp and stopped a car just as it was about to stop ON my map book, picked it up and ran back down to the car yellign SORRY! SORRY! I dropped my map book!!!!!!!!!!
It was hilarious!
anyway, i better go, I am off to find the big organic shop in the city…

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Live A1GP TV coverage rocks!

Just watched the four qual sessions and it rocked!

NZ, France (new driver) and Germany (GO NICO!) battling it out for pole.

I am happy we got third and will sit behind Germany (who got pole) for the start of the sprint tomorrow!

it’s a great circuit and so far everyone seems to love it - a great effort by everyone involved with the 12 mill $ upgrade/redo!

The track has been designed so it can be used for multi sport - a drag strip etc.

it was a bit dirty from the support races this morning and there were a few spills and spins.

A big shout out to the marshalls who ran way outta their way to pull Pakistan out of a wee ditch and put him back on the road to avoid a nasty red flag at min 11 of the last session - which woudl have been a big pain in the butt for most of them!

India had done the best time in prac yesterday but didn’t manage to get up to the same skill today. Neither did Tomas who took out first in the prac yesterday.

I am hoping that the Swiss and Canada can come up and feature in main points tomorrow along with NZ which will prevent france and britain and Germany from consolidating their points and will give us a bit of a jump up!

So.. the starting order for the sprint tomorrow goes…
first germany
second france
third NZ
fourth Netherlands