A bit of business, plus updates from the Hutt!

Hey guys at home. I need a bit of help. I keep trying to pay my Sasktel cell phone bill but every time I try to load the e-bill page it times out (this has happened from a few different cities in NZ now). Is there any way that one of you (mom, dad, Karyn, etc?) could sign in to my account for me and pay my bill with my credit card? I can call you and give you the card info. But yeah, I'm still not home for another 3 weeks and I want to get that sorted before I get home.

Also, if you happened to do the calculations on what I just said there ("I'm still not home for another 3 weeks"), you would notice that I changed my flights coming home to August 10th instead of the 16th. Basically I am having an insane fun time here, but I already did the Kiwi Experience tour of the south island 3 years ago so I'm cutting that part short (just flying to Q-town, bussing to Christchurch, Kaikoura, and back up to Wellington rather than doing the whole west coast again), still doing everything else that I had planned, but coming home nearly a week early. Call me crazy for leaving NZ early, but I just really, really miss Jeff. Also, I definitely like the fact that now I will have almost a week extra of ACTUAL summer holidays with (YAY!) warm weather!!!! Anyway, I changed my flights yesterday and am quite happy about the new plan. I also booked a flight to Queenstown so I will still get the ol' bungy and Canyon Swing adventures in.

Yesterday I took the bus to HVHS to pop a surprise visit on the teachers I worked with 3 years ago. It was so fantastic to see them! I had a good catch up with Katriona and said a quick hello to Gary, but tomorrow I'm going back in in the afternoon to say hi to the Year 12 music class, who were my students when they were in Year 9 (grade 8). I saw a couple of them yesterday, and one of them walked in the room and was like, "Miss Campbell?!" Definitely not expecting to see me, that's for sure. It was great to see her, although the students that I saw yesterday looked so grown up - when I had them they were about 13, and now they're 16, so they've definitely changed. It's so neat to see them again, and I'm really looking forward to the visit to the whole class tomorrow!

Last night we had Fish, Sam, Charlotte, and Richard over for pizza and a movie night of "The Muppet Show" (just like the "good old days"). It was SO good to have everyone together again. We Skyped Jeff (it was his birthday yesterday!) and Charlotte was very enthralled with the computer screen and seeing Jeff there. She kept pointing to it saying "What's that?" and at one point she got really excited when she noticed Sam's face in the little video window. She kept pointing at it and saying "DAD!" when Sam was trying to have a conversation about rugby with Jeff. Pretty funny actually. She's so cute!

Anyway, it's 4:46am here and I technically was just getting up from the couch, where I had fallen asleep hours earlier, and was just heading off to bed. So this has been your middle-of-the-night update from NZ. It's quarter to 11am back home, so if you're reading this, good morning! Hope you had a good sleep. :o)

Picture updates to come. :o)

Picnik mania (and a HUGE congratulations!)

Ok, so first things first.  CONGRATULATIONS to Fishie and Sam who just had their brand new baby girl yesterday at about 12:45am New Zealand time.  SO EXCITING!!!!!  (Why the heck is this writing as though it's a big huge link?  Anyway....)  I can't wait to see pictures of the new baby, Miss C.A. Hall (Kirsten told me the name last night, SO perfect!).  And of course I'm glad that everyone is happy and healthy and doing just fine. :o)

And in other news (oh, there goes the link!), I am hopelessly addicted to the website Picnik.  Seriously.  Check it out here if you have a hankering for some easy photo editing.  My cousin got me into it and I've been pretty much unstoppable for the past 2 weeks.  I'm teaching the students in my Grade 10 (Year 11 in NZ) computer class how to use it, and they are just loving it as well.  So, since I'm long overdue for another update, here are a few pictures.  You've probably already seen most of them on Facebook, but here they are anyway.  Cheers!