4 Weeks, kinda surprising to realise I've now been working full time for 4 weeks up here and that in a couple of days I'll have spent my first full month up here. Hamilton's winter seems to finely have hit if you call ~14c and rain winter, it seems to have an annoying habit of switching between sunshine and rainstorms at a rapid pace. There will be a gap in the clouds for 15mins with plenty of sunshine every where and then boom, it's pouring like crazy and will continue to do so for 30-40mins before you get another bunch of sunshine for 15-30mins, repeat ad infinitum. Makes for annoying biking weather when you live a 20-30min ride away from work, which means you end up wearing wet weather gear while biking home directly into the blazing sun.
Have also moved into a flat, it's a bit of a student flat, 3 other christian guys 20-21 which takes some adjusting too (they all go to a New life style church as well), it's about 4k's closer to work than where I was boarding which is nice cutting, 15mins or so off my bike to work. Should be a reasonable place to stay until around Christmas/NY at which point I should hopefully have gotten to know a few people and can look at finding a better flat.
Work is okay, hardly the most exciting job but that's to be expected for a testing lab, hopefully at some point I'll be able to work on some of the R&D stuff they do there as well as the standard testing stuff. Apparently things will get a little crazy once the calving season starts off and every second farmer wants us to test his calves. The people are interesting, in the group where I work they're mainly gals, 4 or 5 guys in a team of ~24.
Apart from work not been doing a lot, hung out with Brehaut a bit (his flat is a few min walk away), seen Ruth once, read a book or two, watched anime, and SF (brehaut's flatmates hold a SciFi night during the week which is rather awesome!) and played a fair bit of Mass Effect. Also tried playing around with a recent acquisition (a new camera), but Hamilton's apparent idea of a winter has put a dampener on that, quite literally. Have visited a few churches, (1 bapo, Flatmates, and a Brethen (by far the best)) still got to visit B&R's church and the local baptist which is hopefully better than the previous one I looked at. Which was very excited about contributing ~18% of it's budget to missions, which is rather pathetic compared to Westchurch's 70%+ to missions/community, still I may be doing them a disservice possibly they contribute more to local community stuff. Of course seeing I'm not exactly sure that missions, is what we should really be spending money on rather than actively helping people, I'm not sure why it annoyed me so much. Other than possibly I think that missions spending is a sign of a health church that has a decent focus rather than one that's more interested in a big building etc.
Any way if you made sense of all that and are still reading I'm impressed, not sure when I'll next be back in Chch, maybe Christmas/NY depending on what my parents are doing. In the mean time though I'm planning to visit Auckland, New Plymouth and Tauranga to see relatives, though the lack of long weekends in the second half of the year is rather annoying!
Any way hope your all doing well.
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