The offspring had their very first school sports day this week. They were fairly informal days held at the school field for about two hours, nothing like the competitive races of my childhood. They consisted of a couple of sprints and novelty races.

Cheryn and Rachel inherited Gillians speedy genes and both won their sections. I'm not sure whether Gill and I were more surprised in their abilities than the girls.

This is certainly one of the advantages of sending the kids to school compared with homeschooling them. I'm glad they had the chance for both kinds of education and will probably be able to decide better for their own children. Sharon received her acceptance letter for the local high school, I'm horrified at the thought of my 11 year old girl going to high school with a bunch of 17 and 18 year old boys.

I serve as the young men's president here at church. I taught the Young Men about Capt. Moroni and Amalickiah at church today. I found it really interesting to see the comparison between the two men - one lusted after power and used fraud, deceit and murder to get it, the other spent his life defending liberty and justice without thought of power or reward. I imagine that I got more out of the lesson than the guys did, they were quite excited about the intrigue and plottings but I'm not sure that anything sank in.

Gill and I watched four DVDs this weekend - sitting in bed watching on my laptop. We probably won't do this too often as the price of hiring movies seems more expensive than it is worth - especially when you compare to hiring them back in SA. I'm afraid I still do currency conversions in my head before buying everything - which might explain why I only have three pairs of pants!

We've had a couple of people wandering around our backyard lately, owners of the property surveyors etc I don't know how much longer we will be able to stay here because I understand that they are going to tear down the whole block and build a townhouse complex. Although the yard is big (we normally have 10 to 12 local kids playing soccer with ours in the front) the house is comfortable and spacious. The massive property inflation coupled with the weak exchange rate from South Africa means that although we had five houses there the mortgage on one house here (big enough for all of us) is about a third more than the average wage.

I expect to launch my business in about two weeks. it's been a real fun learning experience building an Internet based business, I've had software written for me, designed and put up websites and discovered new skills in putting it all together.

One of the things I learned was to use voice recognition software. I'm sitting here with a microphone in front of my mouth and speaking to the computer, the software translates into text saving me from having to type in. Now I type really fast, but this is even faster. It's a good tool to have.

Cheers

Pete

My brother James visited us for the week. How nice it was to see him again. It would have been even better if we had his family too but that couldn't happen (this time). James and I drove all over the country (well it is pretty tiny) looking at the tourist things - we went to Giant's Causeway and Marble Arch Caves. I found them both fascinating because of my interest in geology.

I've been working as Donovan's delivery boy for the last two weeks. The work is not taxing and it's nice to see the country side as I drive around dropping off stuff.

Can you imagine how much giggling eight 11 year old girls can do in one evening? Cheryn's birthday party sleepover was really interesting to watch - half girl/half women - one moment running around playing catch in the sunny evening and the next phoning boys and hanging up.

Zeek seems to be joining the locals - he has a soccer shirt and the rest of the kit and seems to have a ball surgically joined to his foot most of the time. I fear that he has a long way to go to catch up with some of the kids here who can do amazing things when they're only about twice the height of the ball.