AUTUMNAL WEATHER

I have to admit that England has some beautiful scenes during autumn. All the deciduous trees have leaves which turn brown, yellow or red during autumn. NZ has mostly deciduous trees so you do not get the amazing colours. I was on the fourth floor of the C block at school the other afternoon and I discovered I could look over the top of all the trees in Frimley. I did not realise how many there were. On a clear night it is a fantastic view.

NZ SPORT

What about NZ sport at present! My country is awesome! We continually punch above our weight.

NZ v France at rugby league - a record score - NZ won 62-12.

Wellington Lions v Southland Stags - Wellington in the finals of the Air NZ Cup provincial rugby competition.

All Blacks v Wallabies - the first clean sweep of the Aussie rugby team since 1972. To be fair, the Australian rugby team has been decimated by injuries. The ABs were awesome - lets not ignore that fact. The lineouts worked - still a lot of errors.

NZ v Bahrain at soccer - we only need to beat Bahrain 14 November (Saturday week) - go the kiwis.

I love NZ. I must go back soon.

FANTASTIC MR FOX

Shaun and I just went to see this movie. We thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. The theatre was not full by any any means and there seemed to be a lot of grandparents with their grandchildren. I am not sure the kids would have got it and the grandparents were very quiet throughout. Shaun and I laughed a lot at the many verbal gags and loved the bright visual nature of the film. Overall I would give it a Very Good.

HALLOWEEN

I have bought into halloween this year. No, I do not have any time for trick or treat.
I decided to carve my own jack o' lantern. I did a bit of research through Google and Wikipedia which are the modern day version of encyclopedia. It was not difficult to find a carving pumpkin because there are plenty in the shops around here. The picture below, taken in the dark, shows the result of my efforts. I spent a bit of time making templates for the mouth and eyes and nose and I believe it paid off. I think it is pretty amazing.
You probably think I have too much time on my hands and you would be sort of correct. I have just got to the end of the half-term.

ICC CRICKET FINAL

Okay, so the Australians beat us. We had to do without Vettori who got a hamstring injury in the semi-final. We have had to do without Jessie Ryder, Jacob Oram and Darryl Tuffey as well. Am I bitter? Hell yes. The commentators raved on about how good the Australians were and then they raved on about how hard done the English team was without Kevin Peterson.

CRICKET

I have just watched NZ play Pakistan in the ICC (cricket) competion (in South Africa) final. NZ won pitting them against Australia in the final.

EMAIL WORRIES

We have major eamil worries! Our email account has been stolen from us. I know it sounds crazy but we cannot log in to our email account any more. I guess we have not handled it very well but I did not know what to do. We have been getting a lot of scam emails which have offered us untold wealth in return for giving them all our details. I did not respond to any of them but I read them from time to time because they were quite funny, actually.

On Saturday I discovered someone was using the email account to send out scam emails like the ones we were receiving. On Sunday our password had been changed and we could not access our account. I tried to get in touch with Yahoo thinking that they would be keen to help and do something about it. I could not get a phone number to ring and the website did not provide any email addresses. By Monday we had found a phone number for a London address. I was told they could not deal with it. Instead I was told to ring 'Customer Care Services'. They seemed to 'care' very little.

Eventually (after about a week) I rang the only number which responded with a human voice and I achieved success. The number was in the USA! I got my email back!