Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Family Update

A few pictures of the family





















Friday, September 26, 2014

Treasure Hunt Roundup

Life sure does creep by when you are having such fun.
I still can't believe it can take so long just to round up 21 pictures, I mean we had 3 months to find them, what took us all so long?
I managed to find 21 items, however I did have to use both substitutes as I was unable to find 2 of the main items.

While I would love to give you a run down of all of my pictures, I haven't been blogging about anything else over the last 3 months so all my posts are about the treasure hunt, so please feel free to scroll through my last few posts to see my finds.
However I will recap over a few items.

The easiest to find:

That would be 8 - a tattoo because I have a tattoo so I just took a picture of myself!


The hardest to find:

That would be 20 - a bus with a picture on the side I thought this would be an easy one to find but alas it evaded me for sometime as we seem to have gotten rid of all the buses in Hamilton with pictures on the side, that is until I spied just 2 buses around town and then had to keep an eye out for them to gain a quick shot!


The one I knew I would never find!:

That would be 14 - a parade & 15 - a juggler!
We're in winter here and parades just aren't a happening thing at this time of the year. I am sure I could have thought outside of the square like some people and found a parade in another way, but alas no!
As for a juggler, well same sort of thing, without getting a family member to perform the trick for me, when I really wanted to find a juggler rather than create one, I just knew the chances of coming across one during winter was very low.

My favorite to find:

Has to be 18 - a waterfall we had such an awesome family day out to the waterfall. Due to getting lost on the way we ended up having a fish and chip lunch at the beach side town just a little further up the road and then retracing our steps to find the said waterfall, and believe me it was worth the find.



The one that I was surprised to find:

That would be 12 - a mascot I really didn't think I would find anything for this as I just haven't seen mascots for things around.


I hope you all had a great time over the last 3 months, finding all of Rinda's list. I am so grateful to Rinda for hosting this wonderful event yet again. I am looking forward to next year already and we still have 9 months to wait!

Monday, September 22, 2014

15 - A juggler

Substitute 15 - A birdhouse

Again one that I had a pretty fair chance of knowing that it was going to be against the odds if I managed to find this one during the hunt.
I discovered the bird house in a friends garden a few weeks ago. I explained that I was looking for one and they happily agreed for me to photograph it whenever I needed it, well today I snuck round to steal a shot of it and I managed until just as I was returning to the car the husband came round the corner, he laughed when he heard I was trying to be sneaky!


10 - a photo bomb

Without getting the boys to crash someone else's picture I was never sure how this one would go down!
I thought I might have achieved it quite early on in the hunt but was not sure so left it until the end to submit my picture as I wanted to be sure.

Yesterday on our drive back from a judo tournament I was messing around with the camera in the car and Ben happily climbed into my shot of myself!


My original picture was going to be the one I took of Ben that Alex decided he just had to be a part of!



Sunday, September 21, 2014

14 - A Parade

Substitute 14 - a hot air balloon
I knew I was never going to achieve this one during the whole hunt, I didn't want to be a defeatist, it is just that due to being winter the chances of finding a parade was about 1%.
I never gave up and thus the reason I have only just submitted a substitute because I wanted to be absolutely certain.
I actually managed to find the hot air balloon very early on in the hunt one Saturday morning whilst at soccer with my son, so it has been saved in the hunt box for that just in case need.

Well that just in case need is here:


Saturday, September 20, 2014

20 - A picture of yourself with something that represents the current season

I am one of those lucky people who get to do the summertime hunt in winter.
Makes for some interesting finds when we are looking for things that are in abundance in summer and not so much winter, one year we had to find a bride, well for the life of me I never came across one in the whole time cause we don't have brides outside during that time, but that doesn't mean I give up, just cause it is winter still means things are out there you just have to be creative.

I give you a picture of me in my winter coat with a nice cosy scarf and of course my sunglasses because NZ winters are still very sunny, thus the reason why I could never go back to England, just too darn cold!


Friday, September 19, 2014

20 - A bus with a picture on the side

Do you know it turns out that in Hamilton we don't have pictures on the side of our buses!
I was pretty sure we did and I do remember seeing them, but however someone in their ultimate wisdom decided last year that all buses would now been plain and have just the bus company logo on the side....how boring!

I did finally manage to see a bus round town with a picture on the side and realised that in fact we had all of 2 buses with pictures on that visited into town once every hour!
I even managed to find out where the bus passed through town but never seemed to be hanging around the bus stop at the right time.
So imagine my surprise to come up beside it at the lights on wet morning.
I have never got the camera out so fast to grab a candid shot before the lights changed colour.

It may not be the greatest picture but it is a bus with pictures on the side so I don't care!


Thursday, September 18, 2014

18 - A Waterfall

From the moment the list came out in June, I knew where I was getting this picture from.
It just took me more or less the whole hunt time to get the family organised to take a day trip to see the falls, although now we have been I am so glad we did.
It was spectacular.



Wednesday, September 17, 2014

13 - A sunrise

This has been the one I have not been looking forward to, well with one or 2 others but this one really meant you had to be devoted to the hunt. I mean how many of us are routinely up at the crack of dawn with the camera in hand?

Turns out the 1 day I really needed some sleep I was awake at 5am and managed to stay in bed till 5.30 and then that was it, took sunrise picture, put washing in the machine and generally got on with the day.



Unfortunately it was also the day we were travelling to Auckland to see a show so made it to bed at 2am and felt like I had been up for days let alone hours!

12 - A mascot

Another little picture that I thought I would struggle with, seems NZ is not big on mascots for things.
I sat and went through all the products I could think of and tried to think of the mascot for it and there was nothing that I could come up with that was easy to find.

Then one day we were in the local shopping mall and they were advertising the up coming school holidays and the fun programme they had with shows and activities for the kids to enjoy whilst their parents shopped.
I quickly grabbed my phone and took a picture of the boys with the mascot.

This was great for posting to the Facebook page but not so great for posting on here, see I may use my phone to take pictures and yes I know how to upload them to FB or Instagram from my phone but I has no idea how to get them off my phone and actually loaded into blogger as a picture!

By pure mistake I happen to discover that all the pictures were being saved in an area of my gmail account and so with a little adventure of discovery I have found where a copy of my pictures are being stored online and hey presto I have a copy to upload to blogger, yea me.


Tuesday, September 16, 2014

11 - A horn

I tried, oh man did I try to get something more creative than the horn in the car!
I watched all the animals whenever we went anywhere, I did see a sign with an interesting looking animal with horns on it and made a mental note to get a picture on our return trip but we ended up taking a different route so I missed out!


Monday, September 15, 2014

6 - An urban street

I was never actually too sure as to what was required for this picture?
I took a picture of the street but it seemed so plain and boring, sure I needed something a little more exciting, but here it is anyway.


Saturday, August 16, 2014

9 - A Bakery

When my son saw the list of items the first time, he immediately told me where to find the bakery.
Thought it was so cute he knew what we were looking for however I would have loved an oldy rustic charmed bakery.

Seems I am beginning to find fault with the town I live in and that is that they are making it all too modern and getting rid of the old charm that is the history of the place.
Everywhere you look there is new building work being done and it is ultra modern and suave looking, pristine lines and clinical looking, no character or charm!

The Bakery round the corner is the same , it is not a small locally owned place it is part of a bigger world wide chain, so what you get in one is exactly what you get in a place the same in another town or country.
Whilst some people love that type of certainty I also love the small locally owned places that serve their own creations with flavour and love.




Thursday, August 14, 2014

1 - A Sign Welcoming People to Your Home Town

I am loving all the signs I am seeing during this hunt that other people are posting, their town really knows how to welcome people in.
You know you have entered the town as there is a lovely large display, creation sign to welcome you.

Seems we are not one of those towns, in fact if you come from the North there is no sign at all!
From the South then yes there is a sign but you could be mistaken for thinking it was an advert on the side of the road....


Yes we have the most boring of boring billboard signs welcoming our visitors to our town!
Ok we are lucky in that we have a sign thanking them for visiting but it is just the other side of the billboard!


Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Hunt Failure

I know I still have pictures to find, I have not finished the list just yet, but I am not worried as we have until middle of September to complete the hunt.

1 that is throwing me a little is 20 - a bus with a picture on the side.

I have found buses all over town with pictures on the back but not on the side, seems they have stopped doing that type of advertising on our buses! We just have plain boring buses around town!


There are just 2 buses in town that have pictures on the side of them and I am going to have to get creative and find the bus timetables online and found out what time they are in the local downtown bus depot, then I am going to have to scout the place at that time to secure my picture.

Again it is going to come back to that saying I pull out every year....

"But your honour, it was the power of the scavenger hunt I was doing, it does obsessive things to your brain and body during the months of June thru September!"

I am sure that is the excuse I would have used the other day if caught loitering around the bus station when I was trying to find a bus with a picture on the side! But then most people loiter around the station as that is what you do when waiting for a bus to arrive...loiter!

Sunday, August 10, 2014

16 - A sign in a Language Other than English

And again the gardens are part of the hunt!
As they are a prime tourist destination here in Hamilton then I knew I would find a sign in another language there.
But I didn't, well I did, but only just.
I wandered all around checking the car park, the entrance area, the fountain area that leads to all the gardens, I looked in some of the gardens thinking there may be signs explaining things about the gardens, I even checked in the pavilion but nothing!

In fact it has made me start to really look around at all my local areas to see exactly what signs I can find that are not in English and I am shocked at the lack of them.
New Zealand talks all the time about the importance of Maori and their inheritance and belonging to this country but suddenly I realised there is nothing in Maori written around in everyday life.

The only sign I did actually find was on the window of the visitors centre in the gardens.
It was welcoming you to the gardens and was written in several different languages but it certainly wasn't the clearest most convenient sign I had come across!


Friday, August 08, 2014

4 - A Group of Tourists

Once more the local gardens play a huge part in the challenge.
There are always tourists roaming around these gardens, I think it is on all local tour guide itineraries!

However on the day I was there I didn't find too many! Apart from this small group being lead around by the guy, not sure what they were looking at up the tree but it seemed interesting enough to them.



Wednesday, August 06, 2014

19 - A Public Garden

This one for me is so easy, we are very lucky to have some amazing gardens here in Hamilton.
I know them well as it is the venue we chose for our wedding 6 years ago.

They are forever changing as the seasons go by and there is always something to look at.
I give you the Italian Garden, which is actually my favorite of the lot.


Sunday, July 27, 2014

Why do you Blog?

I am still ever conscious of the fact that I haven't really blogged much this whole year!
Does it bother me? Yes a little.
If so then why aren't I blogging much? I really don't know!

Seems I went off line after my op last year and when I finally found my feet again it was just as our world came crashing back down with news of my husbands imminent operation.

Blogging is always in the back of my head but just not as much as it use to be.
I have been looking at all the blogs I follow and looking to see what they blog about. News, current affairs, life, pictures, children, craft to name a few.

It made me take a look back through my blog to see what I had been blogging about?
Turns out it was all about family, mainly because I started my blog to keep my parents and extended relatives in foreign lands (or was that that I was in the foreign land and they were at home?) informed of how the boys were growing and what we had been up to.

I then realised that because of blogging I always had the camera with me. I was always taking pictures. I captured everything we were doing just on the off chance there might be something I wanted to blog about.

So with taking time out in the last almost a year, I have come to realise 1 major thing......?
I don't have my camera with me nearly as much and I think I am missing out on capturing what is going on in my boys life!

I have come to realise also that maybe I was blogging as a way to keep my boys childhood as a vivid memory, something that they can look back on and remember.
Maybe I need to change my focus on why I am blogging and look at it from a different angle.

Maybe I have to remember that I am not only blogging for me, I am blogging for the memories it will give my boys when they are older.

With that said, I need to take the camera with me more, I need to be capturing all of our life more just in case there is something worth blogging about!

Friday, July 04, 2014

Scavenger Hunt Update

1 month in and everyone is going strong.
Wish I could say the same for me!
I have the list printed and hung on the fridge door, there we have noted next to each item a rough idea of where we may find said item. This way we know that there will be some small travel involved to find a few. However this weekend sees the start of the school holidays for 2 weeks. Now whilst I am working the first week, the 2nd week the boys and I will have a chance to race round and visit so far away places to get our pictures.
I also have the list on my phone, and the camera is always with me, because you just never know when you might see that picture on the side of the bus or a bird on a wire!
I do so love the craziness of this hunt! Again I use my line from last year ...."but your honor, it was the scavenger hunt I was trying to complete, it had us doing some crazy things!"

Anyway back to the update....
So far I have been successful in finding the following:
a rack of postcards

A garden gnome

a rural landscape

birds on a wire

a lamp post
I have also found a substitute item but I will not post it until nearer the end of the hunt just in case I do manage to get one of the actual listed items. May be slightly impossible to get though as it is the middle of winter here and all it wants to do is rain! Can't see us finding too many parades anytime soon!
I am a stickler like that, try really hard to find the actual required items before I will substitute.
Hey we've got 3 months you just never know!

I am, of course the person who set up the Facebook page for the Summertime Scavenger Hunt.
I have so many friends on Facebook that are always showing us their fab pictures, so thought I would give them some things to actually challenge them to find and picture.
It has been lovely to see so many people join in the hunt who are not bloggers. I do still enjoy going round the links and visiting the blogs as this is where it started but I am enjoying seeing some friends, who would never have completed the hunt, post pictures of their life surroundings too.

This is after all a scavenger hunt for bloggers and I hope it remains for many years as everyone seems to thoroughly enjoy completing it and always seem to be counting down the days and months till it starts again. However I do love seeing people who have nothing to do with blogging also having some fun.
I post all my finds on my blog page as well as Facebook and do so hope that all the bloggers who have joined the Facebook page will continue to do the same. However I do hope that Rinda won't mind if we use the list each year on Facebook to spread the enjoyment to others in the world. I do always recognize on Facebook as to where the idea came from and who it belongs to.

I look forward to seeing many more happy pictures from a round the world flowing down the internet wire really soon.
Thanks for stopping by.