For work We had our Christmas celebration as a breakfast at a local cafe. Christmas was spent at Papamoa with Mum, Dad, Suzanne, Bevan and Nana. Christmas day at Bowentown with us and my cousins. The weather that weekend was fairly average- I only had the statutory holidays off. New years went to the Papamoa tavern and saw the Feelers and Zed- two of NZ's popular bands of the early 2000s. The Feelers were the headline act, but I went more to see Zed, as they had broken up a while back. I had seen the Feelers in London for free not so long ago, so it was almost sad having to pay to see them here. 
The middle weekend in January I made use of a birthday present from Adessa and went to Waitomo caves and went through the footwhistle cave after a nice lunch. The cave was good-interesting and well presented, but not too touristy. 
I had noticed when I looked at a map that the Waitomo caves road becomes Te Anga road, and I recalled that my great grandmother had lived there at one point, so on the trip home I did a big detour to check it out, as well as anything of interest on the way such as the natural bridge and the Marakopa waterfall which was huge and pretty cool.
The following week I managed to catch up with Campbell my workmate I worked with in London at the Crown Prosecution service. We had a couple of beers at home then had tea in town and finished off with a beer at a local pub called the Londoner, which seemed fitting. I was expecting it to be a 'London' pub in name only, but it turned out to be just like an east London pub.The next weekend I used another voucher to kayak along the Waikato river from Cambridge to the narrows.
That was quite cool- peaceful more than anything. once that was over I had to rush to my first rehearsal of Don Quixote of La Mancha at the Riverlea theatre.The next weekend was Waitangi weekend, and Christine, a girl I grew up with got married to her welsh boyfriend now husband. Therefore we had a weekend in west Auckland, I got to catch up with a couple of girls I'd travelled around the south island with, so that was good, and my family and I went out to Piha to check it out at sunset. Since I had hardly swam in the last 3 years I decided to have a quick dip. The wedding was great, they made a lot of choices that I liked as ideas for my own future wedding. On the way home we dropped mum and dad off at the airport to go to Sydney. The following weeks were fairly similar, a lot of don Quixote rehearsals with the occasional other thing for variety such as a travel night put on by Calder and Lawson- the travel agency I used to go to London. The other thing was an Irish ancestry research day at the society of genealogists in Auckland- mum and dad were going out fishing with one of their suppliers so we shared the ride, but meant I had less time. On the Sunday my mate Ron had his birthday and celebrated it the usual way- with a KFC party.In the following weeks I had a couple of interviews at our area office for a couple of jobs, and then I did two weeks on another team to cover someone. During this time we started performances of the play. In all it was good, we had pretty poor audience turn outs but admittedly it was competing with st Patrick's day and the balloon festival which were free events. Also I think with the economy and the price of the show people would be quite discerning with their cash.
I'm now just about to embark on an epic road trip... watch this space...
