Much news...

Well, this might not be quite as much of an update as I thought – I’d forgotten about doing it earlier in the evening, so it will have to be short or I’m going to be tired at work tomorrow!
So, what is there to talk about? Work first I guess… I started at my new job on Wednesday. The people there seem nice enough – it’s a really specialized sort of company so it ends up being a very internationalized workplace. A group of us went out for lunch on the first day, and my boss was the only New Zealander among the 6 of us. In terms of the work, I’ve spent the first 3 days trying to work out a little bit about their products before I can get my teeth into doing some real work for them. Hopefully I’ll be able to start contributing meaningfully soon!
What’s next… church I guess. The first week we went to an old inner-city church. The people were a friendly enough bunch, but the kids struggled a little – the service only started at 10:30, so they were getting cranky, ready for lunch by about the time the sermon started. Not having any other kids at the church didn’t help I guess. This week we decided to try somewhere different – a newish church in the outer suburbs. Again, people were friendly enough (always a good thing in a church!), they started at 10am rather than 10:30, and had a really fantastic crèche. The teaching wasn’t quite as good as last week (not as much meat to it!), but it’s hard to tell what it’s like from just one week. I’ve come to appreciate how important it is to make sure kids are looked after during church though – if they’re not, it makes it very very hard for the parents to stay there!
What else? Ah, that’s right. We had been getting a little depressed by the state of Hamilton’s house rental market – a number of cheap houses are around, but all of them seem to be horrible dumps. On Friday we went to look at a house in Chartwell which is about the same distance on the opposite side of the city from where we are now (have a look at Google maps if you want to know exactly where it is!). It turned out to be not too bad – certainly better than the others we’d looked at, so we’ve decided to take it. It’s a 4 bedroom house, so there’s enough room to house some visitors as well (hint hint!). The current tenants are moving out next weekend, which should tie in pretty well with when our container will be arriving. The only trouble is that Mel and the kids will be in Aus then, so I’ll have to do all the unpacking and tidying up myself.
Anyway, that’s a plenty long enough post for now – hopefully I’ll update our flickr page with some photos as well!