Tired.

Phew! The last few days have left me feeling incredibly exhausted. The weather is also so easily dragging me down. Yesterday morning on my run out the door to school, I ever so gracefully slipped on the tiniest patch of ice on my porch. I then proceeded to slide down the two stairs down to the pavement like I was on a sled.... sans sled. My knees (which have been killing for about a week now from doing too much too soon with my training) broke my fall on the cold and wet pavement. Lovely. How does that happen in June??? It was an incredible start to a pretty poopoo day at school as well.

It was my first day teaching the whole day... Pip was out sick and it was quite a struggle at times. I've found that one of my favorite reasons for having another adult in the classroom is so that I can have someone to laugh with about the stupid/silly things that kids do. And she wasn't there to laugh, so I had to just move on, haha.

I've spent the past few days planning my trip to the South Island. I'm SOOO excited! I'm going to be traveling with Kiwi Experience. I bought my flight to Christchurch last night and I'm getting pretty stoked! The return flight was only 100 NZD, which is about 80 USD. Sweet! The trip will be a bit expensive, but it'll be fun because most people that do it are younger and it'll be a great way to meet new people!

Over the weekend, I ran 11.2 miles on the elliptical trainer... that was a joy! That's the farthest I've ever "run" and although I guess I kind of cheated by not really running, my knees thanked me for it. Yesterday I RAN ran for the first time in about a week and that was not SO bad, but it kind of hurt since I fell on my knee earlier. Ah, well.. I cut it short so I wouldn't do any more harm.

I'm being incredibly reflective about the culture shock cycle that I learned about before I went to Mexico. I definitely went through a stage where everything was simply incredible, and then I went through a stage where I found out a few things about the schooling (as awesome as it is) that I didn't like, and I feel like now I'm approaching the acceptance stage. I'd say that if NZ wasn't so far from home or so expensive, I would definitely make the move here. People are great, the country is beautiful, and the schooling is pretty top notch. I'm finding myself getting to the regret stage. When I first came, I thought that I'd want to get involved with some volunteering. I looked into it, but with my training and all of that, I just didn't think I'd have enough time. Now I'm realizing that once I learned how to manage my time, I had all sorts of it and now it's been wasted. SO, the first thing I did this morning was sign up to volunteer to hand out registration packets for the half marathon next weekend. That'll be great!

Over the weekend, I went to a country western band concert with my host parents. Hilarious! It was absolutely freezing outside and rainy. It was pretty miserable. So I had like, 4 hot chocolates at lunch. The people that we went to lunch with were really friendly and we chatted a lot about our travels and that's always fun! Other than that, I just hung around the house over the weekend, recuperating (which hasn't seemed to do the trick since I still feel pretty crummy!)

My kids back home graduated from middle school. They're all grown up!!! I can't believe it... my first class, off to high school!

I'm still working on my journal entry about our incredible trip to the Rotorua, so that'll be coming. I thought I'd just write something since it's been so long! :) Off to work out!