Glowworm caves and new car

so, i told you i got a new computer. this is what it looks like. this is not my computer b/c i didn't feel like taking a pic of it. it was quicker to find a pic online and post that one. :-) i keep it closed and hooked up to my larger monitor, except today. i'm posting from my bed today, rather than my desk 10 ft away from me. not sick. just cold and was reading in bed. jeremy wanted me to find a pic of a house i was telling him about on this cool UK show called Grand Designs that i saw this weekend. it had my ideal living space in it. two walls of built-in shelves floor to ceiling. then a nice u-shape of furniture in front of a fireplace. it also had a large corner window that made it feel like the outside was coming in. also, the floors were heated. it was great. jeremy said if we have that many shelves, we'd have a lot of empty space. but i said, over the years we'll gradually get more books. not that many though. i also plan for them to be shelves for our things we pick up from our travels and pictures and the couple of my favorite porcelain dolls i've kept from when i was younger. anyway, tangent over with. jeremy brought the computer to me on the bed so i could look up to see if they had a pic of that room on the tv shows website. they don't. just the corner window. 

this weekend, jer went camping a little bit up north at uretiti beach. it loved it. the kemps and i on sunday night, we to our friends nate and rach's house up there for the night. then we went to the waipu caves on monday with jeremy and casey. casey is one of the teenage boys at our church. his family is american too. he camped with jer sunday night. the caves were cool. we got muddy and wet, but it was fun and worth it. there were glowworms. we even got up close to some to see what they really look like and their little sticky substances they use to catch food. we met an older english fellow who is living in australia right  now at the caves. he didn't want to go in alone b/c of a past experience of going in one with another guy and getting stuck for hours. he seemed to enjoy himself. he also seemed to have a hard time understanding our accents, which we thought was strange. we weren't talking fast or anything either. also, jeremy's beach was partially a nude beach at one end. when we went to meet him before the caves, we went out to the water, and i saw a guy and what i presumed to be his two young daughters (10-ish) playing soccer. then, they were nude in the water. i was astonished. partially b/c how i've been brought up, that is not appropriate (dad and daughters nude or nude in public at all) and partially b/c it wasn't cold, but it was def. no where near warm enough to be in your birthday suit in the cold water. it was in the low 60s. anyway, crazyness.

also, this weekend, we bought a car off trademe. it's like ebay, but used all the time here for everything it seems. if you're in search of something, look on trademe. you're likely to find it. anyway, we bought a 1995 Honda Prelude. it's cherry red. we weren't wanting a red car, and i was wanting 4 doors, but it's what we found that was in good condition for our small price range. i'll post pics of it sometime. kiwis are more of the mindset that you only buy cars straight out with cash. no bank loan. where as, some people do get loans, esp. foreigners, it is popular to drive older cars here that you can save up for and get. they get a lot of cars used from asia on the cheap, so that's a popular option. you do have to watch for the odometer being turned back though in those cases. our car has roughly 170,000k (106,000 miles) on it. that's pretty good for that age. it runs well too. we christened it nicely for taking it to the beach and caves this weekend. it's now full of sand and mud. :-)