Hedgehog Days of Summer

Well I feel bad about lapsing so much on the blog as it has been about a month since I last posted, but the truth of the matter is that not much of consequence has happened other that visits from my parents and Tenny's mom. Having our first visitors definitely brought a breath of fresh air into the trip, as the last month has been spent mostly making as much money as we can and playing as much softball as I can. I am happy to report that we have managed to save up a decent amount of $$ for the 2nd leg of our travels, and I have managed to correct the deficiency in my batting stance that led me to strike out an embarrassing amount of times. Plus I have finally gotten used to the infamous 'riseball' that was causing me fits. Since fastpitch is underarm the ball comes at you in an entirely different angle, and a good riseball can start at the waist and end up at neck level.

On the home front the summer weather has finally arrived and our house is even more beautiful now that we can keep all the windows and doors open. A couple of days ago we also earned the honour of being the first tenants in 30 years to save a hedgehog from the fish pond. To be fair hedgehogs are kind of stupid little critters and every so often they come down to the pond looking for a drink and get a swim instead after slipping on the plastic lining. Tenny's mom spotted this one paddling madly and trying to get up out of the water, and after some discussion we initiated a hedgehog rescue effort by fishing him out with a garden rake. The water was so cold he was shivering pretty badly so we made him a little recovery bed in the trees with a towel for a blanket and worms from the compost as a snack. He wasn't in any shape to eat so the wormies made their escape but sure enough after 2 hours he had gotten his body temperature back up and disappeared into the grass. Unfortunately we didn't get a picture of him before he left us, so you'll just have to imagine how cute it was.

We did however take a picture of our cat wearing this hat.. which is even cuter, so you can feel like it wasn't a complete waste of time reading this:

M'Lord Mayor!!

Sometimes I wish news broadcasts were still like they were back in 1956, so punchy and full of hullygully. In honour of the start of the Olympic torch parade back home I give you what I can only imagine was the best moment of the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne:

P.M.

The boring morning of yesterday surprisingly turned into one of the most fun nights we've had in Nelson at the beginning of the Nelson Arts Festival. Opening night is headlined by a kids masquerade parade, and last night we took our spot on the street for the main event. I think there must have been some kind of peace and love theme, which was interpreted pretty broadly by the teachers, but seeing the little ones from each local school in a different costume was indisputably adorable. Tens and I had a bit of a photo contest to see who could capture the moment the best.. let's see who you think did better.



Tenny Shot #1











VS.


Doug Shot #1:











Tenny Shot #2












VS.


Doug Shot #2











I think we all know who the winner is.. but nice try babe.

A.M.

It's official, today is one of the boringest mornings of all time. First it was the never ending rain, then a mad dash for a balloon boy that was boyless, and now I go to myp2p.eu to see if there are any exciting sports being shown online to pass the time and this is what I get:

Some days you just have to get creative.. which means it's time to work on my headline collection. Ever since we got here I have been collecting amazing headlines from local newspapers, inspired by a headline in the Vancouver Sun before I left which read "Classy player ends career with class". So far my favourite, from a paper on the Coromandel Peninsula, is this one:


I'm hoping to make a compilation of my headlines and combine them with Tenny's ongoing collection of funny mailbox pictures to make a superbook. Kind of an encyclopedia of NZ culture..

Really.. that's offensive??

I could probably fill twenty blogs with the hilarious instances of racism (although admittedly not malicious) by unsuspecting Aussies and Kiwis, but this one probably takes the (lolly)cake. Apparently this week on the 'Hey Hey it's Saturday Night' reunion special, sadly not shown on our side of the water, one of the acts was just a wee bit offensive. Luckily Harry Connick Jr., a.k.a. Captain America, was there to set things straight. Here is the article from the Guardian, and if you are a glutton for punishment the clip from the show is here:

Personally I feel the worst for Philadelpha Cream Cheese, who had the misfortune of having their logo advertised right as they stepped onto the stage. But hey we shouldn't be too hard of them, it's not like they were highly educated or anything.

lolligag

Last night Tens and I decided to put our money where our mouth is and bought a package of supposedly delicious 'pineapple lumps', thinking that no product with a funny commercial could possibly be disgusting. Well we were wrong, and have noticed that New Zealanders seem to have a strange fascination with revolting dessert products.

Ever wondered what racism tastes like? Well try New Zealand's Lolly Cake. Through extensive research I have determined it to be it's purest incarnation..

Tenny sells them at work, and the finished product looks something like this:


But if you break down the ingredients a bit, you'll find those innocent fluffy chewy marshmallowy chunks are actually these:

ESKIMOS!! The dreaded candy that once sparked a mild international full scale rumbling!

Of course not surprisingly Kiwis ferociously defend the right to use their racist little treat, but I have to wonder what they would think if the shoe was on the other foot and they went to a store in Canada and found a caricature of a Maori person.. honestly I suspect they wouldn't care at all. It's pretty obvious that the two things New Zealanders resist the most about modern Western culture is its PCness and the onslaught of the 'nanny state'. But does the addition of the eskimo candy make the lolly cake officially a form of evil?? Well, before discovering that a lollicake is spelled lolly cake I went searching for a picture of it and the first image that came up when I typed in "lollicake new zealand" was this:

I believe it is customary in the legal profession at this juncture to use the term CASE CLOSED!

Heavenly Mud

Well, not surprisingly the God of Pineapple Lumps cared more about producing and distributing delicious bite size snacks and didn't care at all about our car, so I failed miserably. But I would give myself a B+ for effort, after all I did locate the problem and bought the replacement part, I just couldn't physically remove the starter from the car. Yesterday I definitely learned the valuable lesson that socket wrenches are necessary for car repair, and lack of one is a bit of a deal breaker. So I took it off this morning to the local auto electrician and we'll see how much my lack of skill cost us. As a result I have now put taking an auto mechanics course at the top of my adult education demands, even higher than learning to play the ukelele which was the previous #1 holder.

But it's not all sad news and dollars lost on this side of the world. To the contrary, last Wednesday was an awe inspiring victory for 'Heavenly Mud', the name of our quiz team that competes every week at our local bar the Sprig & Fern. With my knowledge of Chemistry gleamed from the various posters and hooked rugs around our childhood house, Tenny's knowledge of famous faces, and our friend Hugh's knowledge of MTV New Zealand's latest videos we vauled to the top last week claiming victory by a sizeable margin. As you can see from this victory shot we were in a league of our own, being the only team to pick up 80 points:

And that beautiful basket wasn't even part of our prize, that was the gift pack we won in the weekly raffle which took place before the start of the last round. I guess when it rains it pours sometimes.. and thanks to luck and our teammates we got a whole week's worth of alcohol paid for us. Now that is the taste of sweet sweet victory.

The Best and Worst of NZ commercials

One thing I love about travelling is watching commercials in another country, and over our tenure here in Nelson we've seen some interesting trends. The first is that stalwarts back home like KFC need a little extra motivation to get Kiwis through the doors, as apparently just selling fried chicken isn't enough. It seems like almost every week we have seen a commercial for some kind of different KFC creation that defies all logic and common decency. Don't like fried chicken? Well allow me to entice you with chicken in sandwich form.. what?? Not good enough?? Well what if I put a hashbrown on top??

Behold .. the Tower Burger!!









What did you say?? Mashed Potatoes aren't good enough on their own? Well then please good sir allow me to deep fry them for you:

Seriously?? Mashies??

But I'm being a bit too harsh, it's not all bad.. in fact some of the New Zealand made commercials are pretty sweet as. We've both become pretty big fans of the Pineapple Lumps Commercial, and this Mitre 10 ad is pretty true to Kiwi form.

I'm trying to take some of the best parts of Kiwi culture, like DIY, and incorporate them into my life, but we'll see how it goes. This afternoon I'm going to try to remove the starter from our car and replace the copper contacts.. hopefully the God of Pineapple Lumps is on my side.

Viva La Penguino!

Two things have consumed me over the past 3 weeks since I last posted: The impending doom of the current economic recession and what I should do with all my time since I can only find work in spurts. The answer.. puppy linux.

For a long time now I wanted to run linux on one of my computers, but at the end of the day I was too incompetent to make it happen. Enter necessity, the mother of invention and vanquisher of complacency. Getting sick of going to the library every day to check for work and having less than $100 to spend on a computer I looked at the buy/sell ads and saw what I thought was an incredible bargain. Granted she was an old computer, but when I went to take a look at it I could tell it was in pristine condition and hadn't been used for years, plus it seemed to have everything we needed to give us a simple internet connection at home. That is the day I learned that you should never buy a computer without checking how much RAM memory it has.

When I got it home I quickly realized that something was wrong the moment I tried to do two things at once, as the computer made a sound that made me think that Windows XP was about to XPire (HA!.. I kill me!). But luckily for every mistake made in the computer world there is a legion of geeks ready to come up with a solution, and puppy linux was designed to resurrect old computers with low RAM to run like new.

I'll be damned, but it works. Weighing in at a whopping 100 mb (a fraction of the size of windows) it runs amazingly fast and comes with a freeware version of almost every program we needed, so Tens and I have become big fans. It has definitely taken me a bit longer to set up because I know nothing about code and needed to look up how to do every little thing, but with all the time in the world that has been more of a blessing than a curse. If you've got an old clunker lying around I urge you to give it a try.. puppylinux.org

In other news the King Family continues to reign supreme as Mama King comes through in the hash brown challenge to save my breakfast. She correctly identified that my problem was frying the potatoes in butter instead of oil, as only oil will get hot enough to brown the outside and keep the hash from turning into mush. The test kitchen proved her diagnosis, turning out a lovely product in no time flat. Thanks Mom!

MMmmmm.. hash browns

Way Down in the Hold

I'm proud to report that both Tens and I have found some work, although at the moment I am still only getting scraps with a temp agency while Tenny does the full-time haul working for an Italian cafe called DiPierris, making 'flat whites', 'long blacks' and all the other imaginary coffees they love down under (Tenny revealed to me in expose fasion that all NZ coffee names are pretty much just variations on how much foam to put on top.. not very inspiring if you ask me).

But I had the pleasure of working 8 hours for the Stevedores on Tuesday unloading the good ship Rehua, pictured below, which docked in Nelson with its recent catch of Gurnard and Hoki.

Unloading a fishing boat is definitely grunt work, and it's probably the first job I ever had with a rule designed to keep you from dying (don't ever stand below a pallet of boxes as it is being raised out of the hold), but at the end of the day it really wasn't so bad, and the work format of 30 minutes 'smoko' break for ever hour down in the hold is pretty humane. The highlight of the day was definitely the airing of the safety video, which was given a shakespearean introduction by the boss. It went a little something like this:

(clears throat).. "fuck, alright, fuck, here is a fucking video. well it's a fucking safety video, and I know you're gonna be like fuck, this is fucking, but just fucking watch it, because it's the rules and if you want to work on the fucking site, well fuck. So fucking watch, and I'll fucking quiz you after".

Now that's a man who knows his audience..

WWWWMH .. What Went Wrong With My Hashbrowns?!??!

Okay everyone, it's time for the second reader participation game on this illustrious (did I mention award winning) blog. You remember the first game we played: WCOBWIT or Who Kind Of Beached Whale Is That?.. well it was a smash hit, with my brother Andrew taking the prize by identifying the whale as coming from the 'beaked' variety.

**UPDATE**

Coming in a close second in WCOBWIT was a man named Wojtek, whose email we just recently found because it was sent to us through Tenny's Flikr account. Wojtek gives even more detail on the bloated carcass, pointing out that is is in fact a Shepherd's beaked whale, or 'tasmacetus shepherdi', and while Andrew wins in timing, I must say that Wojtek is a tad bit more knowledgeable.

Moving on to today's main event, our second game is entitled WWWMH or What Went Wrong With My Hashbrowns?!??

On Sunday morning I started the day, much like any other, with coffee and a scrumptious breakfast. Feeling a tad bit adventurous I decided to whip up some hashbrowns, and thinking I knew my way around hashbrown prep, I made a huge batch using classic white baking potatoes. The end result was somewhat gluey and wet..


So what went wrong?? Here is what I did:

Took 3 medium sized potatoes, and shredded them with a cheese grater.
Soaked potato shreds (hash) in cold water for approx. 15 minutes to remove starch.
Washed off hash and drained water.
Took a small towel and dabbed the hash to soak up excess water.
Placed copious amounts of butter into frying pan.
Fried on medium heat, but noticed they were damp and gluey, so moved to high heat to teach them a lesson.
Moved back down to medium heat because eggs were taking longer than expected. Hash was browning but still not enough that I would consider them 'hashbrowns'.
Kicked it back up to high heat in desperation, producing the end result, which sadly resembled brown potato turds.

So what did I do wrong?? The person who can correctly email or comment what needs to be changed in my recipe to produce lovely hashbrowns will receive a prize of unnamed size and unassured quality.

Good luck contestants!

The TET offensive

Well it's official, I have become one of the many victims of these 'tough economic times'. Two weeks ago we arrived in Nelson (the NZ version) and I haven't been able to find work. Maybe I'm being too selective, or have become soft in my old age and can no longer hit the streets and sell myself. At this point I think the far more likely explanation is that people around here find it creepy when a lawyer applies to work pruning apple trees. I'm getting so frustrated that I am going to print out a CV which leaves out the fact that I am a lawyer entirely and just pretends that the last 5 years of my life didn't happen.. this might of course lead to an awkward question about what I've been doing over that time, but I've pretty good at making stuff up. Right now the leading candidates are: Trapped down a well, or doing an internship for The Crocodile Hunter. As for the last year since he died of course I've just been in mourning so I thought it inappropriate to search for work. That should do just fine.

Luckily however we travel as a duo and the other half, most certainly the better half at job hunting, has already landed three jobs. Tenny is currently employed as a gingerbread maker, Italian cafe worker, and was shortly on the list for a home care business before she called them to quit because she already had two other jobs. I tried to convince her to give me the gingerbread job, but apparently things don't work that way. weird.

To drown my sorrows today I went to the courthouse to check out the differences, and have now spiraled myself into a full scale crisis about my profession. Why do any of us practice law in the big city?? It is insanity.. Today I went to the courthouse where I found two courtrooms, one of which was closed, the other held what appeared to be a fraud trial. That's it.. in a city of 60,000, that's all there was going on. No lists containing hundreds of drug charges or courtrooms where three trials have been booked for the same day assuming that 2 of the 3 will collapse for one reason or another. And no civil trials at all, which I guess isn't too much of a surprise when you find out that there is no personal injury law in New Zealand. Just this weird thing called the ACC (Accident Compensation Corporation) which covers everyone who gets injured, no matter what the circumstance. Now I'm not saying this is a good thing, in fact I'd wager that the system is probably a disaster to work through, but it all just makes me wonder why I work in such an overworked, underfunded, the only way out of this is to sue type of system. Just taking away the ability for people to 'believe' they can win something by suing someone else is a huge plus if you ask me. From my experience for every 1 person that does sue someone back home there are probably 5 who believe they should sue that person and that the probable result will be the destruction of the government and the beginning of a new world order where you can park your campervan anywhere.

But this is why I need to find work.. so I'll stop complaining about everything.

From northland on down..

New Photos from the desk of Tenny!! Get em while they're hot:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22304779@N00/sets/72157621580710174/

Windy Welly

It is with great sadness that I must announce that I have nothing really insightful to say at the moment. Not to say we haven't been up to much, because we've actually been doing a lot (Tenny is working on a new batch of pictures as I type), it's just that we've succumbed to the banality of city life for a couple of weeks while we figure out the master plan. Tens and I are chillin' in chilly Wellington, enjoying the incredible hospitality of her cousins Georgette and Emily, and getting caught up on all the boring stuff like getting our resumes ready for job hunting.

Actually the most interesting thing to happen in the last few days has been what didn't happen, to us at least. We had talked about going for a hike in the mountains to the north of Wellington, but changed our minds when we found out that the head of the national museum in Wellington died of hypothermia along the track.

http://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/65670/te-papa-ceo-died-hypothermia

I think the two of them were far higher and further than we had planned to go, but it's a healthy reminder that it's still winter and we're probably better off sitting by the heater watching Harry Potter. The strange thing is that I think they probably died the day we were vising the national museum, which is quite an impressive museum. Looks like we'll have to live vicariously through others, like our friend Jed, who just scaled Mt. Adams outside of Portland. It looks like he's excited, but he could also be trying to scare off a yeti.



So for the time being we'll stick to the lowlands, which is what we were doing in Napier/Hastings before we ventured down to Wellington. And I hate to admit it lest I be branded a yuppy, but we had a really good time at the wineries swishing the free samples of the reserve collections and pretending like we could taste apricots and oak (well, I was pretending at least, Tenny has a much more refined palate and can actually distinguish these things). Ahhh, who am I kidding.. anybody who uses the word 'lest' in a sentence deserves to be ridiculed. I'm not afraid to admit that I could get really used to having expensive glasses of wine poured for free, in fact Tens and I are already plotting a trip to the Okanagan to check out the local wineries back home. And if anyone is planning on buying New Zealand wine in the near future I can certainly attest to the fact that 2007 was a good year.

GOTCHA!!!!

Well after the rains finally ceased we got some really beautiful camping in on the northern most part of New Zealand at Cape Reinga and 90 Mile Beach before heading down the west coast for a truly EXTREME New Zealand experience. We camped at a small national park called the Trounson Kauri Park, which apparently due to the fact that it is entirely surrounded by pasture land has helped to keep pests out and increase the population of north island brown kiwi. So we set up our tents, cooked a hearty meal, covered our headlamps with red foil to dull our lights, and headed out into the bush an hour after sunset to see if we could find a wild kiwi.

We knew there must be some in the forest because we could hear a couple calling to each other as we were cooking, and sure enough after only 13 minutes of wandering the trails we found our superstar..


Amazingly this little guy wasn't even afraid of us, and walked right through our path about 5 feet away. At that point we figured it was easy peasy to track them down, but after another 2 hours in the bush the only other sighting we had was a beak poking out from around a tree. It's a shame that the picture doesn't show his beak actually, because it is definitely the most impressive part of the kiwi. It really is quite a miracle that any of these birds survive at all, considering that they seem pretty oblivious of anything that could kill them, and apparently they don't really rear their young at all, just turn them loose shortly after birth. But hey.. it leads to good times and after a really fun kiwi hunt we're not complaining.

football is football is football

After finishing up our two week stint on our second farm, puriri flat, we headed north in search of good views and warm enough weather for a little bit of camping. The first stop was a little town on the Bay of Islands named Russell, where we very unceremoniously got completely rained out..

So we took the opportunity to brush up on some of the finer aspects of New Zealand culture, by going to the bar and watching rugby for hours and hours. I don't think either of us really knows the rules of the game quite yet, but we do know that this guy stole Tenny's hair:

As we watched the southern hemisphere's version of the beautiful game we were also soothed to the easy listening sounds of 'Plan B' - http://www.myspace.com/planbduo (their musical skills are thankfully better than their web design skills) who played a variety of cover songs to a faithful fanbase of us and one other lady at the bar. They were really nice though, and didn't get too jealous when we payed more attention to the rugby than them.

After careful analysis I've also discovered the secret of the game, and contrary to popular theories involving 'skill' or 'fitness', I've determined that the class of a rugby team is entirely dependent on the name of its captain. Strange that England won the Rugby World Cup back in 2003? Not if you consider that their captain's name was 'Jonny Wilkinson', or that the 2007 winners South Africa had a captain named 'Paul Roos'. You'd think this would give New Zealand a good chance of winning in 2011 with a captain named 'Mils Miliaina', but I'm afraid my pick has to go to the Aussies, behind... Stirling Mortlock Anyone care to place a wager?

And the winner is...

Drum roll please.............. My brother Andrew, big shocker. Andrew correctly identified the splayed body as that of a beaked whale, and his pick is backed up by a recent report from May in New South Wales that confirms that beaked whales do come ashore once every blue moon.

In other whale news Tens and i spotted our first living whale (a boring run of the mill Orca) yesterday on what turned out to be an 8 hour fishing expedition from dawn to dusk. We were only supposed to go out until 2 pm but we didn't actually find a good spot until the end of the day when all sorts of stuff started flying into our boat, including an eel and a crazy little fish called a 'leather jacket' which croaked at us angrily when we pulled it up. Pictures will follow shortly, which reminds me I forgot to post the 2nd round of shots Tenny has meticulously logged on Flikr. If you haven't seen them already they can be found here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22304779@N00/sets/72157619491529149/

Hot Water Beached

We've said adieu to the Corromandel Peninsula, where we can now pretty much call ourselves local experts after spending three weeks, and have landed north of Auckland on an olive oil/vinegar farm called Pururi Flat. On the way out of town we stopped by Cathedral Cove and the Hot Water Beach, which is one of New Zealand's big tourist draws. On a lovely day you can dig a hole in the sand and bask in natural pools of hot water while looking over the shimmering ocean. Or on the crappiest day of the year however, when we visisted, you can look like an idiot trying to dig a hole which gets covered up immediately by the incoming storm surge. Let's say hypothetically you did decide you wanted to be that idiot, well then you'd look a little like this:



And let's say, again hypothetically speaking, that you tried to go around the rocks to find a more secluded portion of the beach away from the waves, and you had as much luck as we had that day, well then you'd probably find something like this:

Our host here believes that the poor belated soul was a pilot whale, but after looking at some pictures I don't think it is. The elongated snout would suggest a dolphin more that a whale, but I looked up what the largest dolphin was and apparently the internet is claiming that a killer whale is actually a dolphin. So now I am thoroughly confused..

A thousand gold pieces to the person who identifies this carcass!*

*depending on the availablilty of gold pieces successful entrants may receive a postcard

Seriously Bizarre

We picked up our new wheels while we were in Auckland, and are proud to introduce the newest member of our family:

Princess Silver Fern

She is a 1996 Subaru Legacy Brighton, with some sweet hatchback space and dual left hand driving side action. Within our first week we took her up into the mountains on the Coromandel Peninsula, where we did the Pinnacles Hike in the Kauaeranga Valley (Tens will have some photos up on Flickr shortly). And it was on her first night camping that New Zealand proved it isn't always as warm as it is cut out to be, with this being the scene in the morning after a long cold night:



Geniuses that we are we decided to test her by leaving a light on all night, and she passed the test by driving for another week before the battery completely died on us (Atta girl!!). Next test is to run her without oil (not even valvoline) in the desert for 5 days and see if the engine survives. If she passes that test then maybe, just maybe, we'll start taking care of her.

In other news Tenny and I were in deep discussion while planting some trees at our first wwoofing farm, named Tihanna, after something that I didn't understand (you get used to that after 2 weeks of Maori names all over the place), and began to ponder one of the great questions of New Zealand culture: what is the most famous band ever to come out of NZ???

Well I responded quickly that it must be Silverchair, to which Tenny replied that Silverchair was from Australia, and we proceeded to spend the next 10 minutes trying to get that damn 'wait till tomorroooooow' song stuck out of our head. And so the question was left unanswered, but some quick research reveals shocking results! Pretty much the opposite from Canada, where google reveals a whole bunch of artists that you never knew were Canadian, I was floored to find that there are almost no notable bands from New Zealand. Not even debatably notable punk bands, or opera singers, it's just a wasteland. There are only two musicians of note, the first being the person who wrote the music for the Rocky Horror Picture Show (mildly bizarre..), and the second being the New Zealand artist responsible for the greatest selling single of all time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfJe8hQ8ha0

Wanna know the rest hey... buy the rights!

Kiwiiiii

Well, we finally made it to the shores of New Zealand (2 weeks ago) and have already racked up our first tramping (hiking) trip, bought a sweet ride (princess silver fern), and landed on our first farm (farm). So far things have gone amazingly smoothly, and we even had time for our first 'different day' in Auckland. Different days are days when Tenny and I do something different from each other. For example, on this different day Tenny went to the museum to learn all about Maori culture, the history of New Zealand's flora and fauna, and even watched a performance of the hauka dance. I went to go see Star Trek at the Imax.

I'm sure Tenny has a lot to say about history and stuff, but first of all I've got some things on my mind about Star Trek. Overall I would say I liked it more than I expected, but I feel uncomfortable with a Star Trek movie pursuing the notion that time travel could allow for changes in the space time continium and lead to 'alternate universes'. I don't profess to be a 'trekker', let alone a trekkie, but this kind of flies in the face of every other major star trek series/movie that has come before and I kind of think Gene Roddenberry is rolling around in his quasar grave. I mean, Picard pretty much relied on the fact that foolish aliens would try and alter the course of history but he knew they couldn't so he'd just sit back and chill and wait for things to go down the way he knew they would. It was all nice and clean and at the end of the day there was only one reality, even if a transporter accident had created two Rikers (You see the lengths they went to to make time linear!). In general the premise was okay, although If Kirk managed to hang from one other precipice I would have probably walked out, and I genuinely like the rendition of the characters. At least it wasn't pure crap like the 2nd go round at Star Wars, but at the end of the day it just doesn't quite sit right. I like to go to sleep at the end of a long day knowing whether or not Vulcan exists or doesn't, and that there aren't two different Spocks, one slightly more edgy than the other. Is that too much to ask in this crazy 21st Century madness?

Hey Britt, Where's Your Beckpeck?

After spending 8 days becoming professional snorkellers we have finally landed in Auckland.. primed and ready for battle. We spent the first two days setting up a bank account and buying a car, and now we can take care of the little things like setting up this award winning adventure blog.com. I actually just got a call from someone who wanted to give me an award for that last sentence I just wrote, apparently the internets is really fast in New Zealand.

We're going to have to get adjusted to the internet cafe lifestyle again. As I write this Tenny is sitting next to me cursing Flickr for making her create another unwanted email address, while some Korean guy playing some sort of video game explodes in delight. Check it out.. our first counterpostlink!!:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22304779@N00/sets/72157618228396350/

As you can see there are some beautiful images of Fiji and the 600 hundred times someone said Bula! to us (apparently that's Fijian for Aloha). Unfortunately we didn't get an image of the coolest thing we saw in Fiji, which was a 2 meter long Zebra Shark hanging out in the coral right off the beach of our first resort, Sunset Beach (big ups to Helene for the recommendation). It looked something like this:

You're probably wondering just like we were why the Zebra Shark looks a lot like a leopard, well apparently the Zebra Shark has stripes when it is a juvenile like this:..

which would explain the misnomer. Apparently taxidermists (ahh the good old days when people listened to taxidermists!) used to think that the two were a different species and when they were merged I guess the Zebra beat out the Leopard, which is highly unprobable in this day and age I might add.

Now check out a picture of this one, he looks so happy!:

Special thanks to the ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research for the enlightening photos.