A photographic venture - Part 1

A select few of the 500+ photos I took yesterday while on a photographic venture. These are of my godson's sister Tegan, who's 8. Her and Ryan were so good as we told them how to pose and how to smile, and to stand there, and look like this... you get the picture!

But when you get photos like this, it makes all the trouble worth it...

Step up to the beat...

I haven't got anything really important to share with you all, but I thought I'd write anyway, because this blog is about me keeping you all updated on what's going on in my life, even if I don't think it's very exciting or blog-worthy!

So...

Yesterday we had our dance eisteddfod. We usually enter one eisteddfod a year, and it's always the CBAA (the association our dance studio belongs to) one, but this year we decided to enter others. Yesterday we went to the Step Up to the Beat eisteddfod at Castle Hill.

I was looking forward to a relaxing morning, because we didn't have to get there until 3. We have to have part of our hair braided for the competition, so I'd organised for my friend from church to do it on Friday night before Youth Group, since I am terrible at braiding.
So, I was all organised. My friend Claryse was going to come over at 1.30pm and we were going to drive in together.

And then, at 12.45pm, I get two messages on my phone. The first one, from Claryse saying she's coming over at 1.00 now instead, so we can leave early and get our hair done there.

What?!

The next message, from Sally, our dance teacher says after some reflection, they've decided to change our hair to another type of braid.


So, in the next 15 minutes, I hurriedly wash my hair (there was that much gel and hair spray in it, there's no way they'd be able to do it without me washing it first), blowdry it and straighten it.
Claryse arrives and I'm flying around the house, getting costumes out of the dryer, stockings off the washing line, shoes from my closet. And I'm still not dressed. Not an inch of makeup on, let alone any stage makeup.

Then we walk outside, and it's raining. Awesome. And how are we supposed to keep our hair straight when it's raining?! We run out huddled under our jackets, shove all our stuff into my car, and turn Tom Tom on. I type in Castle Hill and look for the street name that the High School the eisteddfod is at. We know it's Castle something. Well, it turns out there's Castle Street, Castle Road, Castle Place, Castle Hill Road... a million options. Which one is it?

I run back inside, check the note and find it's Castle Street. Sweet.


Half an hour later, it's raining a lot, and it's dark and I really have no idea where we are, but we somehow make it to the school and park where we see Sally's car because we figure that she'll park closest to the entrance. Wrong. We end up having to call her, because we're standing in the rain with our costumes and can't find the hall. After a serious tiki tour where we practically walk around the whole school, trying fruitlessly to avoid the huge puddles that have amassed on the paths, we find everyone.

Only to find no one is there yet to do our hair. And we only have a few sections until our section. A little bit of panic sets in, but we resolve to be efficient and go do our make-up. I take my hair straightener with me because I hope to be able to undo some of the damage that the rain afflicted on my now wavy hair. Well, I plug it in to the one power socket we could find. And nothing. The plug doesn't work. Fabulous. Oh well . We're rocking the messy hair look.

Our first dance is ballet. We manage to find one of the mums to do our hair (and then halfway through she realises she's braiding mine as an outside braid rather than an inside braid, but I tell her don't worry about it, at this point it really doesn't matter!) and we get in our costumes. Luckily I had the sense to grab that second pair of ballet stockings off the clothesline, because the first pair I brought with me have a massive hole in them.

Anyway, finally, finally we are all dressed and waiting. Our section is meant to start at 4.00pm, so we all start stretching while we wait for our section to be called. And then there is confusion about our music. And confusion about what number our section is (they put our jazz section right after our ballet section, which is ridiculous because there's no way we'd be able to get changed fast enough, so we organised with them to put our ballet section earlier, but apparently they forgot about that!) 4.00 comes and goes. 5.00 comes and goes. At about 5.40, we go backstage. All this, and did I mention we were the only group to dance in our section? We could have gone on stage and stood there for 3 minutes, and we still would've won.

After that first dance, the rest of the now night seems to go a bit faster. They are running way behind schedule. We start to wonder if we're ever going to get out of here in enough time to go see the movie we'd planned to go see together. We do our jazz/funk dance and then our contemporary. We don't place in either. The adjudicator only gives out 1st place. No 2nd or 3rd, thanks very much. I could go on about what kind of adjudicator we all really think he was (90 out of 100 only got Highly Commended! We apparently "overdanced" our contemporary! How do you do that at an eisteddfod! Our choreography for jazz/funk was "messy"! Let's not point out that the choreography of everyone else in that section could've been danced by 5 year olds!) but I won't.

Suffice it to say that some of us felt the day was a major waste of time. For us senior dancers at least. The intermediates kicked butt and showed us up with 2 first places.
All the rushing around, then the waiting around, then the confusion and the disappointment.
As I said to one of the new girls, "welcome to eisteddfods!"

Wait. Maybe that is a bit exciting after all!

Information overload

I'm just about to head out and go to my information session about the Masters of Teaching.

I'm a little bit nervous, to tell you the truth, even though everyone who does an undergrad Arts degree like me gets guaranteed entry into the M.Teach. I wonder what they're going to ask me.
I've heard they get a copy of your transcript and goe through your units and your grades with you. Eeek! That sounds a bit scary.

Guess I better gather my courage & go do it!


*** update***

I just got back from the info session. I first turned up at 3.30, when it started, but the line was ridiculously long. So I met Mum at Gloria Jeans for an hour or so and then went back, and the line was much shorter.

The best part was, the majority of people waiting were doing secondary (high school) teaching, so I got to cut the line & go straight up to the front! The people in the office gave me a form to fill out while they checked that I was eligible to enrol in the M.Teach (I was) and then I was given a stack of paper and an offer to accept a place in the M.Teach program!

It all happened within 5 minutes, it was so quick! The people in the office were really nice too.

It's made it all seem a little bit more "real"!
-Class starts in February, 2010!

ABC, 123

This past week has been mid-semester break at uni (even though we're in Week 10 of 14!)
I've been enjoying all the goodness that comes with mid-semester break - sleeping in, lounging around watching TV, meeting up with friends spontaneously. It's been lots of fun. The odd thing is, I have to keep telling myself that I still have 4 weeks of uni left! Mid-semester break has tricked my mind into thinking it's the big 3 month long summer holiday we get at the end of the year. But it is not so. I still have 7 assessments left to complete. Oh yes, the fun never ends. And that's not even counting my end of year exams.

But, the exciting thing is, that in saying I only have 4 weeks of uni left, I only have 4 weeks of my Arts degree left! Just last week, we got an email advising us that applications to graduate opened soon, and so as soon as Monday morning hit, I was on the computer downloading that form! It's all a little surreal, really. Next week we are invited to an information session about the Master of Teaching degree. Someone from the uni sits down with you and goes through your units and grades and makes sure you are eligible to enrol in the M.Teach. I'm pretty excited about that, because it means after 3 years of my (sometimes useless) Arts degree, I will finally be learning about teaching!

The downside is that the NSW Institute of Teachers has recently mandated that all Teaching degrees must be extended from 12 to 18 months. Part of the reason I decided to go to UWS in the first place was that after completing an Arts degree, you could do a M.Teach in 12 months. To change this on us in our last year is a bit of a bummer, because it means I'll graduate halfway through the school year in 2011, and who's going to employ a teacher halfway through the school year? Unless it's a maternity leave position or something like that... here's hoping!

Happy Birthday Mum

Today's my mum's birthday. In honour of that, here's a little tribute.

New Zealand... Mt Cook in pictures

As soon as we landed in Christchurch, we were off on our drive to Mt Cook.

This is me at the Church of the Good Shepherd at Lake Tekapo.



Yeah, it was cold.

When we got to Mt Cook, it was snowing!

We thought we'd go out to eat, but this is me right before I slipped and slid all over the icy ground.

We decided to stay in since walking the half mile to the nearest cafe was just not going to happen, we couldn't drive since we didn't have snow chains on our car, and the taxis had also stopped because of the snow. We were literally snowed in!

I had a dinner of a cup of noodles, a chocolate bar and toasted marshmallows.





This was the view from our hotel room the next day.

We had to shovel the snow off our car. Well, we didn't do it. The hotel guy did.

I had fun walking around in all the snow.


It was so pretty!

New Zealand

We arrived in New Zealand on Tuesday, after a very quick (2 ½ hours) flight to Christchurch. Mum & I, being the two that don’t particularly enjoy flying, were certainly grateful that it was a smooth flight with not much turbulence, as normally Christchurch is renowned for being a “bumpy” destination because it’s so windy when the plane goes to land. I wasn’t feeling well for much of the flight, and I was worried they would realize I was sick because they made an announcement about Swine Flu and the symptoms they mentioned matched some of mine! Nevertheless we got off the plane and after picking up our rental car, we were on our way to Mt Cook (after a stop at Couplands Bakery which was conveniently located five minutes away from the airport!)

Mt Cook was about four hours away, so we spent two hours driving in late daylight and two hours driving in the dark. Towards the end of the journey, it started to snow! (You might have seen me twitter about this) I’ve never really seen snow fall from the sky as much as it did while were nearing Mt Cook. I’ve only ever seen the occasional flutter of snow in places like Canberra and the Snowy Mountains back in Australia. But this was the cover-a-car, shins deep kind of snow! It was awesome. We made it to our hotel in Mt Cook (The Hermitage, which was very nice. It even had a heated bathroom floor in our room!) and then decided we wanted to go out for dinner, since the only options at the hotel were a bar and a ridiculously overpriced buffet restaurant.

Well, Mother Nature had other plans. We tried to walk to a café nearby but didn’t make it ten steps before I was slipping all over the place in my boots in the ice and snow. We retreated back to the hotel, only to find out this café was “half a mile” away. Now, I’m strictly a Metric girl, but even I could acknowledge that half a mile was way too far for me to make it, especially considering the boots with no grip/ icy roads situation that faced us. So, our next option was to try and drive there, but one look at the roads and we knew we’d never make it without snow chains on our tyres. And snow chains we did not have. On top of that, by this point we were pretty much snowed in. Cars were covered in snow, and the roads weren’t going to be ploughed until the next morning. Fun.

So what to do? Well, since it was such a fancy hotel, the room didn’t come with a kitchenette or even appliances such as a toaster, so our only option was to raid the shelf of grocery items that was in the small store near the lobby. Given our hotel room only had a jug and cutlery (no bowls or plates) I had to settle for a cup of noodles and a bar of chocolate for dinner! I went upstairs, boiled the jug, poured the water into the cup of noodles, took a spoon and went back downstairs to sit by the fireplace! How very classy.We spent the evening drinking by the fire and watching it snow. Later we discovered a cupboard full of board games that the hotel kept for guests, and we all played Yahtzee and toasted marshmallows in the fireplace.

The next morning we were up bright and early only to find it had snowed even more! (You might have seen the photo I posted on Twitter of what it looked like outside our hotel window) We were wondering if it would even be safe to drive, but the guy at reception shoveled the snow off our car and told us “you’ll be right!” Okay then.

Off we went on our journey to Queenstown. We stopped at some nice places, like Old Cromwell Town, where there were these beautiful antiques and knick-knacks stores in this village that had been replicated to look like an old historic town. I bought half a metre of this beautiful pink and white damask (that’s a pattern) fabric that I’m going to use as the background for a pinboard. I loved exploring all the little shops in the towns we’ve stopped at, even though Mum and Neil make fun of me for the way I pronounce the names of the towns. Seriously, you try pronouncing Twizel and Pukaki. (I said it like Twizzle and Poo-cark-ee.)
Another thing I love about New Zealand (apart from Maori pronounciation!) is the food, and the little towns we visited didn’t disappoint when it came to this. Apart from Couplands, we’ve enjoyed all kinds of savouries and biscuits and slices that are uniquely Kiwi. And they are so good.

We got to Queenstown about three hours later after leaving Mt Cook. And even though it looked like it would, it didn’t snow. But man, was it cold! I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said I was the coldest I’ve ever been the first night we were in Queenstown. As soon as we got to our room, I sat down in front of the (ridiculously small) heater and wrapped myself in a blanket. Later on, I had to buy myself one of those huge big puffer jackets to keep me warm. Even with scarves and jackets and beanies and boots on, the wind is icy and bitter and it cuts right through you as it seems to come fresh off the snowy mountains that loom above us. That night, we had fish and chips for dinner with some of Neil’s family at one of the restaurants in town. Even inside, I kept my puffer jacket on! It is just unbelievably cold here once the sun goes down (or even when it’s still up, really!) As soon as we got here, my allergies flared up and for the past few days I’ve been a snuffly, sneezing mess.

Nevertheless, we have done a bit of sightseeing, and enjoyed looking around all the shops in the main part of Queenstown. Yesterday we went up to Coronet Peak to go skiing, and the views up there were a sight to behold. We were literally skiing on top of the mountain! We started at about twelve-thirty, but by the afternoon it had gotten bitterly cold again so we only made it up and down the slopes a few times before packing it in at about three-thirty. Today, my legs are sore. I feel like I have used muscles I didn’t even know I had! Which should be interesting, really, because today is the day of Neil’s nephew’s wedding (the whole reason why we are here) and I have to stand all day in high heels. Not to mention that the afternoon ceremony is outdoors, and have I mentioned how cold it is? We didn’t come prepared for snow weather, so my outfit for the wedding consists of a sleeveless dress I bought in New York, a thin trench coat and a scarf. Maybe enough for Sydney winter, but definitely not for a New Zealand winter like this! I’ll let you know how it goes. Keep an eye on my Twitter for updates throughout the day, as it’s hard to find free wi-fi access to blog around here; they all want you to pay for it!