From today and for the sake of my sanity, all my blogging will take place back on my original blog, bignoseduglyguy.  I have migrated all the posts, pictures, comments and yeasty goodness to bignoseduglyguy for posterity and ease.  Please redirect your browsing and feeds accordingly and thanks for sticking with my peripatetic noodlings.

From tomorrow morning, this will be the view that will greet me and She Whom Must Be Obeyed each morning for the next week.  After a family meal of chicken piri piri with our girls and a friend who will live with them for a week, we’re heading off to Aggie Grey’s Lagoon Resort in Samoa – most recently, the location for Survivor Samoa – for our first holiday without kids for 18 years.  A bit of saving and a bit of a bonus and a bit of a travel agent discount have all been combined to make this happen so we’re planning to make the most of the break and really relax.  As we have met and worked with a few Samoan folk in New Zealand, we are looking forward to seeing something of their homeland.  Having booked this trip months back and collected the tickets on the morning of the recent tsunami, we were a little conflicted as to whether we should still take the holiday there with so many having lost so much on that day.  However, the advice we have been given is that because tourism is a mainstay of the economy, just spending our tourist dollars will be of benefit.  Be that as it may, we also hope to hook up with a local contact in Apia for a little mini-mission while we’re there.  With that, I’m off for a plate of chicken piri piri.

New Zealand are through to the World Cup!  The goalkeeper of the family and I joined her team at a team mates place up the valley for a pot luck dinner before watching the match together.

Bahrain gave some opposition and displayed their talent for acting in the first half.  However, Rory Fallon’s rocketing header just before half time and Mark Paston’s save of the questionable penalty were stellar!  Despite the temptation to fall back and defend which seemed likely early in the second half, the All Whites licked it up a notch in the last 20 minutes with several attacking raids and a few shots on goal.

I confidently predict there will be no beer left in New Zealand by morning!

What is friendship? When we are in kindergarten, our friends are those who have the cool crayons that they are willing to share. Friends are easily made and there is no conflict, no fights and no racism. Love beats all things when you are young [...] Tiffs are inevitable, but the saddest thing is when a friendship falls to pieces over the smallest wee thing. In kindergarten, fights would be resolved with a hug and a kiss, and then we would all play on the playground for hours like nothing had happened.

The lovely little passage above resonates with me – the simplicity of our early friendships, the fiery fury of the playground breakups and unconditional love of the before home-time makeups.  It brought to mind the following passage from Robert Fulghum’s lovely book ‘All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten‘.

Most of what I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten.  Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at Sunday school. These are the things I learned: Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life—learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work everyday some. Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together. Be aware of wonder.

Isn’t it great then that the first passage was written by Chelsea, a young aspiring writer here in New Zealand, in the second post to her new blog, Chelsea’s Thoughts.  I must confess a smidgen of bias here, for Chelsea is a close friend of my daughter – and, bless her, cites my blog as an inspiration to write!  Never the less, I think the world needs more enthusiastic young writers like Chelsea – writers that have a great spark and a lovely turn of phrase, so add her to your blogroll, read her posts and comment with encouraging words.

“The Ship From October to December, 2009, the ‘Pacific Link’ ship will be a hub, traveling to 8 different port towns/cities in New Zealand. It will spend about a week in each port, with a variety of events planned around it… school group tours, on-board presentations, and city-wide youth events. In the three to four weeks before the ship docks, there will be teams serving in the community, and presenting a missions call in Christian high schools, churches, youth groups, and young adults groups”

KB kindly handed me a copy of Engage, a missions mobilisation resource package by the Create Emerge and Create International teams.  It contains two DVDs packed with video, slide shows and PDFs that profile the work of those on outreach or in the mission field.  To get a taste of the quality and depth of the contents, check out Voices From The Frontlines.

If you can make it, I can thoroughly recommend hooking up with these folk or the ship on what is it’s valedictory tour before taking on a new role.

Twenty-five years after the original sermon was delivered, this is one of many videos out there based on S. M. Lockridge‘s six and a half minute description of Jesus Christ.  First saw this a few weeks back and was reminded of it again this evening by my daughter.

The Bridge Builders

Today, our youngest and I decided to grab a little one-on-one time together as we haven’t had a ‘date’ for a long time.  Leaving the rest of the family to boring clothes shopping, we headed downtown to see the Da Vinci Machines exhibition.  While a little smaller and a little more pricey/commercial than I was expecting, we spent an hour or so wandering round looking at and discussing the themed replica exhibits.  These ranged from the well-known like the air screw, flying machine and tank to smaller explorations of engineering principles like the wormscrew, column-lifting machine and autolock mechanism.

We both won a bookmark (a.k.a. exhibition advert) by managing to replicating one of Da Vinci’s arched bridge designs from a pile of notched logs.  Da Vinci created these designs for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico ‘Il Moro’ to facilitate rapid troop movements across rivers while carrying out surprise attacks.  It took us four attempts to get the structure stable enough to bear our weight and one wonders how easy it would have been to build these bridges without access to both sides of the river or under a hail of arrows or flaming shot!

A little peckish from our bridge-building efforts, we crossed the street and wandered into the small, friendly and pleasingly un-commercial Auckland City Farmer’s Market.  There we tried out various things to eat including the delicious pita bread cooked on site by the lovely folk at Abu-Melamed Bakery, poppy seed and Parmesan bagels from the bubbly peeps at the Bagel Love stall and great spicy hot dogs with smoky capsicum sauce from two ladies at an unnamed stall.  Sharing a sunny table, we talked to a nice couple who came from Hawaii and Sydney (long distance love?) and took a photo for them – in return, they gave us both a big juicy strawberry!  We shared a fruit smoothie while we walked over to the Maritime Museum where one of us got our face painted before we walked up and down Queen Street looking in bookshops and chatting.  An ice cream in the sun topped off our trip and we slowly headed home for a cup of tea with big grins on our faces.

I discovered that Yahoo’s GeoCities is being shut down today – and with it a few of my fledgling attempts at blogs.  I clicked over there to find that only the index page of my first serious attempt remains, with broken links to my hand drawn graphics and 404 pages for the rest.

Back in the day, I used to blog a lot about food which I still do occasionally (see blog roll top right).  I was also a bit of a PDA geek and wrote a fair amount about Palms, Psions and iPaqs, which led me to writing a few pieces for the much-missed Happy Palm website, where I met my good friends Chuck, Jason and Roger.  I’m not an overly nostalgic person but I’ll miss those first stumbling steps and over-use of all those things we used to think essential in a web site like scrolling marqees and flashing text – a look captured brilliantly by the marvellous xkcd today.  I’ll close with the footer from my old site.

This morning, we received a message from Jennifer:

Good news, I entered ‘Proud’ in the Waiheke Art Award.  Last night it opened.  And I won the Zini Douglas Merit Award, The Elizabeth Grierson Merit Award and I sold the work within 1/2 an hour of the show opening.

It is peculiar to think that a picture of us has been purchased by someone and may very well end up hanging in their house for other to look at.

Compared to the US and the UK, books are pretty expensive in New Zealand.  This is due in part, I’m sure, to the fact that we’re a flipping long way from anywhere and, according to a lady in my favourite bookshop, the closure of the last book warehouse in NZ.  Apparently, all NZ booksellers now stock from vast book-caves somewhere in the Aussie outback.

For these reasons, I am grateful that, despite being preoccupied with moving his family of four from autumnal UK to the NZ spring, my good friend Dave, of funkypancake fame, did me a great favour by sneaking a copy of A.J. Jacobs – The Year of Living Biblically into his luggage.

I’m a couple of chapters in and it’s a great read so far.  This is mainly because – though the book is both wry and funny – Jacobs hasn’t gone for the easy/cheap laughs but instead has really tried to explore what it means to live to the letter of the Scriptures in the 21st century.