Earth! Fire! Wind! Brellies? Gust Busters?... Go Planet?

The winter weather here is fickle to say the least.  And impressive.  It can be sunny, windy, rainy, cold, and warm at the same time.  Way to multi-task, weather.

The wind is my least favorite though.  It is brutal.  I feel like calling Captain Planet’s team and telling Wind,  “Put down your darn ring and walk away.  You’ve done enough, sir.  Give someone else a chance.”  Like Sun or Beach Weather.  Those are not real Captain Planet members, but they totally should be.  I would call on them right now.

The safety warning from our new apartment hints at how bad Wind is behaving.  “At times the wind can be very strong around the main entrance to the tower, on some occasions residents have been blown over, please be careful.”  I’m not going to lie, I kind of want to see that happen.  But knowing my luck, it will probably be me.  I’m going to have some Wizard of Oz cyclone moment and end up in Antarctica.  I just know it.

We have been told we need to get a special type of umbrella (or “brellie”) called a “gust buster”.  Apparently these have some special magic that prevents them from turning inside out every 5 seconds. Which would be useful since we can now be spotted all over the city “comically” trying to right our umbrella in the middle of a downpour.  This must be how they tell the newcomers apart from the locals.

This week we went to Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World and MOTAT (Museum of Transportation and Technology).   Kelly’s is billed as being “the” place to have an antarctic encounter, but I was not really that impressed.   We did take a snowmobile around to look at the penguins so that was kind of exciting and different.  But we could not pet the penguins and the penguins did not fly or dance.   For the price of the ticket, I was expecting the penguins to do tricks or at least wear bow ties and serve us ice cream.  

I think I scared the sea horse when I took this photo.  Sorry, sea horse.

Penguins not wearing bow ties or serving ice cream.

MOTAT on the other hand is worth the ticket.  I think it is probably meant more for kids, but usually that just means it is more exciting for adults too.  There are lots of cars and trains that you can crawl into, a mirror maze, a printing press you can play with, and a giant kiwi bird!  There is also a tram that takes you on a 10 minute ride around parts of Auckland.  And the conductor wears a “train hat” and says “all aboard” so you know, that definitely makes the experience more grown-up.

Extremely large kiwi bird.

I have also been searching for jobs which is a little difficult because we have limited internet resources.  But I have found something that I am good at that I think would make an excellent career.  Gambling!  David does not agree.  I spent less than 30 minutes though and made $27 at the casino on Saturday.  If I kept that up and made $50 or more an hour, that is like a 100K job.  He has yet to convince me why this is a bad idea.

- Meredith