The International Comedy Festival

April 1-5

The International Comedy festival was in town and we decided to take advantage of the free shows downtown. We headed DT on a Sunday Saver train ticket and caught the tail end of a French acrobatic/comical show. Afterwards there was a pair who did a random improv show with some very strange props. Beau got picked out of the crowd to join them on stage. He did some improv with news paper and got a sucker out of it. I was laughing so hard I was crying! A guy in the crowd had taken a video of it and sent it to Beau. Check it out here! (the video isn't amazing but you can get an idea of the shenanigans Beau was put through) After that show there was another one later with short performances from the two groups we saw as well as a Swedish Elvis impersonator and a hoola hooper. We were very entertained that day and enjoyed ourselves immensely.

The rest of the week was pretty uneventful although Beau did buy a guitar from Costco. It's not the greatest but he's excited to have a guitar to play.

Monique and Ingo headed off on their holiday to Tahiti this week. They have been lovely, gracious host but it is nice to have a little time on our own again. We do have Snow and Juneau to look after.

The French group - Five Foot Finger

Beau making his stage debut with Funny Bone

Getting his sucker reward

The hoola hoopest

She had all these hoola hoops going around here at once

The Swedish Elvis Impersonator

April 6 - 9 Happy Easter

The weather was really nice on Friday so we took the dogs down to Brighton Beach. Google took us down a fairly busy route so it took about an hour or so to get there, probably should have taken less. There were a bunch of dogs at the beach, Juneau and Snowy had a ball. We brought camp chairs with us so we were able to relax without getting bowled over by dogs. We enjoyed the beach for a couple of hours before heading home. It was nice to get out and enjoy the sunshine.

The rest of our Easter weekend was pretty uneventful. We mostly did some more work on the deck. We did hit up a farmers market while walking the dogs and picked them up some homemade treats at Monique's requests. Gotta say they love the homemade goodies. On Monday we made the mistake of going to Westfields Shopping center and it was packed. It was sooooo hard to find a parking spot and sooo frustrating. We picked up some coffee and cheap sweat pants from Big W, think Walmart. It's been disgustingly cold the past two days I think it was a high of 17. We had to turn the heat on.

Snowy and Juneau

Juneau drying off

Snowy and Me

Tues April 10 - Will Anderson, Wilarious

We spent the morning doing some much needed house cleaning. Man can those dogs shed. I made us crepes for lunch and then we had squash soup for dinner. Since the International Comedy Festival is going on we decided to get tickets to see one of the shows. While in Christchurch we had seen on TV a show called the Gruen Transfer and it was a comedic talk show about ads and marketing hosted by Will Anderson. We found him quite funny on the shower and since he had a show, Wilarious, with the Comedy Festival in Melbourne we decided to go see him. It was fun to get out and do something quite different, I have never been to a stand-up comedy act before. Will put on a really good show and we were really happy we decided to go.

April 11 – 16

I know I keep saying this but we are pretty boring. We've been continually working on the deck. We've been taking the dogs for walks and Beau's been practising the guitar. I decided I needed a creative outlet and I've taken up crocheting. I've been working on slippers with my first one not turning out quite right. Typical me, I wanted slippers so I make myself some. The internet is a gold mine of information, go YouTube! I did get a short day of work in on the 11^th. One of the agencies needed a body fast in a near by location so I got the call and had a 5hr day in a housing development sales center doing mostly nothing. But hey they paid me about $24/hr for it so I'm not complaining. On the Friday Monique's friend Sarah stopped by with her two dogs, Lucy the Great Dane and Layla the Boxer. She stops by fairly frequently to let the dogs all play together and wear them out. While there she offered us some tickets to a comedy show. She had won them but she and her husband couldn't attend. The comic was a Canadian named Mike Wilmot. We attend the show on Sunday evening and had a good laugh. He was funny and vulgar but it was all good natured. Beau was in stitches laughing.

Painting the rails

A work in progress

Removing a rotted post

Post Gone

New post!

 Now be prepared to be grossed out by the common house spider, a huntsman

He was about the size of my palm, YUCK

Lazy Days in Christchurch

We've been extremely lazy in Christchurch.  It's been great.  I'm not going to post day to day events but I'll give a little info of what we've been doing besides watching TV and reading.  We do walk the little dogs every day so we get some exercise.  If you're worried about us and the earth quakes we are a good 20km for the epicenters.  We have only felt one after shock and as Beau described "it was like your belly rumbling from the outside."  So just one little rumble that's all. (Actually we just had another one a little bigger than the first but even the dogs are not overly alarmed by it)  The buses have been really easy for us to get around and there is a nice park nearby.  Unfortunately the weather isn't all that nice right now.  It's over cast and slightly rainy.  Max it's 20 so we've been curled up under blankets in the house.  I have baked cookies though!
We went into town one day to the botanical gardens and had lovely weather for it.  We wandered around and got some ice cream.  It's was sunny and warm.  I was hoping to find 1 of the 2 bead stores downtown but both were closed due to the earth quakes. We've done little more exploring though.  Maybe after the new year we'll drum up some more energy.  Not sure what we're doing tonight for it.  There's fireworks downtown but we don't know how we'd get back from them.  I'll let you know how it goes.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Me and Jackson

Molly, Jackson and Beau

Merry Flying Christmas

We survived our flight to Christchurch and our night in the airport.  We had no trouble getting to our house-sit and have settled in well.  The two dogs we are sitting are very sweet. Molly is a Pekingese cross Spaniel and Jackson is a Pomeranian.  I'll post pictures of them soon.

Dec 25 – Merry Flying Christmas

Alarms going off at 4am are never fun... especially when you won't be catching Santa sliding down the chimney. We were up and off the catch a 4:45am shuttle bus to the airport. Unfortunately we weren't all that clear on which airport we were going to so we got off at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. AirAsia doesn't fly out of this airport though. So we had to run for the shuttle bus to the Low Cost Carrier Terminal and of course had to pay for that too, oops. We arrived at the LCCT and went to check in only to find they wouldn't issue our boarding pass until we could prove we had an onward flight out of New Zealand. We hastily logged on to the airports free wifi (yay technology) and booked our onward flight to Melbourne for March 3rd. Hopefully we don't want to stay more or less time than this :S. We finished check in and went through boarding pass control, immigration and security. We picked up a little duty free before finding a seat. We had much less time waiting around than we thought we would. Beau attempting to Skype his parents but the internet was too slow. I found us some buns for breakfast although Beau wasn't to sure about his chicken curry doughnut but I enjoyed my red bean doughnut. Shortly after we boarded for our flight. The aircraft was very nice and very basic, pretty much everything is an add on. It didn't have a plane wide movie although you could rent little personal movie players. The flight was quite empty too but hey it's Christmas. The flight went fairly quickly and I guess we slept a little. We landed in Christchurch around midnight. We cleared customs and bio-security easily. They didn't even ask us about onward travel. I traveled on my British passport and can stay for up to 6 months and Beau on his Canadian can stay for 3 months. Not really sure what the point is in having to have an onward ticket when you can stay for so long. Now we need to kill some time in the airport till the buses start up at 6am.

Dec 26 – The house-sit

It seemed like forever but 6am finally rolled around and we set off the get a bus. We had been given some instructions to catch a bus slightly away from the airport so we didn't have to pay the $7.50 for the bus only the regular fare of $3.20. We did have to change buses once but made it down town. Down town was bizarre after being in Asia. It was deserted. Granted it was 7:30am on boxing day but the bus station is right next to the area that is cordoned off due to the earthquake last February. We wandered a little to find us some breakfast. We found a little mall that had a Subway and split a sub for breakfast. We still had some time to kill so we went into the mall and explored a Zellars like store called Warehouse. We headed back to the bus station and purchased a Metro Card. This gives you a discount on bus fares. We took a bus to Halswell and found the house. We met Tracey there and the two little dogs, Jackson and Molly. Tracey showed us the ropes and we got ourselves settled in. Jackson is a Pomeranian, a sweet little fluff ball, and Molly is a Pekingese cross Spaniel, who is also very sweet. We had a nap on the couch, we've been up over 24hrs with only little naps on the place. After napping we had a short walk to the grocery store and picked up some food for the next few days. We had a nice dinner of lamb, pasta and salad. We also bought some wine and enjoyed a nice glass of red. We last had wine when we were in Canada, actually I tried a glass of Vietnamese wine but it wasn't good. We watched Braveheart, which was on TV. We went to bed fairly late though but we don't have to go anywhere tomorrow!