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.