January 12, 2011
Today was our last day of house sitting in Wellington. We are ready to move on. Staying put for three weeks was a good break but was also a long time. The house was very accommodating. We saved a lot of money by being there and we got to experience living like the New Zealanders live!
From what I gathered by some of the books in the bedroom, the woman of the house, Mandy, has/had breast cancer. In the beginning of our stay there, I felt like I could feel her energy and the sadness of the disease; it was heavy at times. It subsided at some point. She and I have a lot of similar interest. I read four books from her book shelf (which is a lot for me in a short amount of time), her jewelry looks just like mine, and she has my favorite cd’s on her shelf! I also love her kitchen and all that goes along with it!
We have had numerous day trips into Wellington and are feeling pretty at home wondering the streets. Joe, Sadie, and I went to Martinbourgh last week and worked on a vineyard for the day. We did it with the WWOOF organization. There were other wwoofers there working and staying. We were just day workers since we were staying so close by. Learned a lot about growing grapes and it was very interesting. Had a delicious meal with everyone. On the day we worked, Julian and Eliot went to a park called “Adrenalin Forest”. It is a forest full of rope ladders, pulleys, zip lines and all sorts of “balancing” type things to walk across, each level getting higher than the last. It took them about three hours to complete. There were areas that made Julian think twice about his abilities; some were a challenge to Eliot but for the most part, he had no fear. In Welliington yesterday, I filmed Eliot doing Parkour in various places. He also went down last week end and met up with a local group that does Parkour. I tried my hand at driving again yesterday. As long as I have someone with me helping me navigate round abouts, I’m pretty confidant. They have very few traffic lights and stop signs here. For the most part everything is either yield or a round about. There are a lot of funny little differences here. I’m going to try to start a list of them. We play Rummy every single night! Seems like it could get old, but we’re still having fun at it!
Being with the same people 24/7 for three months is going to be the experience of a lifetime! I laugh sometimes at the dynamics of it all. And sometimes I get very irritated, bothered, pissed off, the whole gamut of feelings have surfaced at some point in time. Today I realize that we are all so much alike and what bothers one bothers the other in the same way. Like, Sadie has this thing where she says “stop looking at me” (lol!) and I realize sometimes I glance at her and she’s staring at me and I feel the same way, like “stop looking at me!” (lol!) We all have our very sweet moments and then moments where nothing is tolerable. Julian is so much like me. He has a lot of patience (like extremely patient!), is very accommodating, always ready to help out and is just down right “nice”. However, he is also quite sarcastic at times and I hope I don’t have so much of sarcasm anymore; I used to.
Kids are so smart and have such excellent memories that sometimes they can tend to make me feel like I’m losing my mind. They remember every little detail of everything seen, read, or heard, and I have to be reminded of details. Sometimes I don’t even remember a movie Eliot says I watched!