Sunday, 20 February 2005

Dundee: 12:04 p.m., PST

New pictures. As always, they are posted to The Big Trip picture index page.

Allow me to take a moment to discuss conventions for dating these pictures. Let's say Dawn takes a photo at 1:30 p.m. It's Sunday, February 20th, NZDT (New Zealand Daylight Time). Then she resizes it for her slow dial-up email, creating a new file at 4:30 p.m. After dinner, when the phone is free, she logs on and sends it to me at 9:30 p.m. It's spooled into my Web host's mail server (which is down in California) sometime after midnight, PST. The "next day" (which is also Sunday, February 20th) I download my email at 7:30 a.m. PST. I create a thumbnail and an HTML file to display the photos at 11:30 a.m. I post it at 12:10 p.m.

Now: What time do I label the picture? What day do I assign for them? When I get the photo? When I post it? When it was taken? When it was resized (remember, that creates a new file with a new file time)? Experienced digital photographers will suggest reading the EXIF data; well it's blank.

The point of all this is not to bore (I have plenty of other pages for that) but to suggest you take such concepts as "date" and "time" with a big grain of salt. Usually the dates of the photos represent when I got them. But maybe it's when I posted them. Look at the picture: Is it day, or night? Now remember, it's summer in New Zealand. So you know now when it was taken: A summer's day in New Zealand.

Enough of that foolishness. Let's move on to our travelers. As you know, they have been having a rough time of it:
We all rolled out of bed at different times. There were a variety of cereals, crumpets, fresh pineapple and warm apple sauce to greet us. Dad and Elizabeth went to the beach for a swim.
I only hope they can keep their chins up.

Even in paradise, though, the responsibilities of parenting remain:
It should be said that every time I say someone went to the beach this also means that I had to go oversee the finding of swimwear, towel, floaty and most importantly (and most time consuming) the application of the sunblock. Sunblocking seems to take forever.
The tasks of parenting can't be ignored. Unless, of course, the parent is seven thousand miles away. Okay, enough of my stupidity. Let's just read what Dawn had to say:
When they got back (short swim, it was too rough for Liz) they got dressed (I put Elizabeth in a beautiful new dress that Mom had gotten for her, sunflowers, see the attached pictures), had breakfast and then everyone decided that they were going to walk down to the end of the beach. We waded across the estuary. It was a bit foamy because the waves were so high last night that they had pushed a big sandbank up in front of the outlet and it was all backed up.

The waves were bigger than I had seen them. Lots of people out body surfing and enjoying the waves. Liz managed to stay dry on the walk down the beach. She was having a lot of fun collecting crushed shell sand and the occasional shell that had escaped the waves. We met Derek, Kacie and Aundine, they had left about 5 minutes before us, after they had turned around to come back. Mom caught up with us - she left 5 minutes after us. She kept on going to the store in Hahei to get milk, cream and fresh vegetables.

The walk back was nice. I held Aundine's hand on one side and Kacie on the other. She made it about half way back before needing to be picked up. She really likes the water. Someone else loves the water and that is Elizabeth. Despite the long sunflower dress. She inched further and further out into the surf. I took some great pictures of her. I yelled at her a lot to get out of the water but she didn't pay any attention. To be fair she probably didn't hear half the time.
Back at the bach, things settled down to a familiar, Vashon-like pace:
Aundine went down for her nap. I volunteered to babysit while Derek, Kacie, Dad and Emily went back to the beach and boogie boarded. Elizabeth and I spent the time working on some of her homework projects. We cut, pasted, wrote and colored...Lunch as everyone trickled in. Some had cornbeef sandwiches, some PB and J, some left over venison hamburger patties.
For those unaware, New Zealand has a thriving deer farming industry. Venison is a common meat at the butcher's.
I have been playing peek-a-boo with [Aundine] over the computer monitor. She's a real cutie. I am so glad that we have this time together so she gets to know us.

Ahhh... Several hours later...I have the house to myself for a while. Dad went golfing and everyone else has headed for the beach. Derek took a shovel so he could dig out the estuary and they also took the boogie boards. Apparently Emily is the perfect body type for it. Long and light, she can come in all the way to the beach on one wave. I may go down later with the video cam - maybe not though. It is so quiet. It is also pretty hot and I am thinking that the nice cool house sounds pretty good.
O, intrepid travelers! Our prayers go with you...