Sechs Monate

We celebrate the sixth mensiversary and the milestone of half-anniversary, which we call the Sechs Monate to-day on Wednesday 25 June 2014.

At midnight to-night, we will remember 25/26th December 2013, exactly six months ago, when we climbed off the Air New Zealand flight which had brought us to Wellington on that memorable Christmas Day in the Sky from Sydney.

 
(Above): Cape Town, South Africa… six months ago….The last snap of the scene outside our eastern verandah at Dolphin Beach, just before leaving for the airport and the journey to Sydney via Johannesburg. Five minutes later, we closed the door on that chapter of our lives… and….

(Above): …. Reikorangi, New Zealand today …. six months seems like just yesterday, but also a surreal lifetime ago… Its an entirely different attitude in an entirely different time-zone…

150 Days

Isn’t it amazing how time flies when you’re not paying attention? It has now been 155 days since we left Johannesburg on Christmas Eve. We’ve seen summer and autumn and are standing on the brink of winter, our fifth mensiversary, if you will.

Searching through my pictures for an appropriate image to associate with this subject, I happened to find this picture. It was taken during the second half of January 2011 and it shows our waking/sleeping adjusted hours timetable based on my planned JAC project, a highly-successful (in my opinion) program to maximise one’s acclimatisation to adjusting to vastly differing time-zones over a short period of time.

(Above): The last few days of the JAC project, with departure from Cape Town on holiday to New Zealand on 2 February 2011. The times in brackets refer to JAC-time, for Sunday 31 January, we went to bed at 1:30pm (as the neighbours were preparing to have lunch) and we were due to wake up that evening at 9:30pm to start our Monday morning. It sounded strange, but worked out perfectly well.

Our Second Mensiversary

MEN-SI-VER-SA-RY (mèn´se-vûr´se-rê) noun
1. The monthly recurring date of a past event, especially one of historical, national, or personal importance: a first date mensiversary;
2. A celebration commemorating such a date. From Latin: mensis, month + versus, past participle of vertere, to turn.

Two months ago to the day, we arrived in New Zealand from Cape Town on an Air New Zealand flight just on midnight Christmas 2013. That’s still a point of contention, as I believe that we officially touched New Zealand, so to speak, just after 00:00 on 26th December, yet the passport control officers had not yet changed their date stamp from 25th to the 26th. Today is therefore our second mensiversary of our arrival here. How time flies.

Before someone starts pointing out the discrepancy of my statements versus the posting dates of my blogs: please note that I registered this blog in its old format in Cape Town (SAST = UTC+2 hours), and have continued with the same page in Reikorangi (NZDT = UTC+13 hrs – summer daylight-saving time). Therefore the orange-gold date (which is automatically generated) which you see at the top of the post (see example below) refers to Cape Town time and is generally a day behind the actual post date.

NZST (the standard time UTC+12 hours) starts at 3:00am  on Sunday 6 April 2014 and lasts until 3:00am on Sunday 28 September 2014.

Some highlights during the two months include the following (hyperlinks to the specific blogs are indicated in the orange-gold colour.

2nd January 2014: Visited Otaki Forks park.

7th January 2014: Visited St Andrew’s in Reikorangi. (must still go inside as well)

12th January 2014: Visited the Lavender Farm at Te Horo, near Otaki

19th January 2014: Attended the A.P. & I. show at Levin.

20th January 2014: As a taste of her hospitality, Mother Earth sampled us with a short Magnitude 6.2 earthquake centred at nearby Eketahuna at 3:50pm on Monday 20 January (Wellington provincial holiday).

25th January 2014: Visit the Waikanae home gardens show, hosted by Waikanae Lions.

20th February 2014: A pleasant walk in the Kaitawa Scenic Reserve