16/10/2000

Well, my bunch of devoted overseas followers is getting smaller! (ok, ok,
I know I'm forcing you to read this ;-)

From the big world wide news we have the headline "Orphan has a rough
start to life". It seems a baby donkey was born some time during Saturday
night on the dark lonely hills of Christian Youth Camps at Ngaruawahia in
New Zealand. By time Cherie, Jeremy & me got to it, the mother was in a
bad way with bleeding etc. The baby was soo cute (ok well not as cute as
Alana but still). It wasn't that the
mother was unfit to be a mother, it was just that she was unfit - well
dead actually. Needless to say, I was more than a little late to church.
We got her drinking in the afternoon and then gave her to some people that
had been in camp & offered to look after her. I'm glad I didn't have the 2
hourly-during-the-night shift to feed the 'cute little thing'. Why do
things like this always happen when Mum & Dad are on holiday!
Ok, ok on to the real news.

Sport:
Of course rugby is the big game so the Semi Finals. The first game was
Friday night, Auckland vs Wellington. It was a good game & quite close
until towards the end, with Wellington winning comfortably (our work
Internet connection is down so I can't check the score right now, I'll
guess around 46-24, not bad it was actually 48-23). The second semi was
Canterbury vs Taranaki and while we were all hoping for a Taranaki upset,
Canterbury did win the game (31-23). Now that makes for an interesting
final since Wellington have beaten Canterbury a few times recently.
About the only other thing worth mentioning is that apparently some New
Zealand kid (18 yr old Jeremy Yates) beat all the international cyclists
in some world champs - like the Radio announcer said, 'where was he at the
Olympics' !! (new note - it was actually the junior men's road race ...)
Also now that the net's back up, I've found out the NZ won the ICC
Knockout Trophy last night beating India! India started off with 141 for
the first wicket off the first 26 overs. Then for NZ we lost early wickets
until Chris Cairns (knee injury) and Chris Harris (back injury) stepped up
to bat and got 102 not out and 46 respectively - hmm I should have watched
it!

In other news, the weather was pretty bad last week, this was good of
course - very good. I went skiing on Saturday with Martyn from work. The
weather was perfect and the morning snow was incredible. It was heaps
better than last time I went and there weren't that many people. We skiied
the valley (with excursions out to the Far West T-bar) until the afternoon
when it got a bit slushy, and then when we thought we were dead we had one
last ski down the gut (Knoll Ridge) which turned into 3 or 4 runs because
it was just sooo good :-)

Briefly with other things... Maori are claiming gas & petroleum resources,
rugby fans abused the police trying to clean up an accident because they
were late for the NPC semi final, the Lord of the Rings filming has
reached Twizel, and National has overtaken Labour in the latest poll.

So that will have to do for this week, I hope everything is going well.
Incidentally Stefan & Rodney, make sure you bug the young stud David
(dhebbend@ihug.co.nz) to get his ball photos onto the Internet so you can
have a look ;-)

cu8lr

D^