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September 11 last posti've decided that this blog has run it's course. it was set up originally to celebrate ben's entrance and contribution to our family. since then it has been beaten into new shapes and been redressed in some of the most frightening outfits this side of the salvation army shop. so, this is the last post. if you have visited this site more than twice, thank you. if this is your first time, then i'm sure you'll be more specific next time you google something. we may well continue somewhere else. August 19 homehaving not posted for two months and a day i expect myself to write something blinding. however too many things have happen recently to even consider summarising them or making light of one or two quirky moments (while finding some obscure to connection to life in nepal as is oft the case). while in new zealand i was extremely happy to have taken some time to catch up with friends from my past. friends for secondary school and even primary who i hadn't caught up with for ten, fifteen or even twenty years. don't get me started on what it's like being on of those people with friends from twenty years ago. something deep inside was delighted to see those faces and hear the jokes and pick it all up where we all left off as if the nineties and noughties were never there. we dunk beer, we ate pudding we teased, in their absence, those nerds we loved to beat, and so it went on. i don't put enough into my relationships to necessarily be able to rekindle old friendships. but, i feel so stoked to have met up old friends again because it allowed me to affirm within myself and hopefully to them also how important they were to me and how influencial they were in my life. my life in weird and i do think often about when i was young. not because they were better days but becasue they were formative years. thank you all. for everything. June 18 post september 11 worldwe went to estonia once. we spent about five days there which wasn't enough. it was a lovely, lovely holiday. for starters we arrived by ship. it could have been an awful experience but it wasn't. having arrived in port we took a taxi to a hotel we thought would be comfortable and suitable. it was neither. in fact the guest house we spent the remaining four or five nights in wasn't particularly comfortable or suitable either but is was hillarious. the senior russian lady who ran the owned and ran the place was nothing short of alzheimic. she provided these wonderful cooked breakfasts for us which we enjoyed while watching the first of the u.s. invasions on afghanistan on tv. if that wasn't violent enough, our hostess' accusations that i had broken the shower were but not as fierce as her yelling sessions at the other guest for bringing ladies back after midnight.
what we saw of estonia was incredible. incomparable to any other country we have visited. apart from finding ourselves on a nudist beach we wandered through the orangest forest i have ever, ever seen. we saw giant waterslides on a beach, a mouse, an eccentric scotsman (saw some in glasgow too less than a month earlier), baskets of flowers and a city that should be cryogenically preserved. it is the sweetest city i think i have ever visited. more captivating that leuven, dubrovnik, mostar or nicosia. it fascinates like jaisalmer or varanasi. tallin is beautifully coloured and laid out. i have a thing for cobbled streets as did the creators of tallin. we walked around and around and around. i loved it and as i think about it now, i want to go back. one night we found a very attractive restaurant. we entered, sat down, ordered the reindeer curry, supped, paid and left. as you do. we were hosted in estonia by saints and ate like kings. thank god we made it safely back to helsinki because we were due to fly out to new zeland again just 2 days later. shakingit's easy to sit on the sidelines and judge and scream and have better ideas and comforting thoughts and a healing plan for ones neighbour from a distance but when shit is hitting the fan much closer to home i am learning it's best to put the high falooting words out the window and allow a personal, raw touch to takeover. May 31 offtoday there was the most minging stench in the air all around ras al khaimah. really, it was putrid. as frustrating as it was vile was the fact it was very difficult to pinpoint exactly what it was. it was definitely of fish origin. but why and how was it so powerful? you can't imagine the damage the wafting force was causing. it was like twelve right whales beached themselves just down the road, farted themselves to oblivion after a krillfest like never before then passed away. all in 50 degree heat, mind.
we remain well. just 23 days left for us in this country. we fly to new zealand for six weeks before heading to malaysia early august. regretably we won't have enough time to do a third of the things we would like to do. we only hope we can see our friends at least for a brunch or something.
i have wickedly underestimated how much we will miss our lives here. much of our married life has been spent here and this is the home of our two amazing boys. taking them from their place of birth is not something we are doing lightly or flippantly. however, it is for their sake we are moving on.
i hope you have all rssed our new blog page:
we plan to update it a couple of times each week. please check it and comment. we need you.
oh, and i spoke to the hon john key the other day. May 27 specificswe've been busy blah blah no time to post blah blah. anyway, with that out the way we'd like to introduce you to a new page:
we want you to know what's going on. our boys are inexplicable.
the new page will contain vids, photos, but more importantly the details of plop and keef - ben's two new friends. okay, so we can't see them but they are there. jonah is walkingish. see you there.
March 16 1001it might be fun to create a list of reasons why i haven't posted here for heaven knows how long. two and a half months actually. then again, it might be wickedly boring, too. i'm not prepared to take that risk. instead i will provide a diary like catch up of what has preoccupied us all the past while.
on christmas day we flew to perth for brother matthew's wedding to christa. the week we had with the bucks and the sambells and the daltons became the highlight of the year, predictably. the hospitality provided by all our perth hosts was second to none (one - for those non maths boffins). respect to all the sambells for their welcome and the daltons for their generosity and thoughtfulness throughout. the bucks never disappoint with their persistent humour and insatiable need to use the word 'pigeon' like gordon ramsay uses *&#$. it was literally swell.
i hope you also know by now that we will be leaving the uae this june. from august our new adress will be malaysia, asia, world, earth, milky way, galaxy.... as much as we will miss our dear friends in ras al khaimah we look forward to becoming part of a new community on the east coast of malaysia. i did a reckie to kl late january and was very pleased (with the price of all skateboard accessories at 'cool element'). we now begin the task of getting rid of 90% of our worldy possessions here and travelling as light as possible. this continues with jenny attending the rak women's flea market this weekend with a car load of stuff.
having used a good chunk of air miles to get to kl in jan, we still had plenty left and with only a few months to use them, we decided to book a last minute holiday. last week we went to cyprus. i didn't really know what to expect. i have added a ridiculous amout of photos to an album to give you a glimpse of this fascinating country. we hired a car and visited as much as we could. next time we will spend days instead of hours in the troodos mountains and take more time to explore nicosia. it was great to be able to cross in to the turkish half of the city too.
our boys are growing cleverly. ben's language is fantastic. he is so delightful to talk with and so engaged and engaging. jonah, at nearly 10 months, is the bomb. he now pulls himself up onto both furniture and any legs dangling from. when he is not smiling he is laughing. we can't wait to take them to nz this july/august asthey are our pride and joy.
jenny recently took part in a 1/2 marathon. a group of 4 ladies formed a team and ran 5km each. jenny ran in a very impressive time of 26 minutes. full credit to her for being devoted to training and for literally pulling one out of the bag. i had planned to run too, but found myself in hospital 4 days earlier with a thumping headache and out of hospital one day earlier appendixless. followed by a couple of weeks at home.
so far we are really enjoying the new year and looking forward to the changes ahead. saying goodbye to friends here will be devastating and softened only by, well, nothing really.
finally, i swam in the sea this arvo and saw a turtle.
January 01 wellingtoniansit used to piss me off but now i find it comical. i am of course referring to that one day each year when i skip through the 'wellingtonian' - the annual magazine for old boys of wellington college. when i was there it was a school of mediocre teachers and a managment structure that enforced the 'if you're not in the top 2% or can't play the oboe through your nose, well, what are you doing here?' philospohy that has plagued the school for long before i attended under harvey rees-thomas and apparrently thrives under the nose of roger moses. in 16 years of reading the wellingtonian i have not once read an article about an old boy who went off and met a nice girl, got married and raised adorable, healthy kids - all out of the spotlight. or one who announced his homosexuality and became head trolley boy at city new world. it's as if they can only see success in the letters and titles that follow and preceed people's names or in the size of their bank accounts. it's boring, actually. dead boring.
okay, so i haven't won a medal in the peruvian moose racing champs, or donated $500 000 to the WCOBA drinkies fund or had a grandfather who (as well as being a wellington college old boy) once discovered the secret to an odorless fart. i endured for 5 years being ignored and harassed by the school for simply being average. it is hillarious how they continue this buffoonery in the form of a yearly magazine!! if i liked, i could even attend a reunion and be ignored in person!!
i am in fact very happy with my life. i see myself successful in dozens of ways. one of which being my abilty to enjoy myself without comparing myself to the shallow acheivements of others. imagine if life really was just about getting money or an order of merit (nz) or anything else like this. what a waste of time it would be to chase these things.
i have a family which brings me more happiness and peace and security than all the money in europe. i am loved. i have friends who are among the coolest people ever. i have a hope and prosperous future ahead, for certain. this year i hope to pour more of myself into my family. i hope to become a more thankful and appreciative person for all that God gives me day by day by day.
having said all this, one can never tire of reading news about the flight of the conchords. December 12 a whileimagine being three. it appears to be a time when happiness far outweighs worry. ben is three. he can do everything in the world. run, skate, dive, joke and pour his own chocolate milk. he adores jonah in a way which makes you stare. there is nothing funnier to jonah than ben's helicopter impression, for example. i've added more photos for you to see. i have probably repeated some. who wouldn't? i've got 12 days left to conjur up a deep, humourous and provoking christmas blog. no pressure. i'll probably resort to photos of my boys again. November 08 some kind of mistakei've been thinking recently. thinking about what is says in the bible about children being a reward. there must be my namesake out there, barren. my boys are sensational. you should hear ben speak. using the correct tense like it will be easy and making himself chuckle with his own dancing. jonah has picked up that his brother is awesome and therefore follows suit, literally. his smiles are as honest as i am besotted. together ben and jonah will take over this world. they've taken over mine and they turn heads like natas did when he turned up at the paraparaumu skatepark and ollied that blast ramp. ben waddled his way through the food court this evening waving at diners and singing "i've been working on the railroad, all the live long day...". jonah gets passed around at a party more than the present in the parcel passing game. everyone wants a bit of our boys and they are welcome.
winter has made it to ras al khaimah. we celebrated by going to the park and having a bucket of kfc for tea. what's wrong with us? actually, it was a lovely evening out as a family. cool weather, plenty of space to run and lie down and look for cats and count boats and all the other things expected of park goers. as i apply for jobs these days we look forward to our new lives beginning in just a matter of months. i find it extrememly hard to not know what is coming up. i think i know what i want but so much is out of my control. i snicker as i type, imagining if it WAS in my control. this is the guy who couldn't organise an orgy in a paper bag speaking. i have to treat this time of waiting for an interview and of job getting as a time of excitment and trusting, not of worry. a friend of mine once explained that trusting is more that the absence of worry, too. we're off to perth soon for a family wedding. wkd. ben and jonah star in this weeks photo album. i made gingerbread biscuits with ben this arvo, which feature, too. October 27 all goodjonah is a legend. he's that good weight now when you can hold him for ages without the old elbow arthritis saying "ahem, put that chunk of cuteness down, please", but not too light that you accidently drop him mistaking him for a pillow or a kitten. the best bit about holding him is that he likes to look up at the holder with eyes the size of plutos moon and a smile the size of ours. even sweeter is when you are talking to a mate while holding him then decide to look at him and realise he may have had his galactic face on for a while. he's nothing short of sensational. he's not short at all in fact. taller than ben was at this age. remember ben is the one who pats giraffes on the head on the way to the office. i know that when i'm old (45ish) i'll have two young men who are not only handsome as, but who also tower over me in the same way i dominate them now. watching the way they interact is fascinating. ben adores jonah and jonah is trusting and ready to emulate his big brother. ben calls him 'little one' as in 'look there's two birds flying little one *points out the window to two birds flying*' or "*nose to nose* don't cry little one". the wonder than jenny and i indulge in every day is more than we imagined we'd ever be blessed with when we prepared for our wedding back in 1998. we could not have planned for much that has come our way during our (nigh on) ten years of married life. we've spent half our time in ras al khaimah. that'll be enough for us as we look forward to our next place to call home. we plan to leave rak next june and find a greener landscape to become a part of, literally?
Psalm 127:3 Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him.
October 03 i'm sorryloss is a ridiculous thing. partly because it literally comes out of the blue for most people. life is rolling along. the roof is down. jamiroquais deeper underground is blaring. you're fat arming it. the sun is shining. then. wham. the phone rings. the text comes. the nurse looks up, serious as. i'm so sorry but.
my small life is exceptionally smooth. my family brings me happiness that you either understand or you don't. i won't dare use a metaphor of marshemellow or cool water. they are lame. my boys are immeasurable in the way they are handsome and bright. jenny is like no other. a mother whose devotion to our family is like a flame. beautiful to watch. impossible to understand and attractive as heck. like your lives, ours seldom have straight, easy bits. we do, however, have a mountain of things to be deeply thankful for. let me today just be thankful for the health and life of us and you.
i take ben to the skateboard ramp every day or two. we try to leave before the azan. the call to prayer at sunset that is made from several of the who-knows-how-many mosques we have in ras al khaimah. we left the other day as 'allah akbar' was charmingly being called across khozam and the wider emirate. we were a minute late leaving but as ben looked up and saw the moon, he also announced "it's eid". it wasn't though. he was a day late. i know that for sure becasue we have formed a tradition with a group of friends of heading to the mountains to light a fire and a couple of barbies and celebrate the end of ramadan and the time of eid together which we had done just the night before. i still had sausage breath if there was any doubt. i simply love being outside. being surrounded by some of the best people in the world is a bonus.
at kidszone ben has been learning about arabic culture. this came to a exciting conclusion on sunday when they held an arabic party. pig in muck was ben. i've added a few photos of ben in local dress for your delight.
September 13 jonahas jonah is 3 months old now he had a swim. he loved it. he is amazing and you can see photos of him in the photo album on this page.
i dont knowi dont know nick willis. i only mention this because so many i know, do. all i can say about him is that what pleased me most about his medal last month was that he got it running. what i mean is that clearly he is fast. his ability to speed up when most of us would be calling for an iv of tiger balm is godly. he is a runner. he has been, he is and he will be. i am so, so glad that he, therefore, had the chance to run.
think of michael phelps or lance armstrong with their weird bodies. what is it: three hearts, five lungs and and a toupe between them? not to mention muscles where the six squillion others of us dont even have body parts. but still, they got the opportunity to take part in their sport. its about fulfilled potential.
there are a lot of people on earth. i am one of them. i for one, also, have potential but make more excuses than india has bus crashes for not even beginning to see what i might be able to give back.
i love watching people do things well. almost regardless of what it is. thats why i play pool with my friends. although i get as flogged as a tehranian pickpocket, it honestly gives me pleasure to see the way they do it.
that old man i saw in kandy near colombo with a loincloth and half a dozen sheets of corrugated iron on his head as he dodged traffic, fauna and nosey tourists - i wonder what he might have been good at should he have been given a better chance. the loincloth wasn't on his head. that would be silly.
for these reasons i make sure ben has a chance to excel in whatever he wants. we sometimes take a bike AND a skateboard out to play in the early evening when, according to ben, the sun and the moon are here. jonah gets to lie on his back AND his front. (today he rolled for us for the first time).
as always i'm being incoherent and allowed my thoughts to be hijacked by another stroy of how crap it is to live in the third world. i want you (and i) to know that if you can do something, you should. just because you can. when i skate, i worship. in fact, i will continue to skate until i find something i am good at. July 29 pee essbecause i am so full of myself, literally, i have spent the day thinking about what i wrote last night. see below.
i'm unhappy with how i worded just about all of it but couldn't possibly be bothered to rewrite it. not for a minute was i literally blowing my own trumpet regarding my dadding skills. i am a very average father who spends too long on the computer and too much time grumbling. i would like to respect my own mother and father for the hours dad spent taking us to ramps, collecting us from town, doing the skatepit run twice a weekend, endangering his house by building various ramps and letting us spend hours out there. it was in those years that the phrase 'mind the windows' was coined. the lord only knows what percentage of mum's pocket money was spent on stussy shirts, yellow suede vison street wear boots as well as countless pro decks and grab rails.
i will endeavour to make yesterday's point in a nutshell, so to speak.
* boys will do better when their dads are there
being christiani've watched one documentary and one news story this week which have literally stirred me. because of the quality of the programming in ras al khaimah i was forced to watch abc news yesterday. i use 'forced' to mean it was either watch the show or do some tidying. there was a story that appealed to we in ways enormous. it was about a canadian boy called ryan. actually i missed the introduction to this boy but the jist was clear. he felt sorry for the ugandans with their dirty water and everything. so he decided to raise money to buy wells. you can imagined how it all played out. speaking tours in schools, abc news, lemonade stands. maybe even the canadian oprah. which is not a patch on the italian opera. basically he raised heaps of money and sent it to uganda and they didn't need to walk for 20km each day for fly infested water to feed their babies. i'm not being flippant.
his parents came across as very supportive and full of delight in a way that i relate to even now as i sit next to jonah soothing himself in his rocker. i can still feel ben's tight squeeze and smile as i dropped him at play centre at hour ago. i get delight. ryan's parents were clearly his heroes. friends of his parents made arrangements for the family to go to uganda and visit ryan's penpal and see a well they named after him. you can imagine the reception. i am sure he felt happier than michael campbell did that day he rode up lambton quay surronded by his wife, emirates airline staff and ticker tape, in celebration of winning the us open. i think i was two years back. i hope i let my boys do things like that. you know, sell lemondae for ugandans.
then, last night i watched half a documentary about christian hosoi. the vert skater who went so, so high out of the top of a ramp. in his first session in the deep end of a pool, he managed to handplant, backside air and frontside ollie. as a skater he was remarkable and second only to tony hawk. i liked the way, in the documentary, that tony hawk said he invented the late grab to get airs like hosoi. he admitted he was too scrawny to push himself out of the transition as much as hosoi did. you wouldn't believe it now.
it was mentioned in this record of hosoi's skateboarding life that everywhere he skated with the old bones brigade, vision team and the others his dad was there. frank hawk was there too with tony. the world's one and two and their dad's were there. literally.
sometimes when i take ben to the park or the mountains or the pool or the ramp or mcdonald's i hope that i am not just feeding and entertaining him. i pray that i am also keeping him off drugs too. *
jonah is crying so i'm off give him a snuggle.
* i realise that hosoi ended up using fine white powders, hawk is addicted to mcdonalds and ryan, at nine years of age, probably already has a girlfriend. i don't think these things happened becasue their dads were too supportive, however.
July 26 sunny dayswe've become people who spend money at mcdonalds. it's not the sesame bun that tempts us because we don't buy the burgers. usually just the crispy chicken fillets which, as well as containing up to 8000 calories each, possibly, are declious. my lawyer told me to say 'possibly'. the trouble is that they are deliberately situated about 15 minutes along the motorway out of dubai. so this is how it works you go to dubai. you do what you need to and as you are about to leave you remember two things: you are a family now and can't live on chocolate milk for 4 meals a day; there is always a plethora of traffic literally jamming the roads going home. they are packed as. so, in response to the first item i have to buy food for my family. and the second, well, i like to get past the other cars and onto clearer roads first so we don't eat then get stuck in traffic and not get home till it's time to shave again three days later. mcdonalds knows both these things so they built a store just past all the traffic where we have eaten up to three times in the past six weeks. it's not too expensive. ten new zealand dollars usually sees us decked out in chicken and ginger bear. it just makes us wriggle. last night we had mcdonalds for tea. i love live shows so we went to dubai to see the sesame street live show. it was awesome. there was a fear before we arrived at the mall that it might be toys r us workers dressed up in colourful suits stitched together for a fraction of the price by al mustaqbal tailors. but the soothing american accent of the mc assured me that these monsters were real. digression: i really hope they wore their costumes on the flight over. that would've been so, so cute. the show was both sweet and impossible to photograph due to quick movements, unsuitable light and the camera operator being a weirdo. i took a few (dozen) though and have already made an album for them. if you don't like fuzzy monsters, check out the album at least to see ben with our noodle tongs and jonah looking cuter than cookie monster's rolly eyes. ka kite. July 24 faceben decided we should paint a rainbow this afternoon. i prepared some banana milk then joined him at the craft table in his room., just by the door on the left as you go in.
as we sat surrounded by sponges, painting shirts, ice cream containers with mucky water in and the rest of ben's bedroom i decided that i was glad that i bothered to spend this time.
ben's rainbow was very nice. we used sponges just like they do on the tweenies video. then we went on to free play. i painted a blue circle to get things started. i have added a brief album. two pictures of his are in there. you will notice the cheeks, hat, glasses and bottom on the first one. the second one i was out of the room for but it appears self explained.
my contrubution to the art world this afternoon consisted of slipping on the wet floor while carrying red water. a nice bow appeared on the cream wall. it did, thank god, wipe off as easily as is it would have if i were starring in an infomercial for cheap yellow dishcloths.
arohanui. July 22 picturesi used to think that going to the movies was not the best way to spend an evening. in fact i once told a large group of people that the ten bucks would be better spent on coffee and cake because then the two moviegoers could actually talk to each other and connect. (look at me on my soapbox!). i thought it was an antisocial way to spend an evening. that was then. now that i'm antisocial myself i don't mind watching movies. i watched one tonight. all by myself, even, proving that.... i watched a movied called 'stoked' about a former pro skater named gator. i have his autogrpah and i even vaguely remember him skating the vert in paraparaumu. to be more honest, and gator would hate me for this, i actually remember chris miller, tony magnusson and natas kaupas with more vividity. the story goes that he was a dysfunctional boy who got exceptionally rad, then grew up into a dysfunctional man and ended up in jail after pleading guilty to doing some very bad things. it was an interesting insight into the mind of a brilliantly talented person. does it take being screwed up so bad to motivate people to excel? i hope not. i still rofl thinking about what tony hawk said in the film. he was kindly extolling gator's abilities with a skateboard and even said that 'he (gator) was the one to beat' in those oldskool contests. do you get it? the gap between tony hawk's skills and the guy who came second was canyonesque. funnily enough i was talking with an australian just yesterday about what happen to some of those old skaters. business, jail or church literally swallowed a big bunch of them. that was stoked.
you see the thing about movies is that you're not allowed to talk while they are playing. i never really understood/understand why people would want to go to a movie together. to sit and not talk, i suppose. i am a talker. i love company. i'm not one who enjoys sitting in silence with others. i feel terrible when i'm too shy to say something. not sure why i'm like this. hmmm. movies also can be annoying. like when they don't end right. two recent examples in my life are last night's ' the happening' by the sixth sense guy which ended up being ... (just kidding won't spoil it!). i have also used this space to tear a strip off the latest indiana jones film. i.j. and the cradle cap of herzogovina or something. aliens, yeah, whatever.
films also do funny things to us. like the way 'jesus christ superstar' is responsible for the whole jesus is a hippy image we all can't shake. sandals. long wild hair. flairs. ben is developing a good idea about who jesus is. he likes to sing and make things up so the ol' charttopper: 1 2 3 jesus loves me, 1 2 jesus loves you; quickly became: 1 2 3 jesus loves dogs, 1 2 jesus loves frogs. now if by frogs he means all the people i think are not stupid and by dogs he means everyone else, then i believe ben has all the theology he needs. jonah, on the other hand, just gurgles as if his own cuteness sustains him.
i added pimms to my pineappletini this evening. it tasted nice in the same way bar nuts taste nice. they are there. one is peckish (thirsty). the maths does itself. all i mean is that i only drunk it because i made it. and jenny had turned one down doubting it would be potable. in passing on the pimms she not only enjoyed her drink more, she missed out on that smug feeling you get when you defy good advice.
i skated in the dark the other night and struggled only with the tricks which require the board to get back under my shoes. i also, for kicks, took a mouthful of jonah's gripe water. didn't work.
in your face, gripe water.
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