it's amazing how times have changed. and haven't changed.

during my "oh yes i had a blog" excitement from a month or so ago, i ambled my way through past posts and came upon one from march 2004.*

here's a snippet.

"i have THE coolest brother and sister in the world. no, seriously. SERIOUSLY. note the capitals. and note that i never use capitals. that must mean something.

here i am on one side of the world, sitting at my computer in utter despair on saturday morning (belgium time) as i cannot figure out how excel works and how to get little graphs to graph stuff that needs to be graphed.

and there is my wonderful brother on the other side of the world, sitting at his computer on saturday night (nz time), about to save my life.

i send him my little excel file. he opens it. there we both are. opposite sides of the earth. in front of two computers. looking at the same data.

then he proceeds, via msn (a simply marvelous lifesaving contraption), to tell me step by step how to make graphs. he says things like 'okay, now highlight these columns, and then press this button'. i follow his instructions. when i get it wrong, i.e. what i end up having on my screen is nothing like what he has on his screen, he figures out what i did. and how to fix it. then he proceeds to say things like 'hang on, let me see, i think this might look even better' and takes me through a different range of instructions that gets me a different graph.

...

and then there's my sister. also very cool. who just saved me about 20 hours of work. literally.

i have these numbers in a table that was created in this programme i use. the numbers have decimal points. with a '.' point like is used in new zealand. however belgium have this weird system where they use the comma instead of the point in excel. i needed the data in excel to make graphs. so i thought i had to go through and change every decimal point into a comma so that excel recognised it as a decimal. this probably makes no sense. oh well. the point is (ha ha ha, the point. get it? obviously you can tell i'm tired and have spent far too long on this computer when i start making jokes like that!) that i have 35 tables, each with 50 rows of numbers and i was going through one table at a time, converting each decimal point to a comma, on every single row. this takes a long time (hence the bad jokes).

rachel came online. i sent her one of the tables and she said she would see what she could do. two minutes later (yep, only two, actually probably not even that to be honest) and she had the solution. man. now it takes me one second, one button, and suddenly all my points are commas..."


there are two key things about this post. one of these things highlights how times have changed. one highlights how things haven't changed.

thing that has changed: technology.
1: msn chat? i don't think i have opened msn in at least 5 years. i'm not saying it doesn't exist. some people use it all the time, but not me. i now use google chat and facebook chat.
2: sending, downloading, opening and editing files whilst explaining what you are doing? how about google docs! oh how that would have helped back then!

thing that hasn't changed: coolness of brother and sister.
1: sister: my sister recently posted about blog comments and the idea that facebook commenting is so much easier than blogger commenting.** she then set her blog up with facebook commenting. i marveled at this fact and decided to copy her. i tried. i really did. but after getting stuck on the first bullet point in the instructions i turned to my brother (this time via google chat).
2: brother: my brother then proceeded to have a play and explain a few bits and pieces and presto! now you can comment just like on facebook. it'll even appear in your newsfeed. give it a go. i dare you.

oh yes, one other thing that hasn't changed? my lack of capital letter usage.

*original post
**rachel's post

this post shall be entitled: an ode to cats.

i'm a big fan of cats. they've been a part of my life since i was two years old. so let's have a chat about them.

simon - a rather wise tabby cat who, when faced with a tall thin glass containing milk, understood enough physics to dip his paw in, swish it around, bring it out, lick, and repeat. also known as sugarhead because one day i was making myself a nice cold milo and i accidentally dropped a spoon of wet sugary milo mix onto his head, where it hardened and remained for a number of days.

fluffy - the king of the block with a fluffed up tail and fluffed up body and fluffed up head (i named him after these affectionate features) who would climb trees with me as a kid. often said by another family member to not be as intelligent as simon - until said family member had a dream of fluffy at night walking on his back paws saying "you don't know what i get up to at night".

tigger - a kitten who thought she was a dog. suppose this is understandable as we brought her home at the same time as our puppy macgyver.

picasso - elegantly able to chase her tail and foot around in circles to this day. named due to unique colouring and a brushstroke like mark on her nose. would bring me a bird a day for about a week every time i got home from an overseas trip. i understood her heart was in the right place. but i still got dad to clean up the mess.

phoenix - adequately described by my father in a text message whilst cat-sitting "dad slept like a lamb. mum was attacked all night by a marauding lioness." phoenix loves to chase ping pong balls up and down the hall, tries to follow us on every walk we go on, and is terribly addicted to jellymeat. her favourite flavours are jellified yuck, stinklicious lamb, gross beef (correctly labelled as: duck, lamb and roast beef.

phoenix has another skill. she likes to fly in her spare time.


thanks meg for the pic.

for those of you who noticed, i've rediscovered my blog. and in doing so, had a bit of a virtual walk down memory lane. mostly it caused me to laugh out loud. which made me ponder writing more regularly. so that i can have more walks and laughs down the virtual memory lane in the future.

this reminds me about what my sister called a "mindtrap" back in the 80s. a mindtrap quite simply is when you think about doing something and then realise you are thinking about doing something, knowing that when you actually do that something, then you will remember back to thinking about doing it and thinking about thinking about doing it. and this causes a mindtrap. pretty ingenious. i think the matrix copied our idea later.

anyway, so me thinking about writing my blog purely for the purpose of being able to read it in the future and think back to this moment of thinking about writing it is a mindtrap. but a good one, because now when i re-read this blog in ten years i will laugh and remember, possibly quite vividly, writing this anecdote.

phew. new paragraph required to delete mindtrap traps.

i pondered starting up a new one. a new blog i mean. not mindtrap. you know. mentioning eric. and caleb. and phoenix the cat. in the title. but then i decided they could just join me on my one. especially because i'm writing it anyway. as a slight aside - do i use full stops too much? maybe i should start thinking about alternative methods of punctuation. not sure. i like the full stop.

so. i started this in 2003 when i was a mere 22 year old heading to europe to start my masters. i guess it was a travel blog back then. to keep folk back home updated on my life. remember this was a time long before facebook. and now? well i don't know what it will become. time will tell. things i do know:

(a) i will be writing it
(b) i will be reading it
(c) other people might read it

let's see what happens eh?

i used to send out a yearly excerpt.
maybe you will remember them.
if so, it means you knew me quite a long time ago.*
then one year i forgot.
and the pattern was lost.
so.
here's me trying to start up a new tradition once again.

2011 - the new adventures of bex + eric + caleb**

bex: status updates...***
before the year began: a wife for four years to my wonderful husband eric
at the start: a classical studies / geography teacher, in charge of the environmental council and assistant dean in charge of pastoral and academic needs of 350 students at pakuranga college
part way through: involved in church activities at eastview baptist including preaching, running creche and helping organise a family camp
towards the end: becoming a mum on september 1st to caleb merriman jeffery (4.8kg)
at the end: working for nzqa, hosting my canadian family and writing a yearly excerpt in bullet point format

eric: status updates:
before the year began: a husband for four years to my wonderful wife bex
at the start: an english teacher, professional learning coach focussing on digital technology, and in charge of boys' football at pakuranga college
part way through: involved in church activities at eastview baptist including worship leading and helping organise a family camp
towards the end: becoming a dad on september 1st to caleb merriman jeffery (10lb10oz)
at the end: given a promotion to become an assistant dean in 2012 at school, hosting my canadian family and letting bex write this yearly excerpt in bullet point format

caleb: status updates:
before the year began: living inside mum
at the start: growing bigger inside mum
part way through: growing very large inside mum
towards the end: being born on september 1st via emergency c-section due to size
at the end: 4 months old and smiling and laughing a lot

the three of us wish you all the very best for 2012 and maybe we will attempt to keep up this tradition for the years to come... if any of these bullet points appeal to you and you want to know more - leave a comment!

much love,
bex, eric and caleb****


*hello to all of you!
**obviously it's new because it's not just bex anymore
***i'd just like to take this opportunity to state that i am pretty positive i was one of the very first kiwis ever to use facebook (thanks meghan jeffery for the invite when it was opened to the world in 2006)
****actually caleb has no idea i'm writing this but i shall include him in the credits regardless (actually i wrote eric's part as well)

this post shall be entitled: the ancient world of the mediterranean beckons.

about a month ago i was awarded a staff scholarship in which to travel to the mediterranean to:

a) re-inspire my own passion for the topics i teach in classical studies
b) look into field trip possiblities for my students in the future
c) create resources for my department

so eric and i have booked our journey that takes us in january:

from auckland to turkey (istanbul, anzac cove and troy)
from turkey to italy (rome, naples, pompeii, cumae)
from italy to greece (athens, delphi, thebes, corinth, olympia)
from greece to turkey and back to auckland

i am looking forward to:
a) travelling back to the land of aeneas & paris, romulus & claudius, socrates & exekias...
b) eating real greek food again
c) showing eric my favourite destination of all time (he's never been to the mediterranean)
d) being immersed in archaeological sites

so thanks pakuranga college for giving me a scholarship!

the good samaritan

my first sermon: sunday 29th august 2010

this post shall be entitled: a diary through the ages.

9 years old: kept a diary of places i visited in canada. mostly wrote about animals i saw and mini golf games i played. occasionally mentioned place names. always mentioned newly bought soft toys.

12 years old: kept a lockable diary (though i don't recall ever locking it, or having a key for that matter) that discussed my last year of intermediate school and a trip around the south island with family and friends. discovered that if i had run out of things to say, it was worthwhile to fill up the page with long descriptions about what happened on the tv show neighbours that night.

along with this - many letters received from my cousin in nelson - each one with a word count because apparantly i counted my words first and then encouraged her that at least as many words needed to be written in return.

13 - 17 years old: my high school years have been neatly recorded day by day explaining what subjects i did at school, boys i liked, and tv show anecdotes focussing particularly on lois and clark. mostly i theorise about boys. this seemed normal.

also recently discovered - hundreds of letter written by fellow classmates - each of which clearly indicated i had written a letter twice as long to them and they felt compelled to reply.

18 - 22 years old: university diaries upgraded to large books with no set amount of writing needed for each day. this meant i could ramble on for pages on one particular day, and skip a day if nothing was worth pondering. i did a lot of pondering it seems. a lot. i feel like if one day the world collapsed and my diaries were the only artefact of life as we know it - people would learn a lot about how indecisive and complex we really are.

emails became the 'in' thing and it seems i wanted to be 'in'. thousands of emails ranging in topic and length remind me that i had a knack for story-telling and capturing moments with exact detail.

23 - 26 years old: as i headed overseas i decided to not only continue my written diary format but to embark on my first ever 'blog' - yes, this one in fact. the diary writing went well and i have pages of excerpts about trips to greece and italy, how i lived in a little european town called leuven and how i met eric to name a few. but the blog option intrigued me. and i had a lot of followers once upon a time. a way to share my adventures in one hit - for the world to see and comment on.

26 years & counting: then i got married. and for some reason all diary entries - both written in books and typed online - have ended. it's quite easy to note why as i now have someone i share my adventures with on a daily basis. writing a diary was just a way to have a conversation with myself - to clear my head - and now i have a very patient husband who plays the role perfectly.

so. what came next? facebook. twitter. and soon another unknown technological step in recording life stories for people to see.

so i ended my last blog with "i will keep you posted".
i guess i didn't say how often?
certainly much has past since last october, though, as with these diaries - no space will pass between one post and the next.

some 2009 news:

one: eric and i bought a house*
*it's nice to have our own place. at the same time, it's weird that bunnings has become our favourite shop. who would have thought shopping for ladders could be so enjoyable?
**i like to say we almost have a sea view. if our neighbours across the road oblige and open all their curtains, it is possible to peer all the way through! seeing the water every day as i go to and from work is a sight i will always treasure.

two: i am still a teacher*
*this year i also became an assistant dean. which pretty much means i look after 300 kids through all types of issues which range from what you can imagine the range would be with teenagers. i like it but it is a massive challenge.
**classical studies proves to be popular as it involves me pacing around the room dramatically re-telling mythological stories of angry gods that send pigs to attack kings and humans that are thrown into firey pits and so on.

three: i am still an archaeologist*
*unfortunately this is in my head and heart more so than in actual digging expeditions at present. never-the-less i don't doubt getting back into the field.

four: i love new books with old characters!*
*i have always enjoyed a good novel series. back in the mid nineties (oh so long ago now) i read two fantastic series by a woman called bodie theone. then this year eric discovered (how glad i am that he loves the library) that she had written more - with the original characters! to think that ten years later i could pick up a book and be right back to the very day the last book finished... it's a real treat!

five: i'm re-learning the guitar*
*i'm trying to get better at guitar. i learnt the basics when i was fifteen and then promptly stoppedown playing. now i have my own parlour guitar (the fancy name for a smaller baby-sized guitar) and eric and i try and play along together.

it's now my bedtime. i won't promise i will write more often. but one day i will write again. i always do.

well.
it HAS been awhile :).
and yet here i am, only a few lines on from where i left off!

this year i have strived to be a teacher.
i've had ups and downs:
my biggest challenge is to suddenly discover that sometimes some people (insert teenagers) don't like listening to me and i have struggled with this concept. why don't they like listening to me? i've never had to deal with this in the past.

my biggest positive was to have other parents tell me that their child comes home each day and wants to repeat, word for word, stories i have told them in class. that made me smile.

in other life stories:
we have a kitten now. her name is phoenix.
we no longer live out of suitcases (i was up to four years and counting).
it means we can have people over for dinner.
so we do.

on the archaeological front:
i miss it.
a lot. and still see myself as an undercover archaeologist posing as a teacher and just waiting for the next opportunity.

will keep you posted.

back in the day i used a variety of search engines to look things up on the net.
now google reigns.
in fact it is now normal to simply say "google it" and be understood.

a similar phenomena is hitting new zealand shores.
its called facebook.

i would like to think that i have in some way helped in the planting of facebook in new zealand. maybe this is too extreme of an opinion to hold in public internet space. you have to be careful these days.

still, this time last year facebook was rarely talked about.
however since the start of this year, and incidentally just after i jumped into this new virtual world, the people of new zealand started to sign up.

facebook (www.facebook.com) is addictive. its fun. it quite possibly could be run by a secret society planning on taking over the world. nevertheless it does explain a little about my lack of commitment to blogger as facebook has become my new photo album and my new chatting space.

what will "they" ("they" being the unknown fuzzy group of people/robots/dolphins) think up next? if i knew, id obviously be part of them. so thats obviously a rhetorical question.

today's title: canada

firstly there was our rededication...



then there was an adventure to toronto...



then there were lots more adventures but i haven't uploaded those photos yet...

but i did see a moose (three in fact)
and we did go canoeing
and eric was a groomsman at a second wedding!
and then we all sat around and told lots of riddles.

e.g.
a man comes home, goes up the stairs, turns off the light and goes to bed.
in the morning he wakes up, looks out the window, and there are bodies all around his house.
what happened?

we taught at schools for seven weeks
we moved house three times
we went to hamilton with six others
to watch the all blacks play canada!

my last assignment has been handed in
the semester has officially finished
the course is half way to completion
and tomorrow we fly to canada!

my passport expired last month. this is rather convenient because i have a new surname now. and the new zealand system is quite remarkable in that it was able to check with the "marriages" department as to whether i had in fact married and what my new surname should be. no need for certified copies or originals to be shown. for this i am grateful.

however. i am disappointed to find that new zealanders are no longer allowed to smile for their passport photos. i recall, back in the day, when i discovered friends' unsmiling overseas passports and i laughed and said "that's ridiculous. that would never happen in new zealand". alas, i have been proven wrong.

but why i ask you? why can't we smile? this photo doesn't look like me. it's too serious. too unsmiley. when i show up at the airport in a couple of months am i supposed to put on an equally distressed look for the customs officer?

i am having a dejavu moment.

long ago, in the days of leuven, i used to write posts as a procrastination technique. it seemed a lot healthier than continual games of mindsweeper. and it didn't really feel like procrastinating because i was still on the computer and i was still typing so i was basically just taking a formal thinking break from academia.

now here i am, back home in new zealand, and well in need of some sort of procrastination... why not say hello?

firstly, procrastination is once more necessary because im once more back at university. this time in new zealand. and this time in the middle of a literature review assignment. my literature review was the hardest part of my masters thesis back in the day because:

literature that needs to be reviewed tends to be of the sort that is a) hard to read and b) not very interesting to read.

one day, if i write something significant, something that might be reviewed, i hope that whoever is doing the reviewing will smile and think a) this is easy to read and b) this is interesting to read.

that is my goal. that, and to finish this literature review today.

a couple more pictures of our wedding day...

saturday 17th february 2007

the countdown finished counting down and the sun rose to shine upon us out at north piha beach. a day without wind and without clouds, a day with family and with friends. eric and i are now happily married and plenty of photos from our special day can be found at:

www.bexanderic.com

thank you to all those that came and celebrated with us in person and thank you to all those who sent messages and cards and thoughts on the day. we could not have asked for a more precious wedding.

two weeks today i will have a new signature! i've been practising.

so much is going on right now and the timeline is short:

there's everyone arriving from north america in a week
there's the wedding in two weeks
there's the trip with everyone after the wedding for a week
there's enrolling in university which starts straight after everyone leaves
there's eric's permanent residency visa application process
there's our house-sitting plans

life is busy and i'm doing my best to see the lightest, funniest, calmest side of it...

two interesting facts about the above:

*i had my shortest/longest telephone conversation(s) this week when i was transferred to (insert large number here) different people at auckland university when trying to sort out the timetable clash that shouldn't exist but does...

to make me feel better? eat macdonalds happy meal for lunch and play with toy that makes cool noise.

*eric needs fingerprints for immigration purposes. we go to local police station. they will only take fingerprints if eric has done something wrong. we consider loitering. this is not "wrong" enough. only three places in auckland do fingerprints for immigration. we are in the zone for one particular police station that is on the other side of town (don't understand how the zoning scheme cuts across most of the city). they have only one person who can do the procedure (called putting erics finger on a stamp pad and then putting his finger on a card to record print). this person is semi-retired and only is available for a few hours on a wednesday afternoon. they are, therefore, booked up for a long time. second police station is not happy as we are not in the right zone but could squeeze us in "if they have to", but once again at an inconvenient time. third place is basically not in auckland and has a sneaky way of saying in the phone book it is in one far south suburb but is in fact in an even more further south suburb.

to make me feel better? well, really, when you explain it to someone it becomes too ridiculously funny that its impossible not to laugh. plus, there must be something cool to do in papakura so we will make a day of it and invent fun things to do in the car along the way.

rewind 2006:

i've always dreamt of going on that big roadtrip - the one where you have no job until you need one, the one where you don't really know where you are going until you are forced to look at a map, the one where you live each day as it comes until you realise you have no more tins of beans and have to get to a town with a shop...

and that's what eric and i did from january - october 2006.

and part way through eric proposed and i said yes and we set the date for february 17th 2007!

in october i headed to egypt to work on a dig and had one of the most incredible experiences of my life. i found a couple of excerpts from emails i wrote when i was there... bringing back images of life - the good and the ugly...

"at first we lost power - not the end of the world and it did come back after about 24 hours. for a time. it was down again yesterday. but then the septic tank got full so we needed to get a truck in to empty it. then the truck got stuck in the front yard spilling some of its contents... finally it made it up the drive only to dump the waste literally on the other side of the road. the stray dogs loved this of course and enjoyed coming back over to see us after having a play. this was repeated all day long so for that day the toilets were out of action. later on in the day the water mains cut out across the village. we were without water for 3 days. this caused so many people to get sick - we only had the turkish toilet but no water to clean it off with. there were girls throwing up and girls with bad diarreha so basically that toilet became offlimits pretty quickly. illness spreads like wildfire when theres no water. we do of course have a supply of mineral water for drinking but that didnt make too much of a difference. the water came back yesterday finally only to decide to break down again today. and then the power went down again when the truck trying to fix the water problem broke a line in the road. how much worse can it get? so many people are sick..."

"this afternoon im heading off to the biggest souq in cairo. its a crazy colourful place with so many different smells and sights. i love it there and am able to lose myself in the tiny alleyways of stalls. i have a way of closing out the world and not listening if i don't want to, and i can easily merge in and out of people, threading here and there, without paying attention to all the comments and calls of shopkeepers wanting to sell me their products. i actually find it relaxing, i love the sound of arabic, and i can almost escape the people despite the hundreds that line the way. "

i arrived home just before christmas and it took awhile for me to re-adjust to the western world where carpet and doors and real beds and no sand is normal...

2006 has finished, 2007 has begun...

check it out:

www.bexanderic.com

more to come...

living...