Before I left for my last trip to the US, I went to a school board meeting where a program called Super Kids was discussed. It’s a kids Christian program that wanted to use the House Of Learning (aka “library”) at our local primary school after school hours. I voiced my objection, asking why they would want to use the school when there was a perfectly good church and Sunday school one block away. The meeting ended with the board deciding to ask the program for more details.

Great news! The house in Colorado is under contract, they inspect tomorrow morning, and then hopefully it’s smooth sailing to closure. This is it: if it falls through, I’m renting it out. But if it sells (even if for much less than we were hoping to get) it’s the end of monthly nightmares (the financial monthly nightmares, anyway!) for us.

Kids are doing great. Tonight Jenine had a meeting of the preschool board, so I was Daddy alone. We played poker with a bag of the 10c coins that New Zealand is removing from circulation. Raley’s getting the hang of how much you should bid for each type of hand—it’s amazing to see her able to identify pairs and threes-of-a-kind by herself now, because a year ago she was struggling to do that. Now she’s figuring out when to bet 2 and when to bet 4. William’s just passed that, and has been taught bluffing by his grandpa. He’s going to be dangerous. I look forward to the day when his Uncle Jon teaches him card counting and takes him to Vegas.

Great news! The house in Colorado is under contract, they inspect tomorrow morning, and then hopefully it’s smooth sailing to closure. This is it: if it falls through, I’m renting it out. But if it sells (even if for much less than we were hoping to get) it’s the end of monthly nightmares (the financial monthly nightmares, anyway!) for us.

Kids are doing great. Tonight Jenine had a meeting of the preschool board, so I was Daddy alone. We played poker with a bag of the 10c coins that New Zealand is removing from circulation. Raley’s getting the hang of how much you should bid for each type of hand—it’s amazing to see her able to identify pairs and threes-of-a-kind by herself now, because a year ago she was struggling to do that. Now she’s figuring out when to bet 2 and when to bet 4. William’s just passed that, and has been taught bluffing by his grandpa. He’s going to be dangerous. I look forward to the day when his Uncle Jon teaches him card counting and takes him to Vegas.

Back in New Zealand after nearly three months away. What a lot of culture shock there was, both in leaving and returning.

Leaving: it’s so easy to return to the US, yet so hard. The traffic was incredible: it takes as long for us to get from our US house to Old Town Fort Collins as it takes us to get from our NZ house to Warkworth. The difference is that one is 5 miles away, the other 20km.

In the past month or more I’ve been working hard on making sure William had a good experience at school. I talked to his teachers to make sure that they were keeping their eyes open for bullying (and to ensure that they knew I had very high standards for them and for the school). I got involved in the schoool board’s charter discussion, doing the bulk of the writing of the new vision and mission statements. And I spent a lot of time at the school.

Today was unsatisfactory. I worked a solid 8 hours, packed in the email, made a coworker laugh, and made significant progress towards a goal. So why, at the end, do I feel blah? I was so knackered after the day of full on email and phone calls that I had no energy for the kids. And I realized, as I was doing the dishes, that a day when I don’t connect with the kids, is a day that I feel I’ve wasted.

We took William out of school for the day, drove down to Auckland, and went to Kelly Tarlton’s World (like the Monterey Aquarium) and then to a buffet for lunch. Very luxurious, but you have to be on the ball when it’s the missus’s birthday and Valentine’s Day. The kids had fun, but all that driving (90m down, 90m back) took it out of them.

I realize it’s been a while since I blogged. We had a bit of family drama over Christmas, when Dad’s business burned down in Colorado. Lots of stress there, and ongoing visits to America for Dad to pick up the pieces. I’ve had to think hard about what I want to do in August when I stop working on conferences fulltime–I may have a lot of dependents!

It’s been an adventurous week, weather-wise. Being away for so long, I’d forgotten the misty mornings that are classic New Zealand fare. We had a front parked over us for four or five days, with what the weather forecasters discreetly refer to as “scattered showers” but which really means occasional heavy rain and light spitting the rest of the time. Useless for drying laundry, but not an impediment to getting out and about.

I’m reading Russell Brown’s collection of other people’s essays, Great New Zealand Argument, and at the same time I’m reading The Nationbuilders by Brian Easton. Both tackle the subject of what it means to be a New Zealander. I’m reading them in bite size pieces: Easton’s in the bedroom and Brown’s in the bathroom. Uh, so to speak.

They’re fascinating. Lots of things I’d never thought about, such as the fact that we’re the only country where our national day is always (and has been since the beginning) an occasion to question why we even have a national day, whether it means anything, what we might do instead, and what we’d celebrate if we had such a day. And also things I’d always wanted to know, like who Bill Sutch was.

It’s been hard to balance life and work here on the other side of the world. Some days the work consumes me and I ignore family (bad Dad!) and other days I’m burnt out and can’t face the keyboard. I dug in a garden last weekend with my uncle Les and that made me feel like I was doing something constructive, with a purpose. Thinking in timescales longer than a week or a month is oddly reassuring, and I’m slowly realizing that I didn’t do this at the other places I’ve lived.