Triathalon

    On Sunday I did a triathlon. I did the sprint distance which is 500m swim, 20 km bike and a 5 km run. The weather was horrible when we were driving to the tri. There was lots of rain and wind. The water looked very choppy when we got there. It was still sprinkling when we got in the water. The water was the choppiest that I have ever swam in. It was hard to sight and figure out where I was going. I swam the 500m 4 minutes faster than I swam in the last triathlon I did. The bike was difficult because the ground was still quite wet. There were some hills that I liked because I get a bit bored on just flats. The run went all right. By the time we were running the sun had come out and it was really nice.
     Overall I am pretty happy with how I did. I finished in 1:32. I was 64th over all. I was 10th out of my age group of 15th but I was only 37 seconds from the 9th place in my group. I have another triathlon coming up soon and I am hoping to go slightly faster.

St. Patricks Day!!!

Indie making the trap. 

   

Tally being silly with her head band. 

Green mac and cheese

   













   




            This year over St. Patricks day the big kids (Kaiya and Jack) were away on school camp so it seemed like a good time to make St. Patrick's Day a big deal for the little girls. The day before St. Patrick's Day we read some stories about leprechauns and made a leprechaun trap.  I got some cool headbands for St. Patrick's Day. The girls stacked two pots and covered the handles with tape so that the leprechaun would get stuck. They then filled the pots with every green thing they could find including, grass, a seashell colored green and beads. They then covered the pots with a paper tent to keep the leprechaun in if the tape didn't work.  I was very impressed that they were so independent in building their trap. Overnight a leprechaun went into the trap and took the treats we had left to lure it in and exchanged it for some chocolate gold coins! Tally and Indie both had a gold coin with breakfast.The leprechaun had also got into the breakfast smoothie and turned it green! The girls had a St. Patricks Day themed lunch box with shamrock sandwiches, green grapes, a clover cookie and a few green m&ms. I had to throw in some not themed things because I didn't have enough green things for them to not be starving. For dinner we had green mac and cheese that I colored with spinach in the cheese sauce. They were initially very skeptical of their dinner but after a few bites they warmed up to it.

Indie and Tally with their trap. They were having a laugh
about what a leprechaun might look like 

Photo of the Week (Feb 29-March 6)

EDIT: I tried to publish this from my phone but it didn't work for some reason. I've only just realized so I am publishing it now.

I am copying a good friends idea by doing a photo of the week. There are lots of silly/cool things I see that aren't worthy of a whole blog post but are still worth sharing.

I saw this car in the library parking lot and had a good chuckle at it

Weekly Photo March 7-13

This photo is really exciting to me because it is the preliminary data for my thesis. I could go explain the data but I don't think that many people will be overly interested in it. I was really excited to start getting data. Even though the data probably won't make it into my thesis and the data is not overly interesting. Ideally the two groups would have very very different bar heights but oh well. Such is the way of the world I suppose

Busy Busy Saturday

      Saturday (March 5th) was a crazy busy day. I cycled down the shore and took the ferry over to the CBD. Then I cycled to swim squad. I had given my friend Fiona my swim stuff the night before so when I got there we went for a quick run and then we did swim squad. I sure have a lot of work to do on my pull. We were doing a set where you count how many times you stroked between two buoys. Everyone else had numbers that were about half of what I have showing that while I move my arms with good technique I don't move a lot of water with them.

Funny Coffee Cup from
Shakey Isles

Fu    After the swim Bevan picked me and my bike up. We had brunch in St. Hellier's. It was an alright meal. I find that the cafes in the bays are often not as nice as the ones on the shore. They seem to charge the same price but not produce the same quality of food. So after our semi disappointing brunch we headed to Hyper Ride. Hyper Ride is a shop that sells discounted snow board/skate board/surf board stuff. Bevan's birthday is next week and he needed to go try on some things so his parents knew what to get him.
     After Hyper Ride we raced back into the city to go to the Coffee Festival. It was in Shed 10 on the water front. The festival had a very hipster feel to it. There were tons of different coffee roasters most of which I had never heard of before. We got free coffee from one called Shaky Isles. They have hilarious coffee cups and packaging. We also got free coffee from another place called Flight something. It wasn't great. We tried coffee from Spaceman but I didn't like it so I didn't get a full coffee. We also tried the most delicious hot chocolate. It was just like melted chocolate. It reminded me of the Bernard Calibu hot chocolate I used to get in Calgary when I visited the Mitchelle's. I also tried some stuff from a place called True Food. They were making really nice almond milk from home made almond butter and water. It was tasty. Their food was over priced though.
    After the Coffee Festival we went to Bevan's house then my house to get ready for the evening. We went to a friends party/casino night. It was fancy dress which was fun. I wore my favorite Federation dress which is awesome. We had some Indian food before heading down the my friends house. Then everyone headed to the casino at Sky City. It is one of two casinos in New Zealand. I didn't gamble because it doesn't seem like a good idea on tight finances.
     It was a super fun yet exhausting day. Luckily today I got to have a lazy day to calm down from it all.

Busy Weekend (Feb 19-21)

     Last weekend was pretty busy. Friday afternoon I worked then I was planning on going to the Lantern Festival with Bevan and some friends from uni. I was really excited about the festival because it moved from Albert Park to the Auckland Domain. There was also rumour that they had lots of new lanterns because the Domain is much bigger than Albert Park. I have really enjoyed the Lantern Festival the past two years and it reminds me how long I've lived her.

The Museum in the Domain that had special
lighting for the lantern festival. 

Panda Lanterns! These are the only ones I saw.
I don't remember seeing them last year.
The pandas are on a teeter totter but they look
a bit sad. 

     Due to some poor communication I didn't get to the lantern festival until 9:30. By the time I met my friends they were all hungry and wanted to eat. We wandered around the food stalls for about an hour. Then we set off to see the lanterns...right as they were turning them off and shutting it down for the evening. I only got to see the panda lanterns that were next to the food stalls. I was pretty bummed but there wasn't a lot I could do at that point.
     Saturday I got up and went to the ocean swim clinic I have been going to all summer. It was a technical set which was really hard because we did so many drills. By the end of it I was absolutely exhausted. There was a bomb threat at Mission Bay (where swim clinic is) while we were swimming so they had closed off most of the park and the beach. I had planned to run after swim clinic but they had closed the side walks and there were loads of police around so I decided not to. Instead I went home, had a shower and a nap then got ready for Bevan's sisters engagement party.

Bev and I at the engagement party

     Bevan's sister, Emma is engaged to Josh. They are both really nice. Bevan came to pick me up and we ran to get a few last minute things for Emma. We got to the engagement party about an hour after it started. The engagement party was at the Marine Center in Browns Bay. It was nice because the building is right on the beach. I didn't know any one there expect Bevan's family. I got to meet his Aunt and Uncle. They were very nice. Emma had some games set up like guess the number of kisses in a jar and a quiz about the couple. She also had a photo booth set up that had an instax camera. I have a cute picture of Bev and I from it. I tried to take a picture of it for the blog but they are all kind of blurry. I mostly hung out with Bev and his parents and chatted. It was pretty nice. At the end of the party we stayed to help tidy up then had pizza with Bevan's family for dinner.
      Sunday I relaxed and got ready for a busy week. I have Masters Orientation this week and next week my program officially starts!

Rainbows End

     Last Sunday (Feb 14th) I went to Rainbows End with Bevan, Alix, Sean, Ali and Haley. Rainbows End is a theme park in South Auckland. Here is the link incase your interested http://rainbowsend.co.nz/. It was a pretty fun day. We didn't get there till about 11. We started off with a movie room thing which wasn't very exciting. Then we did a smallish roller coaster and a log ride. That was pretty fun. As we were about to go down the big hill on the log ride Bevan reach foward and tickled me so I screamed naturally. I got teased about being scared on a calm ride. Then we went and did a corkscrew roller coaster and a cool spinning ride. After those we had some lunch. We went across the road to the mall for lunch because it was way way cheaper. When we came back we waited in line for ages to go on the go carts. After we went on the go carts we did a ride called Stratosphere. It is sort of like the Kamakazi ride at the fair in Helena but it also spins around as well as going upside down. They have the "extreme" setting which goes all the way upside down and the "chill" setting which only gets to a 45 degree angle. We were in line for extreme but after we got to a 45 degree angle it started slowing down. Turns out there was an issue with the harnesses so we had to reset them then do the chill version again to check them before we could do the extreme version. It was mildly frustrating. By the time we finally got the whole ride we were all pretty excited which probably made it better. Unfortunately that was our last ride of the day as the park closes early on Sundays. We kind of missed that when we planned it. Oh well it was pretty fun.