| Letter from Vickie in New Zealand
17/1/02 |
Hello
- Yes the rumours are true, after substantial time off i have
started work again, i hope you were sitting down when you were
told the news. Seriously I did miss work, its good to meet new
people, even though they are 50% british. The actual work is
interesting, stuff i haven't done before so that will be good
for the cv. Its mostly based around Norwalk-like virus (I have
to do DNA sequencing on all the outbreaks around NZ) and on
a research paper into virus viability in cooked mussels. It
pays the bills and i get my name
on some published papers so why not. |
View across the harbour in Wellington. These pictures all link
to Vickie's extensive worldisround.com
page. |
| Wellington is great we only have to drive
a few miles before we're in countryside, its not too hot or
too cold. It's got so many restaurants and the cinemas play
old movies on Sundays so I can catch up with the movies I missed
last year. And the views, we're house sitting at the mo and
we can see most of the city and the whole harbour, mountains
and sea. Had a great storm on Thursday so got to watch all the
lightening for miles around. We are flat hunting this weekend,
hopefully finding a place next to the beach or with a harbour
view. Rent is so cheap for a 1 bed flat with view or beach its
only 40 pounds a week (couldn't even get a mousehole for that
in old london town). It's also a bank holiday weekend, these
kiwis like to roll gently back into work, they have an extra
day off after new years day as well, good idea! |
Dramatic skies on a trip to Fiorldland, on South Island. |
I'm planning my next trip, trying to decide
on which pacific island i want to
visit maybe tahiti or the cook islands. And need to start planning
my return
trip home and the places i want to see in oz when i return in
september (forest fires are finally out after some golf ball
sized hail storms). I'll meet with my friend if she's still
there and hasn't run out of money. So how was the christening,
i heard old raffy was a star. So are you you guys planning any
holidays this year? Are you coming to devon for xmas next year?
it would be good if you could! - love
vickie |
A housetruck commonly used for travelling in New Zealand. |
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On Saturday 9th March we drove to Whitstable at about 8am for
a walk along the beach. Here's a picture of Dan with the boy.
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| Our two-week break at home... |
| In early March I had to use up some annual
leave, so we both took two weeks off to spend some extra time
with Rafferty. It was wonderful to relax at home, pottering
about in the garden and catching up with all sorts of things
- sleep, for example. |
On a visit to Farming World in Faversham on the 25th February,
Rafferty met all sorts of animals, including this friendly
sheep. There are more pictures of this trip available in the
Animal
Farm album. |
| Apart from catching up with family and friends,
we were able to plan some adventures for Raffy. So far he's
been to the zoo to see some elephants and fierce tigers, and
also to Farming World to see lots of sheep, goats, chickens,
cows, pigs and horses. I found the farm trip interesting myself,
as it's not the sort of thing you'd normally think to go and
see. One of the best things about becoming a parent has been
that it prompts you to go out and make the most of your time.
We're off to France on the ferry later this week - it only cost
£1 as a foot passenger, so how could we pass up the chance? |
| Rafferty's progress... |
| The young man is eight and a half months
old as I write this, and seems to be changing every day as he
learns something new. He learnt to crawl a few weeks ago, and
can now motor along from room to room at alarming speed (when
he spots something he is interested in) and even worked out
how to climb up the stairs with some help from mummy and daddy.
Emergency stair-gate purchase coming on I feel... He can stand
and pull himself up from the floor, as long as he has something
to hold on to, and is just starting to take a few steps. It
will be a while before he's actually walking yet, but he's on
the way. |
Rafferty at his christening party, showing his potential to
become a true gentleman scholar in years to come. I should
emphasize that we weren't actually giving him this bottle
of Becks. More pictures available in the christening
album. |
| Over the last few weeks, Raffy has started
to babble away to himself: "Doo doo doo" seems to
be his favourite at the moment. He's learnt to clap his hands
as well, and whenever he gets really excited he gives himself
a little round of applause. Tooth count = 8 at present. |
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| Breakfast on the beach at Whitstable. |
| On Saturday 9th March we decided to go for
an early morning drive to the beach, seeing as we are normally
awake with Raffy from about 6am. |
Rafferty with Vanessa on the sea wall in Whitstable. |
| It was a beautiful crisp winter morning
when we arrived in Whitstable at about 8:30am. We walked along
the beach and Raffy played with some pebbles and looked at the
waves with great excitement. Then we went to a little deli on
the high street and bought freshly baked foccacia, octopus &
squid in a pot and some ham; bought coffee from yet another
shop and sat on the beach for breakfast. |
The family Horton-Szar by the sea, early one Saturday morning. |
| Raffy played with some pebbles and seashells
on a blanket, and nibbled on some foccacia crust. What an amazing
way to start the day... |
| WTGC Winter Meal |
| The lad's club winter meal is arranged for
later this month, at PJs restaurant in South Kensington. We'll
be meeting at Nathan's place in Warlingham at about 6pm, and
the minibus will arrive to pick us up at 7pm. Have a look at
the WTGC page
for more information. |
| Complete re-design for the whole website... |
| As you may have noticed, I have been completely
rebuilding this site over the last few weeks. This was mainly
because I designed the previous format eighteen months ago,
when I knew a lot less about site building than I do now. It
was heavily reliant on images for the page structure and navigation,
and this made it quite slow to load. |
| Parts
of the site that still need to be updated:
Clipart Library
Wedding Pictures
WTGC Members Page |
| I've rebuilt the site using text and CSS
to provide the navigation. The graphical headings have been
replaced with flash text that is much quicker to load (about
2k for a large heading) and I've also remastered a lot of the
older images, which were quite degraded due to over compression.
The pictures are now of much higher quality, but the same file
size. |
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