The Reynoldz

Hooray!
Going to spend the night tonight in our empty house!!

(This is a sign on our new road)

Happy Birthday!! We love you and miss you!










Again, I apologize for the blog delays... Crazy enough.. (and this is true) we seemed to have maxed out on our internet usage at our temp house.

In NZ the ISP providers charge by how much you use.. So when you get cable you have to buy a package.. 10GB, 20GB, ect.. all based on how much you download/upload.

When you go over you alotted size everything SLLOOWWWWS down to a speed worse than dial up... We are guessing that the house we are at now prob has a low usage package.

Because our high download/upload usage in the past couple weeks.. i.e. the girls singing happy birthday to Jeb, Eric playing online games, web cam calls and now Haidyn playing Webkinz.. (she needs to keep her beloved pony sent to us by grandma fed so needs to logon to do this).. we have managed to max out and have been terribly painfully slow...

I believe once you hit the max... they start charging a huge amount to keep our daily internet fix going.. if that is true.. then this blog is going to cost more than just the time.. (but you are all worth it)

It is a GREAT thing we only have 3 more days until we move into our house, then we can set up our internet so that we can download as much as possible to keep in touch with all of you!!

Just a little insight into our day... this morning we picked up our new "people mover"... We needed to get a car/airport shuttle because in 6 days Grandma Jo and Papa are going to be here. Also at the end of March my sister Gail is coming out with my awesome nieces and nephew (Dani, Faith, Erin and Matt) We needed to find a car that would seat 8 people.. which is not an easy task.. most people movers here seat 7 max.

Here are some photos of our sexy new family car... it is a Mazda MPV Coach... (just in case you were wondering =)

So another reason that it has been hard for us to post to the blog is...
We have been trying to organize another HUGE move in the states while we are sitting in NZ..

Our stuff in the states has been sitting in transit storage lockers in the middle of CA since May 2005...

We were paying about $159 per month at first.. this was increased to $259 a month.. and we just got notice that as of Jan 2007 it would now cost us about $600 per month.. OUCH!!!

We had to quickly decide what we were going to do with our junk before the storage fees put us in the poor house =)...

Eric's parents came to the rescue!!!!!... They drove a rented UHaul all the way to Cali from Montana and sorted out our stuff at the transit storage warehouse...

They kindly sent some things onto NZ (only to save us moola.. it is cheaper to ship to NZ from CA than Montana) and hauled the rest back to Montana.

They then unloaded all our junk into another storage facility.. but storage that is not as spendy and one that we can at least access when we are back in the states.

We could not have done this move without the help of Lloyd and Joanne!! Thank you so much!

Think about it..... It is hard enough to sort through your own "Junk" during a move.. Eric's folks had to sort through our semi-labeled boxes using an "itemized list" that was frantically put together when the stuff was packed and loaded many moons ago.. (so read not the greatest list, but better than nothing :)

Now for me this is one move that puts my mind at ease a bit. It is nice to know our stuff is safe and sound and in a place where we can actually access it at some point. (the Cali transit storage was a big warehouse where our things were loaded in storage lockers stacked on top of each other.. we could only access the stuff if we hired a crew to take a forklift into the warehouse to unload our storage lockers.)

It is also nice to have a few more "comfort" things from our stuff on their way out on a ship to NZ.

Reunited and it feels so good!!

Seems like January is the month of birthdays for special people in our lives... Today (well yesterday if you are in NZ) is our dear cousin/nephews 1st Birthday!


Happy Birthday Finn!


We sure do love you!

Hello Hello.. (and howdy to you my darling dad =)
I know... we have been a bit delinquent in updating as well as reading blogs.. I feel like I have missed big chunks of everyones lives since X-MAS...

the only excuse Eric and I have really.. is that we have just have been busy with non-computer things... and our computer set up in our temporary digs is not set up for the ease of downloading photos as quickly as we had had it in the past.. but we only have 15 more days and we will be moving into our NEW house!!!

I wanted to get a birthday wish out to Lisa on her big 40..
I am cheating a bit... I am posting it at 6:14pm on January 16th Pacific Standard Time!! (Not NZ time which is 3:17 on the 17th)

My mind is back in the states right now anyway and Lisa is my true "red white and blue" partner in crime down under..... so I think it totally counts!

Happy Birthday Lady - here is to the next 40+ years!!

CHEERS!

Well after Christmas, we headed down to the South Island to do some camping. These islands are bigger than you think. We concentrated out camping on just the teeny tiny northern tip of it. Mostly around Abel Tasman National Park. Looking on a map, it looks like we didn't make it very far from Wellington, but it is a different world. Because Wellington is on the south west point of the North Island, and Abel Tasman is on the north east point of the South Island. And it really makes a difference which side of an island you are on in the Pacific Ocean. While Wellington stayed pretty miserable for the whole time off, we enjoyed what is considered the sunniest part of New Zealand.


Here we are enjoying all our new camping stuff. New tent, hammock, stove, lamp, etc. etc. I believe Athea is napping in the tent in this picture which explains the calm serenity of the scene. We camped for seven days, broken up by four days of hotel.








Here is another picture of this rock. We did a nice long hike to get to this beach. The following picture of Haidyn overlooking the sheep pastures is part of the trail to this beach. This is a beach just west of the Farewell Spit which is at the very very northern point of the South Island. Oh, our girls do love to run around in the sand.











Jumping back to Christmas stuff, here is Athea with her new electric piano. Now I love Anna and all, but even she is starting to wonder where her head was when she bought this thing. It makes horrendous sounds. So, of course, Athea loves it and has a complete fit if anyone else touches the buttons, or tries to turn it off. It has six or so buttons which play whole songs. Hideous songs. Anna watched Athea one afternoon, mashing all the buttons together, and softly muttering "come on music, come on music..."

...need...to....get....real....piano......

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year! We had a wonderful time down in the south island. It is late, so i will throw up some pics and then call it a night!