Pictures, finally

I've finally posted the pictures from our trip--you see, the laptop where we usually put the pictures lost its "v" key, and apparently this is a serious complaint--no one wants to fix it--so it was laid up a while, until we decided to just avoid all words that use that letter...ok, I'm at the office now, plenty of v's to go around. really, I think we will attach a keyboard and pretend it is a desktop. The better to avoid spills, fumbles, and other catastrophes, anyway. But I finally downloaded the pictures and sideloaded them to a flash drive and brought them to the office where they load in a fraction of the time...

Our Trip to the Coromandel Penninsula (where, by the way, it is has been lovely ever since we left): they are in reverse order, I suppose, so from the bottom up, Manford is sitting on the deck of our lovely house in the Macadamia orchard, overlooking bush and cow pastures and, on a clear day, the estuary. It was near Hahei, a cool little beach town where the swimming would have been good if the swimming had been good...This is one of the places Captain Cook visited early in his travels, and he named a lot of the parts thereabout--including Shakepeare Pointe, a jut of land where he went to watch the path of Mercury, or something like that, to figure out where he was. The whole area is called Mercury Bay for that reason. We later went up on Shakepeare pointe and took a picture of Lonely bay, a little bay next to it that's kind of hard to get to. The you've got some examples of New Zealand culture. In case you can't read the sign on the little building, it is the Ferry Landing Library. Home Kills is just a particularly beautiful example of the kind of sign we seem to see in many of the small towns--advertising "custom killing" and variations. They do not mince words. On the way home, we drove around the peninsula to the other side (the middle is all bush and low mountains), and found this one view point where you could see some of the islands in the Firth of Thames.

We've been missing our pool, but going to the campus pool that is really quite nearby. Maybe I will add a photo of the park ("reserve") near our house--there are two of these huge parks within a few blocks of the house, and Charlie and I have been exploring them in the mornings while it is still cool. You can see, though, how dry and brown it is--usually here the vegetation is lush, but it has been so dry that all the grass is shrivelled. Charlie doesn't care. They play soccer in this park--and I think also cricket, sometimes. It can have at least three, maybe four soccer games going at a time. The other park has rugby goals.

We have the unfortunate deja vu of seeing pictures of Fred Phelps and his gang of sign-brandishing family members on the television the last few days--they are having a show tonight on the most bizarre and hated families, or something like that, and Fred Phelps is featured. I'm not sure if I'll have the stomach to watch. But already one colleague has said "Topeka, Kansas--isn't that where you're from?"--so I leave it to all of you still in Topeka to do something worthy of fame, rather than infamy. Manford's hometown (well, birth town--Alice, Texas) was in the paper this morning, with an odd little story about how the mayor resigned after stealing a neighbor's dog. We can all wonder why this was in the newspaper in New Zealand.

Take Care!
Carrie