Hey guys,

Wow - I wasn't expecting responses so quickly.  It must be a pretty intense experience studying in the UK at the moment Genna.  I can imagine the general day-to-day-ness is very different, but what about the syllabus? I worked in a school for a short time here which also had an IB syllabus and it's very well thought out, but a lot of work.  Let me know what texts you are studying if you have any trouble.

That's right Alex, although I don't have quite enough land to grow everything we need, it gives me some practice eh.  Just got to start growing 10 acres of corn or sugar cane to power my car, a pine forest for paper and building materials and finish wiring up my hamster-wheel fuelled power station and I'm all sorted. 

Just been down making some alterations to the garden anyways.  I'm all excited cos the snow peas (they're the ones that you can eat the pods as well as the peas and they sell for about 5RM for a little tray of 10 pods or so) are flowering like crazy.  I'd better go charge up my pacemaker after all of that excitement.

Hey all (if any)

Hey Joanna - ya ya, certainly remember.  I haven't listened to Bic Runga's new album, but I imagine it must be extremely mellow if it's more so than previous ones.  Form 5 - wah, intense eh.

Things are good - it's the busy time of year and so tutoring schedule is all full, but we're going to do a lot of planning, organising, transforming of the place over the christmas break.  I've been building gardens too -- heehee, I'm really old... you see, the apartment is quite small and I've always complained that there's no room to have a decent garden (as I have always tended to when I have stayed in places with a reasonable yard, etc)... so at one stage I bought some pots, etc to grow herbs in on the deck upstairs.   Then more recently I figured: there's some more space downstairs that's a kind of concreted version of the same floorspace as the deck above it so why not put some pots there too... well - it turns out that a wooden pot like 1 metre by 40cm and about 30cm tall is something like $200! The cheapest I could find was about $100 and that looked like it would fall apart if you breathed at it too hard... keep in mind that NZ$1 = about 2.5RM.

So I went and got about $14 worth of wood and $5 worth of nails and made one myself which is about 3x as big (volumetrically) and much prettier and stronger.  Later on I did the same thing again so now I have two gardens so far containing: 2 kinds of spinach, 2 kinds of peas, courgettes, kumara (sweet potato), silver beet, beetroot, celery and pak choy (not counting all the herbs upstairs).  So it's all good. 

Oh - and then there's the worm farm.. No... seriously... we have about 3000 worms.  So yeah - I'm pretty much a farmer now.

Yep - got a library downstairs now... Well, some bookshelves with books on them that are in a certain order anyway.  Trying to get more students in or more editing/proofreading work - beginning of the year and all that.

Ok - We're back in NZ again.  It was an awesome trip and I think I'm going to be constantly full for about 2 years even if I don't eat anything more ever again.

Sorry we didn't get time to catch up with anyone.  I even wanted to wander into school one of the days that we were there to check it all out and see who was still there, but it never eventuated.  I did bump into a couple of students at random so that was cool.

Back into the business anyway.  It's all about shifting furniture and contacting past clients at this stage, but I'm sure you all have more exciting things to think about.

La dee dah.

The year is coming to a close.  We're shutting the business from next week until next Feb - and I finish at the other school in a couple more weeks - so it's already feeling like a holiday.  Yay!  Actually, I am sitting here gradually waking up on a saturday morning before my final 2 lessons today.  Nothing too interesting to say just yet really... it's all good though - northern lights coming out next week and I'll be debating whether to see that early or to wait until it's more like a proper holiday (after Dec 14 when school ends) to see the film.  It should be great though.

Haha - I have started reading war and peace between lessons or while my students are doing worksheets in their tutoring sessions sometimes.  It's not as boring as I expected it to be just yet - although nothing has really happened.  It is going to take a long time to read though.  We actually scored a whole lot of books recently... there was this big book fair for charity where people donated old and new books that they didn't want anymore.  The first day we went there it was $1 per book and we ended up getting about 40 good ones.  Then we can back a couple of days later and they were giving away a banana box full of books for $5 each (actually they were going to charge us just $3 a box in the end, but we felt too guilty and paid $5 anyway).  So we took home 6 more boxes :):):).  Just for perspective, one of the boxes contained an entire 29 volume encyclopedia set.  So, yeah, I've got a bit of reading to do.