Winter has come

Winter in my part of New Zealand is pretty mild, at least compared to winters I remember from growing up in Missouri. It snows but only on the mountain. There is lots of wind and lots of rain and an annoyingly on-going feeling of dampness. My biggest complaint tends to be that jeans and towels take a long time to dry since having a dryer at home is not generally affordable here. I suppose a second complaint is having to get out of bed on cold mornings since central heating is also not a thing here, but it does mean I move quickly and therefore get out of the house on time, ha!

Thanks to winter weather, I got to have a new experience while driving down to a little township called Rahotu for one of Troway's rugby games (they won, first time beating this team in several years woot woot!). When I left town it was sunny, but started raining not far outside of town. Since some form of rain (which could precipitation, rain, drizzle, general wetness, showers, any other synonym the weather people can think of) was predicted for the day this was not terribly surprising. After I got past the next town the rain stopped and the sun came back out. But don't get too excited, because all of a sudden it got terribly windy, started absolutely pouring rain (but sideways rain due to the wind) all while the sun was still shining brightly. SO - I have officially driven through a rainstorm with the need for sunglasses. Thank you Taranaki. Troway reckons it was actually only raining at the mountain but it was so windy it blew the rain to the highway :)

In other news, school is going well. I have officially finished phase 1, which was analyzing a rather long and mentally painful list of scores for a comparison of how the music was arranged for piano. My poor neighbors have had to suffer through me playing the scores. One commented the other day that he has been able to hear me playing a lot lately and fortunately he thought this was a good thing!
Being a pianist has come with its share of interesting neighbor interactions. When I lived in Vienna, there was a city policy that outrageous activities such as practicing the piano were not allow between the hours of 10pm and 7am, so I was pretty safe there. When I was living in Kansas City there was a fella who lived in the apartment below mine who would bang on the ceiling if he had reached his capacity for classical music (even though I have always tried to be respectful of what hours I play as I understand not everyone has my taste in music). But the winner of non-musical neighbors is the lady who once knocked on my door to let me know that there was some noise coming from my apartment. I was practicing something by Beethoven at this point. I was unsure how to respond to her designation of his music as "noise."

I hope you have a good week. I will seek out adventure so I can write again soon :)
Some highlights from recent daily life below.

Autumn in the park

A nice benefit to rainy days

Winter sunset (not to brag, but this view is walking distance
from home) :)