An interesting week

This has been an interesting week. Carrie left last Sunday for Sacramento - she flew Auckland to San Francisco then got a ride with a friend of her mother to Sacramento. We have lost a very lovely man, Vince, Carrie's step dad - he passed away a few days before she got there. She has been, I am sure, a great help to her mom (or mum as they say here). The kids have been real troopers, with little fussing or complaining. As often happens, things did not go as I had expected, primarily blood test results came back and Emily was diagnosed as having whooping cough. So, she had to go on a regimen of an antiboitic, and was told to not go to school or any other activities for five days, to give the medicine time to do its work. I negotiated this down to four days with her school nurse. We suspect she had pertussis for some weeks prior to the blood test results date, but the rules are once it is diagnosed there is an isolation period. So she won't reinfect already infected ones? So she has been pretty much mome bound since this past Wednesday, missing a school swimming meet, chapel at school (this is a mandatory requirement one time a term - hope we are not all doomed to Hell for not going), drama lesson, tennis on Saturday, a picnic on Friday (it was called off because of rain), and a birthday party (she will party on dude with the little girl who invited her at some unkown date). Joseph has an amazing (to me, anyway) new computer game - Empire Total War - that is not in the Quaker tradition you would think, but prior to any wars it is pacific - it lets him create towns and settle other territories, I believe, and of course as with most of the new software has remarkable (again, to me) graphics. Of course it has also caused him to want a more advanced graphics card! He has a little more homework. Emily has some Mon - Thurs, and is liking the clarinet (no way as squeaky as a violin can be, at least in her capable hands - with encouragement from her mom, whose clarinet it is, and who played clarinet for many year). Well to change the subject, we watch the news from MSN, NY Times, other papers and internet sites, and hope none of our readers have been deeply stung - I am hoping that if we are patient enough we will get back, if not all, at least some of our mutual funds and other investments. So far New Zealand does not seem to be hurting quite as much, though house valaues have gone down considerably and the NZ dollar is the weakest it has been in a long time. There are still flowers of one or another kind blooming prettily but leaves are starting to turn on the relatively few decidious trees, and there is a little touch of fall in the air. We are looking forward to our April visit. Hope all of you are well and getting along ok. Remember the phrase in fake latin - Illigitimus non carborundam (I think I almost spelled it right - look it up in Wikipedia for a number of different versions). Sincerely, Manford