Timaru Tidings

It's my day off. It is raining in Timaru, for which gardeners and farmers are grateful, although not dog walkers and mothers taking children to school. We are all fabulous today. Katarina, Janine and I went to the Whirlygig Shakespeare companies production of 12th Night, held at the Caroline Bay soundshell on Saturday. This new company has the ambitious ideal of presenting the bard's plays yearly in a form similiar to what they would've first been performed -outdoors, in the company of friends and family. They made excellent use of the extra room, with various entrances made down the long paths coming into the venue. The highlight of the production was one of those unscripted moments; a toddler was fascinated by the action on stage, and spent much of the performance trying to climb the stairs, but thwarted by her minder. Finally, in the last scene, she succeeded in escaping all care-givers and joined the actors, one of whom simply picked her up, and included her. She led the applause at the end of the play - just delightful!
Youth group met on Friday with 15 emerging from the wood work -cool. They are all of course far too busy to meet every week, but here is a start! Our services went mostly well, apart from a couple of techinical hitches at the start.
The Timaru Herald printed a lovely photo of Chris and I but managed to get a couple of important points wrong; oops!
Zach has had a couple of friends over, which is great, and he is feeling much more settled about life. He also received a certificate at school for sharing his knowledge of Maori with the class, which perhaps says more about the respective levels of expertise of Opoho and Glen-iti schools than it does about Zach's overall knowledge in this area. He has also started piano lessons.
Hannah was "Star of the Day" - she called the roll this morning, and we've hosted the class mascot this weekend and had to write up a short story about what we did in the weekend, not that it was very exciting.
Katarina had a school service last night at St Mary's which led to a discussion on the way home about the differences between Anglicans and Presbyterians. At the end she said - "I'm glad we're Presbyterian!", which is perhaps more indicative of her socialisation than my powers of explanation -but nice to hear, none-the-less. Communion was a bit of a surprise for her too, as they use port, whereas our practice is grape juice.
Janine is delighting in her drama classes at school, really enjoying the regular opportunity to 'perform'!
And Chris is taking it quietly today, but has been up to all hours, sorting stuff for the dog, sorting technical issues for both home and church, and like me, trying to get to grips with a new routine with two churches, and juggle the extra meetings for the March 7 summit, where we will discuss the possibility of the 4 Presbyterian churches in Timaru becoming one parish, with 4 or more congregations.