Snap Crackle Pop, I Fell Off a Rock

Wow, so I went wall climbing at the gym that I signed up with for the first time yesterday. They didn't have any of the autobelayers running so I went bouldering instead (climbing low walls with no rope and lots of padding on the floor). Well I had just finished a slanted (backwards) wall and was moving on to a fully horizontal ceiling. I was never very good at doing the angled stuff so, as I knew I would, I fell. Probably only about ten or fifteen feet to the ground, wouldn't have really mattered because the floor was padded with those really thick inflatable bouncy things that you normally find on carnival rides. I would have been fine (though probably a little winded) if I had just allowed myself to fall, but instinct took over and I tried to turn over to my feet. Ended up landing on my left foot sideways and sitting on my leg. I actually heard the pop. Couldn't move my foot after that, my foot was numb like I had paralyzed it somehow, for a while I thought I might have broken it. Then I realized that my right foot was numb too, which confused me cause I hadn't crushed that one beneath my body in the most awkward position possible, then it dawned on me that my climbing shoes were on too tight. Of course then I took them off and the feeling came back, aaaaaand what a feeling.
I excused myself early from the gym, and hobbled down to the nearest bus stop two blocks away. I swear everywhere else in this valley you cant take two steps without running into a bus stop, but this area was void. When I found the stop it told me the nearest bus was 45 minutes away. So I gimp limped over to the next stop, which was four or five blocks down, over a decent sized bridge, and then another half block down the street, not fun.
I got out of bed this morning accompanied by some beautifully colorful language, unaware that Neville had stayed home again because of his cold (random trivia, over 500 kids were absent from school today, either because they had swine flu, were connected to someone who has swine flu, or had a cold and thought they had swine flu) Any way, he offered me painkillers and a ride to school. I think those painkillers were the first ones I have ever taken in my life that I have actually known for sure that they were having an effect, in fact tonight I my ankle felt good enough that I decided to attend dance class as usual.
Stupid. We did waltz, which would have been fine if my partner could dance. Usually even if you get someone who can't dance, you can lead them well enough that it looks like they can. Except with my busted ankle I was having all kinds of trouble trying to drag her around the dance floor and keep my leg from falling out from under me at the same time. Then we did the jive, the one dance I was hoping beyond hope we wouldn't do. The jive is comprised entirely of bouncing, like a elementary school sock hop. And we ended with the tango, twistyest goddamn dance in the world, or it felt like it.
ps. ankle is not broken as the picture and the audible crack would imply, more likely it's a torn or pulled muscle somewhere in that area (the swelling continues up my shin a little way's, so it's not just a sprained ankle)

Rest for the Weary

All moved in and unpacked... again. This, to the best of my knowledge (which the past has shown isn't all that extensive) is the last move I'll have to make in New Zealand. It's not all that warm (not many NZ houses are) but there are areas of heat in the house that one could retreat to if their joints were freezing stiff. You can usually find their cat Tailor in these areas. He's pretty skittish and runs away from pretty much anything that moves until he gets to know you. Luckily I'm really good with cats, and he relaxed around me within the first few hours.
Other great things about this house.
have a piano. Finally I can practice more than once a week. It takes a little while to warm up, if you play it too early you get this crazy echo like you're playing it in a giant cave. Neville (enter new host dad, sound applause) said it's because its so old and the capacitors have run dry. I take electronics at school, so I actually knew what he was talking about.
-The food. Siân(enter new host mom, applause) seems to me one of very few New Zealanders who get the whole concept of -ingredients should work together, not independently.
- The internet. Not only have they got it, but Neville and Sian (I tried to do the little thing above the "a" again, but the window just blew up in a shit ton of code, so I'm just leaving it as a normal "a" for now) both work in computers, so they have a real nice, real fast wireless network.
- The parents. Neville and Sian are pretty awesome. First day here and they took me up to Wellington, talking through all the stuff that I had done so far and hadn't (mostly hadn't) and planning on doing this and that. Now it looks like I'm going to be able to see a lot more of New Zealand than Lower Hutt (We were given a survey to do today, you list stuff to do in Rotorua [big tourist town on the North Island] then list stuff to do in Lower Hutt. People listed for Lower Hutt stuff to do... breathe, go to the "dairy" [what New Zealanders call a corner store], get rained on, drown in the Hutt River... in a way, Lower Hutt is a lot like Delaware)
I'm also starting up rock climbing after school on whateverday's. I managed to get a climbing gym membership, climbing shoes, and a harness for just under (or over?) $100 US. Pretty good deal in my book. Unfortunately they were setting up for wednesday's competition when I went so I couldn't climb. While I was waiting for my ride, one of the guys came out and told me that they had finnished setting up and I could get some climbing in if I wanted. My watch said my ride would be arriving in two minutes, so I had to pass up today.

Mr. Golden Sun

Today was SUNNY. Cold yes, windy yes, but dammit it was sunny! This morning looked like it was going to be another nasty day, and it rained a little on my way to school, but by morning it had cleared up into a beautiful deep blue sky.
I spent most of my first lesson putting the finishing touches on my new composition. Actually I just printed it out after adding one chord onto the end, but yeah. Its not as good as my first one, but as if the universe had decided that I was allowed to move on now that I'd finished it, I suddenly got an idea in my head for another song. I hit the record button and started playing, then looked at the jumbled mess of notes on the screen before me. It's going to take weeks to decode that into a readable piece of music.
There was also a free concert going on in the school hall at lunch today, a couple of different bands formed from the student body played. They weren't that bad. Some pathetic excuse for a mosh pit started up at the front, and this short frumpy old teacher waded into the middle of it to break up the "fight". Probably the funniest thing I've seen all week.
This is a picture of my old walk to school that was my new walk to school until I never got around to uploading it.
Tomorrow I'll be packing, and I can guarantee that nothing interesting will happen there, so my next post should come from a new house. But first I need to do some cleaning, something smells really nasty and I can't actually figure out what it is.

Chaos Dish

Aright, lots has happened in a short time and now I'm going to have to pay for it by cramming it all into this post. First and foremost, new family, again. I didn't know it when I moved in, but the family that I'm staying with right now is temporary, which apparently nobody thought to tell me. It was "Well lets see how this works out, and if we like the situation, we'll be permanent." Turns out that around this time another family called up and asked if they could host me. They told them that they were still waiting on the family situation from my end and asked if the family wanted one of the many other exchange students they were looking for a home for. New family said no, they wanted me (which is either really sweet, or they really need an American with my unique skill set for some dastardly plan). As the story goes, right after that, the people that I've been staying with called up and said that they actually didn't like the whole being tied down to the house thing and were just starting to enjoy being empty nesters, so AFS called the new family back and said "Guess what? Ben just became available." So long story short, I'm moving in on Friday.
Monday's suck, this is because I miss piano lessons on Monday's, four weeks in a row in fact, and next Monday I won't be missing my lesson, and I can guarantee I'm going to be lectured on whether I'm serious about taking lessons and whether I should be there blah, blah, blah. I missed the Monday I was in Rotorua, the week after that we had the day off, the week after that I was sick, and this Monday I went to an electronics workshop at Victoria University. Pretty cool workshop, we were in the electronics room the whole day working on a circut that would turn a motor in different directions... theoretically. That's right, Mr. Going for my Masters in electronic engineering, Mr. in the process of making a security gaurd robot, but got sidetracked trying to give it freaking emotions, taught a full day workshop on a circut that he never bothered to test to see if it would work. On a completely unrelated note, the pictures are of a real live circut that I built in class that switches between red and green lights autonomously, it's called a bistable multi-vibrator. It may not have been the smallest in the class (only second or third smallest :p ) but it was definately the prettiest, most symmetrical, and cleanest. I got it working on my first try. In fact, at least three other students copied my design. Proud? Maybe a little.
Went to an AFS camp over the weekend. It was the end of stay camp for a few of the participants, so that was kind of sad, but it was a good camp otherwise. We played a game that kinda reminds me of senior assassins that charter plays, except instead of squirt guns it's words. I was sitting and talking to Nicole (Swiss), the only AFS student in Lower Hutt who doesn't go to Hutt High. They started passing the hat around for names. Nicole started saying that she didn't think she'd last long in this game as I pulled her name out of the hat, "No," I thought "no you won't." Then the word hat came around and I pulled out "USA". At that point Nicole asked what I got.
"Oh just the place that I'm from."
"What, the USA?"
"Gotcha!"
"Haha, what?"
"No I'm serious, I got you" I said, holding up the slips of paper.
Suddenly the name passing out was interupted by yelling, a couple of punches, then Nicole laughing literally to the point of tears. Pretty soon the whole room was laughing, and Hauke(Germany) was kind enough to point out that he didn't even think she lasted a minute.
Bloody hilarious.
Anyway, her person who I now had to get was Jean-Paul (Venezuela), who I didn't know for a while because he went by Jean and nobody pronounced it "Jean" they pronounced it "John" so I was confused for a while. Eventually I found out who he was, but it's hard to get someone to say "fish and chips", and in the meantime, Line (Greenland) got me with Beehive. Wouldn't have mattered though, it turned out the winner of the contest had got four or five people in total, and I had been taking so long with Jean I wouldn't have stood a chance.
The camp was really for the end of stay kids, so us mid stay kids got to spend a lot of time just talking with our group leader about how we felt about the exchange, what was good, what was bad. We pretty much came to a unanimous conclusion that Kiwi kids our age are immature, and Leo (French) and I spent a lot of time discussing how bad Kiwi food is and how they don't seem to understand the concept of blending ingredients, prefering to dump whatever they happen to like in a pot (or on a pizza crust as the case may be) and call it a meal.
At the end of the camp, a Hannah (Austria) decided to have a huge party at her beach house in Greece the summer after next to get all the European AFSers back together, but I got invited too, so I have that to look forward to in two years time.
I hate this weather. Today started out nice, and I was thinking it might actually be a continuation of the day before, which was the first sunny day Lower Hutt has seen in ages. Literally weeks come and go and I wonder if the sun even bothers going up in the sky if we're never going to see it. Any way started out nice, but around interval it started to get dark, and by lunch it was actually hailing. Well it let up with the percipitation for my walk home, but the wind was blowing something fierce. It was one of those chill winds that tear the heat from your body. I was okay going around the base of a bank that blocked some of the wind, but when I went over the bridge it really started up, pulling away what energy it could like some foul, airborn vampire. I struggled accross the bridge, my lips were dead and blue, splotches of frozed blood made purple lakes beneath my skin, I fell to my knees, vision fading, as a furious gust of wind carried away my final breath...
okay maybe it wasn't that bad, but still, it was a fucking nasty walk home.

So guess what?

I've got internet now, along with a new host family. They're nice enough people, and the house is big, sprawly, and warm (it has central heating and insulation, both virtually non-existent in most New Zealand households). Unfortunately even though there is only one room between me and the modem, that's a pretty large distance (about the width of the house that I was staying in before) so untill I get around to buying a strainer to make a makeshift satilite dish, my internet is going to be fairly unstable. This means that I won't be posting tons of pictures at one time for a while, because I'd have to leave my computer on overnight and firefox would probably call a network timeout on the whole ordeal, so I'd have to do it over again.
Today was one of those day's where theres a thick frost on everything and not a cloud in the sky, the sun shines bright so you know the day is going to get warm, it's just waiting until after you die of hypothermia. The train bridge that I cross on the way to school was icy, and the old, rounded boards certainly didn't help. Every step I took was a minor slip, some of them were a little more than minor.
Today was Mr. Martens last day. Figures that just as he leaves I actually learn his name (everyone just calls the teachers Mr. or Miss, so I still don't know half their names) I'm wondering if any teachers left cab before the end of the year. I wondering because I don't know if I brought the curse of the class of '09 with me, or if it was my curse all along (for those of you wondering, the class of '09 at cab calloway has lost at least one teacher each year since sixth grade). He told us our new teachers name, I'm not sure, but he either said Mrs. Asswidth or Mrs. Auchwitz, either way, I don't think its too good.
Still catching up with school work. I missed a week of school on a geography trip to Rotorua. It was an ok trip. Rotorua was smelly (from all the sulfur, it's a big volcanic hotspot), and there was a lot more schoolwork and standardized testing and stuffy notetaking than there should be on a field trip. The place we stayed at was campish, but had small cabins that we stayed it. It got pretty cold because Budima, one of my cabin mates, had our space heater sitting on the hotplate (couldn't really blame him for that, the counter was really small) and instead of plugging in the heater he plugged in the hotplate, and before you know it *poof* droopy melted useless heater. The camp called "Rotorua thermal resort" had one thermal "spa" which was just a large hot tub filled rancid geothermal springwater which smelt of Rotorua and left a noticable film on your skin. Nevertheless it was something to do, so that's where most of us spent our evenings. One night there was a woman, probably in her 50's, obviously drunk and dressed only in a towel (which luckely never came off for those of you who were getting ideas). So apparently her mother has altzhiemer's which is sad, and she starts going on about how you should cherish your parents and asking people about their parents. Me, and my friends Pablo (son of the NZ ambassador from Chile) and Rob (from South Africa, a supprisingly large portion of the NZ population emigrated from South Africa) are sitting in the corner. Jokeingly I turned to rob and wispered "I should just be like 'my parents are dead'." Eventually she came over to us and asked Rob out of the blue "are your parents dead" which of course gave Rob a perfect in "No, but his are" in my head I'm wishing all the evils of the world on Rob because now I've got to run with it, outside I say "Um, yeah, happened a while ago"
"Oh no, when did it happen!?!" (obviously having not registered the last part of my sentance)
"Um, must've been" counted on my fingers "it's ten years ago now"
"What do you do?"
Rob broke a little and let out a short laugh, which he passed off as having accidentally swallowed some of the water
"Well, I've been living with my aunt and uncle for a while, but my sister just got a house recently, and she let me move in with them, so thats nice. I'm actually here on exchange with a host family, it's cool you know, having a mom and a dad"
Meanwhile as I find out later Pablo's head is exploding 'Oh my god, I didn't know his parents were dead! Wasn't he just talking about them at dinner, maybe he was talking about his host parents, he never mentioned this before, maybe he just didn't wan't to talk about it, how did Rob find out, I probably shouldn't bring it up"
I could see his eye's growing wider and wider as I told my story. When the drunk lady had gone off to offer some other boys a job with the Rotorua museam doing the website, I turned to Pablo and whispered "My parents aren't dead, just so you know"
"what?"
"shhh" the lady was coming back.
"Ugh, all they (the highschool boy's she was offering jobs to) do is laugh at me, nobody takes me seriously."
Rob replied, "Really, I thought you came off as a very serious person"
"Ohh, but I'm not!"
It was then pretty obvious by the expression on her face that she was dying to ask me more about my parents, but I put on my best, now look what you've done, all these memories flooding back, now I'm going to be introspective as hell for the rest of the week and I don't want to talk about it, face and stared at the stars until she left.
"You know what Rob?"
"What"
"F#$% you"