So a few people have been asking me about what is happening with soccer for me in New Zealand, so I thought I should address it.  Many of you know I have been in contact with the coach of the women's national team, and he wanted me to come and try out for the team.  Now originally this tryout was going to be in June, but he never got back to me with dates, so June came and went without a tryout.  Then he responded to my emails and said let's do it in August... So here we are, end of August, and now I have decided to postpone going up to Auckland for a trial.  Right now I am playing on a women's team in Wellington (although the season just ended yesterday, and we beat the league champions to win the Kelley Cup title...very exciting stuff)  So then after this winter league, there is a regional summer league for women, and the team is made of of the best players in the area.  I'm not sure how the selection process works, and since I have just moved here, I'm not sure if I will get picked to play in it.  We'll have to wait and see...

As for the national team issue, 2 of the girls I play with right now are on the U20 national team, and from what they have said and from what a few coaches I have talked to have said, basically if you are living in NZ and want to be on the women's national team, you need to be living up in Auckland.  I live in Wellington, which is a good 7 or 8 hour drive from Auckland.  Also, I would be unable to get and keep a job of any kind while trying to play soccer.  I would love to be able to play, but logistically a lot of things make it very complicated.  There's always a chance though that it will still work out, we'll have to wait and see!

Here's some pictures of my team from the final game this weekend !

First of all, our floor is done!  And it looks wonderful, I must say.  I was a little concerned that we were spending too much money putting it in, but it makes the house look SO much better that I think it will be WELL worth it when it comes time to sell this place.  See below (note, still without any furniture or the newly painted walls, color TBD)

Now fortunately for us, not even 24 hours after our floors were finished, our container arrived at our house!  Literally right after we paid the customs fee, they brought it over!  And, the best part?  They unloaded EVERYTHING.  Carried it into our house/garage, and that was that.  Easy peazy.  I was all ready to get a good workout in unloading our thousands of pounds of items from the container and then carrying it all up our mini mountain driveway, so this was quite a pleasant surprise.  Now I thought I did a pretty good job labeling all the boxes so we knew what was inside before opening them, but I had one major oversight... I forgot to label the box with all the PARTS in order to rebuild all of our furniture.  So 6 hours and 70 opened boxes later, we managed to come across everything we needed.

So at this point, we have taken a whole bunch of stuff out of boxes, and not really put much of it away.  We still can't put our furniture on the hardwood because we need to clean it and seal it (which won't happen for another couple of days).  Basically our house is a mess, we can barely walk through the hallways and bedroom, BUT, we are so so happy to have all of our stuff!

Mark just sent me an email titled: "Customs is full of a-holes."  Not a good sign, seeing how they are holding our container with all of our stuff at the moment.  Turns out, when we asked the first time if we could bring all of our wedding gifts in to the country without paying taxes, and they said yes, well, they lied.  So technically, you can't bring anything NEW into the country, but you can bring UNUSED GIFTS.  Those sound kind of the same to me.  So all of our stuff should have been classified as unused gifts, seeing how we didn't buy any of them (hence the gift part) and we didn't use them yet.  If we had known, maybe we could have taken all our dishes/toaster/ blender and the like OUT of their original, "look-at-me-I'm-a-brand-new-item" boxes.  We could have run them through the dishwasher or something, bam, then they are used.  But oh no, now we owe NZ Customs $622.00 and we are NOT happy about it.  Not even a little bit.

If you'd like to contribute to the "Mark and Mimi hate customs and are now broke and can't afford to buy groceries" fund, let me know...  :) Ok that might be a little dramatic, it's not THAT bad, but care packages are definitely appreciated (hint hint MOM)

So I haven't really put up any pictures lately (mostly because I haven't really taken any...) so I will try and change that a little bit today.  To be honest, I don't really have an excuse, it has been cold and SO windy here, so I've done nothing but stay inside really.  When it has been raining, it rains sideways.  Brr.

Below is what our dining area looks like minus the carpet that was in there before... Clearly still a work in progress.

In fact, I spent the entire day yesterday with the flooring guy at my house, and am spending the entire day today with him as well, so the next picture should show the flooring all finished! (And of course, still without furniture).  And maybe by then we will have finished painting, which is turning out to be a nightmare.  We have totally finished 2 rooms, primed 2 very dark walls, and have a lot more to go.  The problem is, the previous people painted EVERYTHING gray (including trim and molding in every room) so we now need to paint not only the wall, but all the molding, trim, and ceilings as well!!!

Lastly, I have been feeling like a real kiwi now lately... I have only used the dryer twice (because it was raining) and I have been hanging all my clothes out on the line.  Go green.

Today was Mark's first day of the long road to becoming Dr. Bartlett.  And I enjoyed sleeping in and lounging around the house in my PJs until 1pm.  And then of course realized how much painting and housework I had to do, and so the work began.  Tomorrow looks to be another day filled with painting walls in our house.  But it will be worth it!!

On another note, I tentatively got a job!  So ever since I got to NZ, people always ask me and Mark the same thing: "What are you going to be doing here?"  And Mark goes on about his pHD in chemistry  and blah blah blah, and after people are thoroughly impressed, they turn to me and ask what I am going to be doing.  So I sort of stare blankly and say, "I have no idea."  Which is completely true.  I don't know what in the world I want to be doing as a career.  I love love love kids (particularly babies) but that doesn't automatically lend itself to a particular career...  but, I have been getting more and more interested in photography, and I have just started a photography course, and would like to someday have a career in photography.  Key word: someday.  So what now?

Well, I was a nanny back in California, and I loved it, so I thought I might try that route again here.  I can work with little kids, and get paid for it... can't complain, right?  Well I had an interview with a family last Friday, and they tentatively offered me a job!  Kind of cool because I am working part time, so I have plenty of time for photography and other interests, and I will be watching two 6 month old babies.  Yup, two of em.  They are gorgeous baby boys, and I will certainly have my hands full, but I can get a start on my photography career with two new subjects!  Anyway, my new job would start in the beginning of October, so I have one more month to get our house organized!  And we have heard that our container has actually arrived in NZ and is now just going through customs, so I will actually have some unpacking to do hopefully early next week!

We have officially been living in our new house for more than one whole week now.  We have managed to paint ONE bedroom, and remove all the carpets in the lounge and dining area in preparation for some hardwood look-alike flooring.  We've also gotten a landscape designer to start working on some plans for our front and side yard, so I'd say we are off to a good start.  We still don't have any furniture, but we are hoping that problem will be solved next week or so.

As for everything else, Mark starts his pHD program on Monday, and I start the search for a job.  Still not sure what I want to do, so I am likely to do something fun and that I like once again in order to make money... can't go wrong there, right?  I also just enrolled in a photography course, so I can actually learn all the important features of my new camera, and hopefully start taking some decent photographs.

Sorry for the not very exciting update and lack of pictures, but once Mark starts work I am going to be bored with nothing else to do but play on my computer for a little while, so you can count on some more updates next week.  With pictures.

(1)  If you are male ages 13-25, and want to be “cool” you must have either (a) a mullet or (b) a haircut that looks like someone just closed their eyes and started randomly chopping.  No joke.

(2)  They weren’t lying when they said there were more sheep than people.

(3) People here eat a LOT of meat and potatoes, and very little things green…

(4) My “plan” for making friends by playing soccer is not looking so good.  Why?  Well, I am the oldest player on my team, apparently.  Who knew 22 was so old…  It was this one girl’s SIXTEENTH birthday the other day.  That would be so cool to make friends that can only hang out until 9pm because they have a curfew and have to get up to go to high school the next morning.  Hmmmm… I’ll have to come up with a plan B.

(5) Cops here are sneaky.  There are speed cameras everywhere (as in, in addition to the permanent speed cameras on poles, there are random parked vans with cameras attached to the back that will take your picture if you are speeding, and promptly deliver a ticket in the mail… and no I haven’t gotten one).  There are also people that are hired to sit and take pictures of drivers in the car pool lane to make sure they have at least 2 people in the car.  Literally there is a man standing on the side of the road taking pictures of every car in the carpool lane.  It’s a little much if you ask me.  There are also unmarked cop cars that will get you for speeding.  Apparently speeding is a very serious violation here in the big NZ.

(6) People here love love love skinny jeans.  You will never see me wearing skinny jeans, so I am bound to never be fashionable here (not that soccer shorts and a sweatshirt is ever really fashionable anywhere…)

(7) People think it’s really cool that Arnold is the governor of California.  Sweet. 

(8) Cell phones are ridiculously expensive.  It costs like 40 cents a minute to call from cell phone to cell phone.  And on top of that, most plans only include 30 monthly minutes...  So everyone in New Zealand, I mean EVERYONE, basically only texts.

And what else is new… oh, well, so our “new” car (which is ’99 VW Passat) is going to be the bane of my existence, I’ve decided.  Ok well maybe that’s a little dramatic, but this car was supposedly a great deal, we got it for like $3,000 less than it’s worth, blah blah blah… Well, on the second day we drove it, the Anti-lock brakes light went on, and the heater went completely AWOL.  As in, we are driving along, listening to music, and then we hear this low humming noise, which promptly turns into a loud awful screeching wailing blood curdling screaming noise… no we did not run over a sheep, that’s just the sound out heater/AC makes…  apparently that costs $1100 to fix.  Who needs AC or heat in a car anyway, right?   

Finally we get to move in to our new house... it seems like we have been waiting forever!  Now unfortunately, our container with all of our furniture is not due to arrive for another 2 weeks or so, so we will be living in a fairly empty house for a while.  Although we did manage to buy a mattress which will sit on the floor of our bedroom, so at least we won't be sleeping on the floor.  We are also the proud owners of a new washer, dryer, fridge, entertainment center, dresser, and some other miscellaneous goods, so that's a start.

I've attached a few pictures of our new (albeit empty) house!

There's not really much to see since there is absolutely nothing in our house right now, but there's a few more pics in the pictures section if you are interested.  Although this house is pretty new (built in 2007), there are still a few things we want to do it to make our own.  We will definitely be fixing the front yard, and we are thinking of taking out the carpet and putting in hardwood, and definitely painting something other than drab gray.  These will be the "before" pictures, so stay tuned for the "after" ones!

We have now been in the country for almost a week, and we have accomplished quite a few things already. We managed to buy a car, a washer and a dryer, a new TV, and other miscellaneous items.  We finalized everything for our house, so we will be picking up the keys on Thursday morning!  Very very exciting!

On Friday we drove our new car for the first time (1999 VW Passat), which meant of course we needed to get car insurance.  We went into the bank, and I marched up to the counter and said, "Hi, we need to get some car insurance."  And yes we knew for a fact the bank does sell car insurance, but the lady just looked at me like I was an alien.  She said, "Pardon?", so I just repeated myself without a second thought.  And then received another alien-like stare.  Then she goes, "ok, you got me, what's that?" as if I was playing some kind of joke on her.  So now I gave her this look as if she was the alien from another planet, as I was thoroughly confused.  Then 30 seconds later the light flashed in her eyes as she realized I had an accent, but really was still speaking english.  Apparently "CAR" is pronounced like "cahhh" so she had absolutely no idea what I said.  Apparently there is a bit of a language barrier...

Anyway, we got the insurance, and I drove for the first time on the left side of the road.  I did not crash, although it will definitely take some getting used to.  I almost side swiped a huge truck (oops) and I think I gave Mark a heart attack as I drove through my first round-about (not as easy as you might imagine), but no accidents.  One huge shocking fact... You all complain about gas prices... our car costs $120 to fill up the tank!!!  And it is a small sedan.  Uhhhhh.  Even when you convert that to US dollars, that's still about $80!!!  

We also had our New Zealand family get together on Saturday to celebrate our wedding and move to New Zealand, which was a big success.  We rented out this big house, which had some awesome views of the ocean (and was littered with sheep, standard New Zealand).  There were about 40 of Mark's family members that came, which means that about 20 bottles of wine and 100 beers were had.  OH. MAN.  But it was fun to see everyone!  Check out some pics in the pictures section.