Speeding through the year

Can someone explain to me how it got to be June tomorrow? Life continues apace, particularly since we didn't get raptured last week (disappointingly, my desk with its mountain of work was still there when I got back in on Monday morning...). Though apparently the countdown is now on until October, when we get to go through it all again!

Hockey is going well - though the game on Sunday was a teensy bit stressful, not the match itself, but getting there. Rather than it being at our local astroturf, we were playing at the national hockey stadium the other side of Wellington. Whilst we have played there before, this was the first time for me driving there. I knew roughly where I was going, and I'd looked it up on the map, but I am not one for keeping directions in my head. What I should have done was write out the instructions from Google, but I have a sat-nav, so, I thought, no need. Unfortunately the sat-nav decided that it was going to take an early holiday, and didn't even find a satellite until after I'd driven into Wellington and off the wrong junction of the motorway, onto a one way system, which wasn't labelled as such. I discovered this the hard way, turning round in a car park to try to get back onto the motorway, and seeing that I was turning into the path of oncoming traffic. Fortunately, this being Wellington on a Sunday morning, it was one car, still quite a way away from me, and I was able to pull up onto the pavement whilst I worked out what the heck I was going to do! The sat-nav glitched in and out of contact with the satellites, so I'd get an instruction, and then it would all disappear again. What I hadn't realised was that at some point it had decided that it wasn't going to take me to the stadium, but was instead going to head back towards the previous location we'd visited, most of the way back home! I realised this when I suddenly found myself back on the motorway, heading in the opposite direction, luckily just before I passed the last turn off for 8 km. However, already being 5 minutes late for the warm up, I might have been a tad stressed by this point! Reprogramming the sat-nav didn't take too long, and it gave me a couple of directions before dying completely, but those were sufficient to take me to a location I recognised, and from there I could muddle my way through, arriving with 10 minutes to spare. It takes me 8 minutes to put my goalie kit on...

So - last time I trust technology - I sent John out to the AA shop (he's on holiday this week) to pick up our free allocation of road maps that we get for being members! Hopefully my next journey will be slightly less stressful when we go back to good old fashioned drawings. On the plus side, we won 5-2...

Ooops...

I know, I know - it's been a few weeks - sorry! Things have been a little bit crazy recently, both at home and at work. Very long days at work + active social life = not a huge amount of time at home, and my brain hasn't been hugely active in order to get a blog post written...

Since I last posted, we have had another couple of friends come to stay. This was a lovely weekend, as I'd not seen my uni flatmate since 2002, far too long a time. We went back to the seals and also took a trip round Zealandia. We were treated to a gorgeous display of bellbirds, and I may have even caught some of their song on video (I haven't had a chance to get it onto the computer to see how good the sound was!) - I wasn't able to actually catch the *birds* on video as I think I need to practice a little bit on catching moving objects; I did get a lot of shots of empty branches and out of focus leaves!

I've also been having fun with hockey - we ended up finishing the initial round robin top of our grade (without letting a single goal in), so we have gone up to the next one. Sadly, we didn't win our first game in the higher grade, but it was very close (and should have been a draw, but I'm not allowed to criticise the ref's decision ;-) ), which gives us the confidence to know that we are playing at the right level, rather than potentially coming up a grade only to be knocked back down again at the end of the season.

We're enjoying the freedom that the new car is giving us; we have been out at friends' houses for the last two Saturdays for playing board games (I've got a new game which I'm really enjoying, a re-release of a game which I'd played with my cousins which I was a child; it's called Survive; Escape from Atlantis, and is great fun - as you get to attack other people's characters with sea monsters, sharks and whales, you can make silly noises as much as you like!), and have also been able to help another friend with his house move.

We're gearing up for our next orchestra concert - fortunately, I'm not having to do too much practice as I've already played two of the four pieces before (Slavonic Dances and L'Arlisienne), and the remaining two don't have too difficult a piece for the oboe. Which is a good thing, as I'm not getting that much time to play outside of rehearsals.