double car trouble

so our vehicular relations have taken a turn for the worse recently. on wednesday night our car died. muchos kaputos. it had a dodgy 'big end' (I so didn't know cars had those) but we were told it might keep going as much as 10,000kms... in this case it managed about 100 and rattled to a limping death in the middle of the country side 20 minutes from methven. so that's a complete loss. I wasn't too attached to it, it was navy blue afterall, but a change of luck buying 2nd hand cars would be nice!

my other wee predicament came in the form of a letter from bromley county court saying I owed GBP1,800 for damages in the accident I had last may when my car got written off. I happened to phone my useless insurance company and profoundly useless lawyers the previous night, who'd told me the case had been closed in january. so it turms out as I was not in the uk and there were no witnesses, my lawyers decided to accept responsibility for the accident on my behalf meaning my insurers had to pay the other persons above expenses, which they did, only the courts haven't been informed so in about 2 weeks time if it's not sorted out I get a county court judgement in my name!! my mum's on the case, and mrs A. doesn't settle for any nonsense, but this whole thing is ridiculous as the other driver didn't even include the lights on her accident diagram she reckoned were green when she went through them and hit me! this is my first brush with lawyers, but I don't think they could have been more useless, in fact they might has well have been working for the other side!

on the up side we get to try and find a funky old car for me, cars are quite cheap here and I don't think I have to tell NZ insurers about UK insurance claims, so it could be a lot worse :)

public holiday strangeness...

no adverts on tele on public holidays. wierd. it's only been 6 months since the BBC, but I never realised quite how much I did in the adverts til now.

check out my art site which I've finally managed to get some pics onto...

autumn colours



autumn is here and the colours are just gorgeous. we had a week of grey english weather and now it's bright, fresh and sunny every day. people are big into japanese acer's here so the colors start really early, but now all the other deciduous plants are following suite and you can walk along the pavement kicking up leaves as you go.



this is one of our neighbours - the pale eyed llama. I've been having the odd realisation that I'm now pootling around doing my 'everday life' on the other side of the world. life feels quite normal here, but at the same time so odd that most of the people and places we know couldn't be further away from us.



so we only have 2 months left in methven. it's pretty wierd to think we'll be moving on in 8 weeks. there have been lots of options but we're most strongly drawn to Queenstown. the dropzone there only takes course graduates and makes sure you rotate round all dropzone jobs before progressing onto camera man. also there are many other good reasons - mountains, huge lake, mountain biking, kayaking, snow boarding, tramping, late night cafe's, a bigger town, keeping all our nz accumulated possesions and even a hair colourist I know!



well, we have 4 days off for easter weekend and we're taking a wee trip in our camper to the bank's peninsula. it's a volcanic area with biggish hills and bays/harbours made by eruptions blowing out the land mass. we have it on good account that it's gorgeous so let's hope it and the weather meets up to expectations!

I like wearing my fringe with bits of hair out of place. other people always want to put them back.
:)