HAPPY GROUND HOG DAY!

Happy Ground hog day!  8 months down and 10 months to go on this mission.  It continues to be a warm summer here in New Zealand, not as hot as CA or UT summers but with a bit more humidity without air conditioning at home (but we have it at the office).

After 8 months, I’m feeling comfortable and competent in the legal work I’m doing for the most part.  On occasion I’ll come across something new to figure out. A lot of the tender contracts I’ve been reviewing have been dealing with Pacific temples, maintenance, landscaping, even have an issue about whether a new temple can be built on existing land the Church has under long term lease.

I’ve put in a lot of long days at the office the last 2 weeks just trying to keep up with the work.  So, rather than write about that, I’ll write a little about our trip to Australia last week.

Sis. Gubler and the Communication department (formerly Public Affairs), went to Australia for a week for some training.  I was invited along but decided not to spend a full week there due to my work load.  Instead, I worked until Thursday early afternoon, then hitched a ride to the Auckland airport and flew from there to Sydney, Australia.  When I walked out of the Sydney airport I was greeted by a blast of hot air, full on summer there and much hotter than NZ.  I took a taxi to the temple apartments in the suburb of Carlingford, about a kilometer from the temple there.  The apartments weren’t bad, and had a/c.  That evening Elder and Sister Low, who are serving in our Sydney OGC office, were nice enough to drive us to Costco!  I had fun restocking up on socks, shirts, a book about Switzerland, dried squid, and the triple chocolate brownie mix.  Then we went to the food court where I got the AUD$1.99 hot dog and soda special (USD$1.50), which was pretty good except it was an all pork instead of beef hot dog!  Still better than any hot dog I’ve had in NZ. 

Friday I met with Elder Low to review his litigation cases I’ll be taking over when he leaves in March.  Then he and I rode the train into downtown Sydney where we met over lunch at a fancy restaurant with local counsel Philip Stevens and his partner Angus.  We also took a tour of their law offices.  I’ll be working with them quite a bit on my Australia cases.  That evening Alisa and I and her group of over 20 met and drove down to the water front, for a cruise around Sydney harbor. We sailed for about 2.5 hours which included a buffet dinner.  We got to view the Opera House and the bridge across the harbor, along with the skyline.  We started early enough that we got to see it all as the sun was going down, and again on the return trip in the dark with the skyline lit up.  The evening cooled down nicely such that we could sit on the back deck of the ship and feel the cool breeze. We got back to our apartment a little later than we anticipated.

So I slept in Saturday morning.  Alisa and her group attended the 7 a.m. session at the temple, but I finally got up and attended the 10 a.m. session.  There were only about 8 total in my session, a little disappointing for a Saturday morning.  From there I hiked across the street to an indoor mall to do some shopping.  I bought a new pair of church shoes, since I’ve worn holes in my other pair, got a haircut and bought a bento lunch.  I walked back to the apartments and read until Alisa came back.  In the evening the entire group went out to a nice Italian restaurant for a dinner of pizza and pasta. 

Sunday morning we attended a local ward.  Afterwards, Alisa, Thomas (their intern) and I visited Koala Park, where we saw a koala, emus, many kinds of kangaroos and wallabies, dingos, exotic  birds and more.  Then we caught the evening flight back to NZ.

Yesterday and today was Stake conference.  In the morning we helped one of our YSA's Tatiana move.  Then Alisa and I joined the YSA ward members in providing the music for the Saturday evening session.  Our group actually sounded pretty good.  Then after the meeting we all went to Denny’s where Bishop Dil treated everyone to dinner (his bribe to get the YSA’s to sing in conference).