Sitting on the desktop of our computer here, we have two little weather buttons. One has the local weather for Lousiville Kentucky, and one has the weather for Hamilton NZ. For months now, the two have been miles apart. We'd usually check and see that Hamilton was sitting at about 28 degrees, while Louisville was something like -10 degrees.
However, the gap has been slowly getting smaller, to the point where just a moment ago I checked them and Louisville was sitting at 17 degrees and Hamilton was 18 degrees - we're getting close! Admittedly it's midday here and only 6am in Hamilton, but it's still encouraging. Tomorrow, we're forcast to get 20 degrees. Not bad considering we're still in February (third month of winter).
There will still be some colder weather ahead, but it really feels like spring is just around the corner - it can't come soon enough. Anyhow, we're off for a bike ride...
Edit: It's now late March and we've had temperatures in the high twenties (celcius) as well as a couple of small snow falls since this blog post. One of the snow falls was only two days after a 28 degree day... Hopefully it will all calm down soon.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Here's a little bit about Louisville
Just thought I'd write and let you know a little about Louisville.
Louisville is a city made up of a bunch of little cities. The original Louisville (now a suburb called "Old Louisville") was not very large, and is now an inner city suburb. Around it were a bunch of mini cities/towns that over time each grew to the point where the boundaries between cities was so blurred that they decided to make one large city called Louisville. Therefore, with the exception of a traditional central business district, Louisville feels like a very geographically dispersed city. It feels much much larger than Auckland, although the population is probably a little lower (population stats vary wildly for Louisville as it depends on which of the surrounding suburbs you include and don't include). The most general consensus is that the population is around 700,000 to 800,000.
However, it has an amazing inters ate/motorway system going both north/south (Interstate 65) and east/west (Interstate 64) plus two massive circular motorways, one circling the inner suburbs (Interstate 264, which as far as I can recall is at least 6-8 lanes in every part that I've driven on it so far), and one circling the outer suburbs (Interstate 265). This makes for a very efficient roading system. They still have heavy traffic in patches when going into the central city just as any city does, but these are very minor when compared to the likes of what Auckland experiences. All these motorways, and Louisville's not really a very big city for US standards.
Adding to the interesting layout of Louisville is the fact that downtown is located right next to the Ohio river, with the state of Indiana across the river. There are a couple of mini-cities just across the bridge from downtown Louisville in Southern Indiana which are, for all intents and purposes, part of the Louisville city, although unofficially. People who work in Louisville often live over the bridge and people who live in Louisville will often go shopping over in the Southern Indiana suburbs. It's really just an extension of Louisville, even though it's a completely different state. For that reason, the greater Louisville area is often referred to as "Kentuckiana".
We feel like we're reasonably enclosed here. We cannot see any mountains or hills, we simply see buildings, houses, trees and lots of big roads. We had been here a few months and went for a drive up into Indiana for an hour or so and suddenly realised, once up the top of a bit of a hill, that we hadn't been to any elevation for months. It's all just flat around Louisville... One of the really nice things about the city though (outside of downtown) is all the trees and greenery. There are lots of great parks and green areas, and all the suburbs are really old and so have lovely trees all through them.
Kentucky is a southern state with all the southern hospitality and friendliness that comes with that and has the largest protestant seminary in the world sitting in its suburbs (plus a couple of smaller ones). All this makes for a very interesting and uniquely friendly city. It's part of the bible belt but you'd really call this a bit of a bible bubble. There is an incredible number of strong and thriving churches around the city most of which having a large influence from the faculty, staff, or students of the baptist seminary. This makes for a very "Christianised" city. A huge number of businesses are overtly "Christian" in their ownership and operation, and everyone you talk to is somehow connected with a church. But it's the general warmth and friendliness of the people that has been the most interesting. I've often thought that New Zealanders were, generally speaking, a friendly group of people, but as a generalisation, these guys over here have us all beat. We're constantly surprised at the courtesy, politeness and friendliness of the average person on the street, even when they're driving on the road!
All in all, it's a really nice place to live. It's not a tourist destination at all, and while there is plenty to do in the city, there is nothing worth travelling a massive distance for. The possible exception to this is the massive new basketball/concert facility that has just been completed downtown. Although Louisville and Kentucky only have college basketball teams (they don't have an NBA team), their new facility rivals any of the famous NBA facilities in the US. College basketball is huge here...
We're really enjoying the city. It's a nice place to live, it doesn't get the consistent snow of the northern states, and it doesn't usually get the consistently sweltering temperatures of the more southern states. That said, it's far colder and hotter than we've ever experienced!! It's a really great place to have a family - somewhere that we're very happy to be for the next couple of years...
Louisville is a city made up of a bunch of little cities. The original Louisville (now a suburb called "Old Louisville") was not very large, and is now an inner city suburb. Around it were a bunch of mini cities/towns that over time each grew to the point where the boundaries between cities was so blurred that they decided to make one large city called Louisville. Therefore, with the exception of a traditional central business district, Louisville feels like a very geographically dispersed city. It feels much much larger than Auckland, although the population is probably a little lower (population stats vary wildly for Louisville as it depends on which of the surrounding suburbs you include and don't include). The most general consensus is that the population is around 700,000 to 800,000.
However, it has an amazing inters ate/motorway system going both north/south (Interstate 65) and east/west (Interstate 64) plus two massive circular motorways, one circling the inner suburbs (Interstate 264, which as far as I can recall is at least 6-8 lanes in every part that I've driven on it so far), and one circling the outer suburbs (Interstate 265). This makes for a very efficient roading system. They still have heavy traffic in patches when going into the central city just as any city does, but these are very minor when compared to the likes of what Auckland experiences. All these motorways, and Louisville's not really a very big city for US standards.
Adding to the interesting layout of Louisville is the fact that downtown is located right next to the Ohio river, with the state of Indiana across the river. There are a couple of mini-cities just across the bridge from downtown Louisville in Southern Indiana which are, for all intents and purposes, part of the Louisville city, although unofficially. People who work in Louisville often live over the bridge and people who live in Louisville will often go shopping over in the Southern Indiana suburbs. It's really just an extension of Louisville, even though it's a completely different state. For that reason, the greater Louisville area is often referred to as "Kentuckiana".
We feel like we're reasonably enclosed here. We cannot see any mountains or hills, we simply see buildings, houses, trees and lots of big roads. We had been here a few months and went for a drive up into Indiana for an hour or so and suddenly realised, once up the top of a bit of a hill, that we hadn't been to any elevation for months. It's all just flat around Louisville... One of the really nice things about the city though (outside of downtown) is all the trees and greenery. There are lots of great parks and green areas, and all the suburbs are really old and so have lovely trees all through them.
Kentucky is a southern state with all the southern hospitality and friendliness that comes with that and has the largest protestant seminary in the world sitting in its suburbs (plus a couple of smaller ones). All this makes for a very interesting and uniquely friendly city. It's part of the bible belt but you'd really call this a bit of a bible bubble. There is an incredible number of strong and thriving churches around the city most of which having a large influence from the faculty, staff, or students of the baptist seminary. This makes for a very "Christianised" city. A huge number of businesses are overtly "Christian" in their ownership and operation, and everyone you talk to is somehow connected with a church. But it's the general warmth and friendliness of the people that has been the most interesting. I've often thought that New Zealanders were, generally speaking, a friendly group of people, but as a generalisation, these guys over here have us all beat. We're constantly surprised at the courtesy, politeness and friendliness of the average person on the street, even when they're driving on the road!
All in all, it's a really nice place to live. It's not a tourist destination at all, and while there is plenty to do in the city, there is nothing worth travelling a massive distance for. The possible exception to this is the massive new basketball/concert facility that has just been completed downtown. Although Louisville and Kentucky only have college basketball teams (they don't have an NBA team), their new facility rivals any of the famous NBA facilities in the US. College basketball is huge here...
We're really enjoying the city. It's a nice place to live, it doesn't get the consistent snow of the northern states, and it doesn't usually get the consistently sweltering temperatures of the more southern states. That said, it's far colder and hotter than we've ever experienced!! It's a really great place to have a family - somewhere that we're very happy to be for the next couple of years...
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Superbowl Sunday
This Sunday just gone a weird thing happened. About 6pm, the streets all around the city (and probably all around the US) went disturbingly quiet. Football mad fans (that is American football, not soccer) around the nation all converged on their respective couches, or the couches of their friend who has the biggest flat screen TV. And they sat there until approx 10:30pm, with only minor interruptions to go to the fridge to acquire more beverages, to the bathroom to rid themselves of those beverages, or to the front door to let in either their mates who had come to stare at their flat screen TV or to give the delivery guy some cash in exchange for some eagerly awaited pizzas.
The person with the biggest flat screen TV that I know around here also happens to be my neighbor, so shortly after 6pm I bundled up (it's still deep in winter here) for the 15 second walk from my back door to his, popcorn and Coke in hand.
To set the scene, this is pretty much the biggest and most eagerly anticipated sporting event of the year in the US. Cowboy's stadium in Dallas, Texas was the venue - a stadium that holds over 100,000 spectators and cost $1.2 billion to build (that's $1.56 billion NZD). However, Dallas has had bizarre weather over week leading up to Superbowl Sunday, and had struggled to cope with it.
It's interesting here in Louisville to see the reaction to snow. Louisville is approx halfway between the north and south borders of the US, and so doesn't see anywhere near the amount of snow that the northern states get. It is also in the Ohio valley, which somehow seems to limit the amount of snow we receive. Therefore, when we do get a good dumping of snow, schools close, people don't go to work (or at least go into work late) and everything limps along a bit slower. It does seem a little unusual to us NZ'ers observing, even though we're not used to snow on our roads at all. You see, every main road around the city is sprinkled with a salt-like chemical as soon as the snow starts falling, so by 7:30am when everyone's going to work, all the main roads are completely free of snow and are fine to drive on. Even so, things seem to close pretty easily as heavy snow is still reasonably rare (although the last two winters have been exceptions to that). Our Canadian friends here reckon that if they closed schools and businesses back in Canada like they do here, the whole country would be shut down for about 5 months of the year.
Anyhow, it seems that the guys way down south there in Dallas don't see much snow - far less than Louisvillites, and when they do see a few flakes of snow, they all freak out, buy up a bunch of milk and bread from anywhere they can find it, close the entire city, and hunker down in their homes until all the weird white sky dust disappears. Of course the organisers of the event had planned for bad weather. They had planned for two of the biggest weather incidents that could affect the lead up to the game - a snow storm or an ice storm. They just hadn't planned for them both to hit within days of each other. Mayhem ensued and the major metropolis of Dallas didn't know what to do with itself for a couple of days. There were airport closures (just what people around the country with $4000 Superbowl tickets in their airline luggage want), rolling power outages, roads frozen over for days... everything.
In spite of all this, the show went ahead, and we were all able to sit in the warmth of our (or our friends) lounge and watch the game. And it was a pretty interesting game. I haven't watched all that many American football games since coming here, but am getting to know basically how the game flows and a few of the intricacies of the game. All in all it was a good game, with the Greenbay Packers stretching out to an early lead and the Pittsburgh Steelers fighting back to get within 3 points, only to have the Packers hit them hard in the final quarter to round out the game. It was mildly exciting, but perhaps you have to get a bit more wound up in the tradition, the build up and the culture of the game to experience the full effect. I had an enjoyable evening with my neighbor, had the experience of a football Superbowl event and watched a pretty good game of American football. But was it worth a $1.2 billion stadium, $4000 tickets for not a great view of the game, and endless news bulletins about the theoretical chances of getting snow in Dallas? I'm not entirely sure. I'm picking that the game at Eden park on Oct 23 will far eclipse it. Interestingly though, I haven't met any Americans that agree with me on that point yet...
Ps. Sonia came over and watched a few minutes of the game. Her biggest excitements of the game were 1) Finding out that that Michael Douglas was still alive. She thought he died a while back, but he was sitting watching the game with Catherine in the stands in seats probaby worth a lot more than $4000; and 2) that Camerin Diaz is dating Alex Rodriguez - she saw them in the crowd sitting together. It's great to get a woman's perspective on a football game...
The person with the biggest flat screen TV that I know around here also happens to be my neighbor, so shortly after 6pm I bundled up (it's still deep in winter here) for the 15 second walk from my back door to his, popcorn and Coke in hand.
To set the scene, this is pretty much the biggest and most eagerly anticipated sporting event of the year in the US. Cowboy's stadium in Dallas, Texas was the venue - a stadium that holds over 100,000 spectators and cost $1.2 billion to build (that's $1.56 billion NZD). However, Dallas has had bizarre weather over week leading up to Superbowl Sunday, and had struggled to cope with it.
It's interesting here in Louisville to see the reaction to snow. Louisville is approx halfway between the north and south borders of the US, and so doesn't see anywhere near the amount of snow that the northern states get. It is also in the Ohio valley, which somehow seems to limit the amount of snow we receive. Therefore, when we do get a good dumping of snow, schools close, people don't go to work (or at least go into work late) and everything limps along a bit slower. It does seem a little unusual to us NZ'ers observing, even though we're not used to snow on our roads at all. You see, every main road around the city is sprinkled with a salt-like chemical as soon as the snow starts falling, so by 7:30am when everyone's going to work, all the main roads are completely free of snow and are fine to drive on. Even so, things seem to close pretty easily as heavy snow is still reasonably rare (although the last two winters have been exceptions to that). Our Canadian friends here reckon that if they closed schools and businesses back in Canada like they do here, the whole country would be shut down for about 5 months of the year.
Anyhow, it seems that the guys way down south there in Dallas don't see much snow - far less than Louisvillites, and when they do see a few flakes of snow, they all freak out, buy up a bunch of milk and bread from anywhere they can find it, close the entire city, and hunker down in their homes until all the weird white sky dust disappears. Of course the organisers of the event had planned for bad weather. They had planned for two of the biggest weather incidents that could affect the lead up to the game - a snow storm or an ice storm. They just hadn't planned for them both to hit within days of each other. Mayhem ensued and the major metropolis of Dallas didn't know what to do with itself for a couple of days. There were airport closures (just what people around the country with $4000 Superbowl tickets in their airline luggage want), rolling power outages, roads frozen over for days... everything.
In spite of all this, the show went ahead, and we were all able to sit in the warmth of our (or our friends) lounge and watch the game. And it was a pretty interesting game. I haven't watched all that many American football games since coming here, but am getting to know basically how the game flows and a few of the intricacies of the game. All in all it was a good game, with the Greenbay Packers stretching out to an early lead and the Pittsburgh Steelers fighting back to get within 3 points, only to have the Packers hit them hard in the final quarter to round out the game. It was mildly exciting, but perhaps you have to get a bit more wound up in the tradition, the build up and the culture of the game to experience the full effect. I had an enjoyable evening with my neighbor, had the experience of a football Superbowl event and watched a pretty good game of American football. But was it worth a $1.2 billion stadium, $4000 tickets for not a great view of the game, and endless news bulletins about the theoretical chances of getting snow in Dallas? I'm not entirely sure. I'm picking that the game at Eden park on Oct 23 will far eclipse it. Interestingly though, I haven't met any Americans that agree with me on that point yet...
Ps. Sonia came over and watched a few minutes of the game. Her biggest excitements of the game were 1) Finding out that that Michael Douglas was still alive. She thought he died a while back, but he was sitting watching the game with Catherine in the stands in seats probaby worth a lot more than $4000; and 2) that Camerin Diaz is dating Alex Rodriguez - she saw them in the crowd sitting together. It's great to get a woman's perspective on a football game...
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Planners. Who needs em...me!
So I have just bought a planner! One of the highlights of a seminary course I just completed was seeing how Mrs Mary Mohler organisers her life. She has so many functions and things going on. Her husband is the president of SBTS, Mrs Mohler organisers the seminary wives institute, they have two children, they are constantly invited to various functions, they are constantly putting on various functions etc. And alongside all this how does she manage her own home?? Well I found out that a planner is the answer!
She puts absolutely everything in it. When she recieves something in the post she writes what she needs to down in her planner and then files it or throws it away. It seems way too simple but it seems to work. She plans her cleaning, meals, shopping, gift buying, thank you notes, prayer, scripture memory. Honestly her planner is full. However it seems to work. She carries her planner with her everywhere. And she says she goes to bed knowing everything is written down and she no longer has to store so much information in her head. I like the sound of that! So just this morning I purchased one. So I'm currently trying to consolidate all the little bits of paper lying around the house into one place and I am feeling incredibly liberated.
However, I have to confess that while I am writing this I am contemplating how I am going to get around double booking myself for tonight! Praise the Lord for the planner.
Sonia :)
She puts absolutely everything in it. When she recieves something in the post she writes what she needs to down in her planner and then files it or throws it away. It seems way too simple but it seems to work. She plans her cleaning, meals, shopping, gift buying, thank you notes, prayer, scripture memory. Honestly her planner is full. However it seems to work. She carries her planner with her everywhere. And she says she goes to bed knowing everything is written down and she no longer has to store so much information in her head. I like the sound of that! So just this morning I purchased one. So I'm currently trying to consolidate all the little bits of paper lying around the house into one place and I am feeling incredibly liberated.
However, I have to confess that while I am writing this I am contemplating how I am going to get around double booking myself for tonight! Praise the Lord for the planner.
Sonia :)
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