Lucy and the storm

We were woken early in the morning by the sound of every loose object outside our house skating across the pavement before shedding the bonds of gravity and taking flight. Bleary eyed we peered through our curtains at the serene seascape we admired the day before to see the usually waveless beach a tumultuous pea soup of crashing breakers right out to where the horizon became obscured by the torrential rain making rivers across our lawn. This continued throughout the day and when we lost power, with the light fading, we were found huddled in blankets around a scratchy battery operated radio listening to what the broadcasters were boldly calling a 'weather bomb'. That's right - it was a bomb... in the sky... made of weather. Despite the added aspect of terror (in the popular US sense that is) we were able to batten down the hatches, make some mid-storm reinforcements to shaky decks and find enough candles to play a distracted game of scrabble.

We awoke to a less wild but no less miserable day of rain and newspapers plastered with unroofed homes, landed yachts and rather forlorn looking New Zealand faces accompanied by stories of survival and loss (one of which is pictured right, just try to ignore the rugby propaganda - it's a dark time for the All Blacks but this Aussie thinks they should take it on the chin with the manliness that their haka implies). The storm claiming five lives on a day where winds topped 167kph .



I was particularly intrigued by this last figure as I had done little elemental measurement myself during the day. Fighting my way through the horizontal rain I climbed into the driver's seat of my new red car during the storm and tried figure out how fast this would be if I were driving. Needless to say this wasn't as effective as I had hoped and I concluded that the weather people - apart from following up leads on possible fundamentalist connections to the bad weather - may perhaps have had more effective ways of measuring wind speed, resolving to trust their judgment in future.

Meteorological incendiary devices aside we've had a cosy last few days here. Lucy is expanding her vocabulary of various very meaningful throat noises every day and, in our modest opinion, is taking cuteness to the next level. Here's a little video taken just after we posed some poignant questions to her about space and time and the meaning of life (she smiles about it in the end).

Other adventures of note have been our trip up to Mahurangi Regional Park - where we have begun to discover that New Zealand has more beautiful places than people able to visit/inhabit them, our joining of the Orewa library - this giving us access to the whole of the Rodney District’s libraries (that's right, we are living in a district called 'Rodney' and I have a library card to prove it) and lastly we had the pleasure of meeting some beautiful people at a farm dinner, including some very welcoming new families and an Arab Palestinian Christian formally of the BBC with whom I spent most of the night embroiled in a fascinating conversation covering the intricate nuances of speaking and writing Arabic to the marsh people of Iraq (yeah I know, apparently they have miles of marshes in Iraq where people live on floating beds of reeds and palm fronds, again, fascinating). Thus ends the longest continuous sentence I have ever written. Let's pretend it's postmodern and not just poor grammar.

It's expected to rain here now until 2010 but we are hopeful to begin exploring this beautiful land despite. For the moment just being with Liv's family and meeting some of the very friendly locals is enough to keep us smiling at each other.

Big love.


Tim, Liv and Lucy.

A quick catch up for those who may be out of the loop...

Apparently it takes two weeks from the time your baby is born to process their birth certificate. Once you have sent this birth certificate off with your application it takes a further two weeks to receive your new little bub's passport. So perhaps booking an international flight four weeks after the due date for Lucy's entry into the world was cutting it a little fine... but we made it and with the newest passport on the plane (that is supposed to last her until she turns five - yep 'here's me as a frog' she'll say) we boarded Air New Zealand flight 822 after teary goodbyes from friends and family, manic farewell parties and a whole lot of raised eye-browed strangers who obviously thought we were bad parents for moving countries with a new born baby girl.

Trying our hardest not to smirk at the air hostesses'/customs officers'/duty-free shop assistants' accents we arrived in Auckland with a mixed sense of excitement and relief - excitement at the prospect of a new life on the beach with Liv's family and relief that the ocean of paper work wider than the Tasman was now behind us. After a lift with Hudson from the airport through the darkness and the rain we arrived at 23 Ocean View Road where two very proud grandparents met their first grandchild for the very first time. There was hugs and well dones and isn't this greats and lots of smiling followed by a tasty roast. That night we climbed into bed with full tummies, the sound of the ocean in our ears and the quiet sighs of a dreaming Lucy in a cane bassinet beside us.

Since then we have:

• Bought a fancy car - it's red and it goes really fast, not very us but cars are so cheap here, something to do with not having a domestic auto-manufacturing plant to compete with imports so there is no tax on import Japanese cars.
• Built a dam with Pola (Liv's cousin from Sydney) in one of the creeks that runs across the beach.
• Watched a little too much SKY TV - this has to stop immediately.
• Read stacks of old books - the walls of this old house is lined with well loved volumes - I think the owners use them for insulating the walls (currently reading Thomas More's 'A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation').
• Eaten feijoa cereal like it's going out of fashion.
• Watched rain fall in sheets on the South Pacific Ocean.
• Found hermit crabs in rock pools.
• Giggled uncontrollably at the New Zealand accent while watching the news.

Two things I need to see before I leave this place is molten lava and grinding glaciers, I am told the land of the long white cloud can deliver both.

Much love + deep peace,

Timmo (on behalf of Liv + Lucy)

Ps. For more photos check out this link