2009, A little more year in review…
So in my earlier wrap up 2009, I said I'd fill in a little more later and I guess I'll just kinda pick up where I left off...
Really? Its 2010 already?! (Part 1)
Wow is all I can say. I really haven't written a blog since July?! 2009 has been an interesting and busy year. I started the year out in a friend's basement at his (anti) NYE (non) celebration. The end of 2008 wasn't really good to either of us and the right thing to do (in our minds) was stay away from the drunks that permeated our lives.
I got my bag of crap!
WOOT! So there I was, at work late last Saturday night, when all of a sudden I see woot-off lights go on sale at woot. I saw that it was their 5th birthday so I thought, "Why not?" I bought the lights & read the post further to discover that if the last digit of my order number matched up with the last digit of the Dow Jones Industrial Average when it closed on Monday, I'd get a bag of crap. Not giving it any thought, I went about my business expecting to see woot-off lights sometime in the near future.
Oh WordPress, you are an evil mistress.
I found the backup of my blog from before I wiped everything & decided that today would be a good day to restore it. Little did I know that WordPress only likes backup files that are smaller than 2MB. Mine turned out to be closer to 5MB. Another interesting thing I discovered was that, upon opening the backup file w/ Notepad, the comments I had previously deleted as spam were all chilling inside this xml file. Great. After deleting about 5498451577654 moderated comments of spam, I got the size down to 250KB & viola! All is back. Have a read at my older posts. Anyways, I'm gonna try and clean up all the posts with pics & what not. More to come later...
Back up…
I am lazy. That being said, I just setup wordpress again here and found out that I can't import my old blogs and what not. Oh well, that's just water under the bridge now. Anyways, there will be more coming soon - watch this space.
Arrived in Wellington!
Tamara and I arrived in Wellington last Tuesday and wondered why it took us so long to get down here. This city is beautiful and laid out much better than Auckland. For the past six nights, we've been staying at Nomad's Capital, where I had a job lined up working in reception (Thanks Renee!), and whoa is this place nice. The bar next door, Blend, is quite flash as well and I really didn't expect anything like this because it seems more like a hotel than a hostel.
We went East…
And it was amazing. Our two guides, Jason and Leo, were quite the pair of characters. Before I get into that, however, I want to say something about the night we spent in Maketu. We left Raglan and arrived in Maketu at a place run by a guy named Uncle Boy. He's a half Maori, half English man who wanted to share his culture with us. We ate a traditional hangi dinner and I did the Haka while Tamara did some Poi juggling. It was quite the experience, as the whole bus stayed in a traditional marae-style house, complete with communal one room sleeping arrangements. The next day, we left the big Stray bus and got onto a smaller bus with Jason to begin our Go East trip.
The start of our travels…
Tamara and I have started our travels and so far its been absolutely wicked. Leaving the flat was a shame, as it was our home for the last six months, but it was definitely time to go. We stayed at the Fat Camel on Sunday and had a few drinks before a really early morning. The weather was pretty crap on Monday when we left Auckland, but all of New Zealand was like that because of a cyclone that came through.
A quiet Christmas and a few days in the Bay…
Well, we had ourselves a nice Christmas & Boxing Day at our flat. We all sat around on Christmas watching a Family Guy marathon and ended up having a few drinks later on in the night. On Boxing Day Tamara & I went with Nathan and his girlfriend Darinka to go see the new Beowulf movie on the Imax in 3D. After that, we checked ourselves into a night at the Fat Camel so that we could make a nice early start to our trek up to the Bay of Islands.
Happy Holidays!
Well ho ho ho to all... The holiday season has come and its getting warmer, which is a pleasant surprise. The weather's been quite nice for the last two weeks, bar a few rainy days scattered about. If this is any indication as to how the weather will be between Christmas and New Years, I don't know if I'll even want to come back to Auckland (other than to fly home). Its nice here in the city, but I'm really starting to get an itch to get out of here. That time will come soon enough...