The Kiwi Connection
Category: Navel Gazing...
Posted Friday, September 01, 2006 at 10:01 PM [GMT-6]

I mentioned a special visitor in the previous post, and she arrived on schedule this afternoon. "She," in this case, is the lovely young Rachel, who blogs over at Precipitation and who is making her first ever trip to the States from her home country of New Zealand.

I'm not sure what the local Chamber of Commerce would make of the fact that she chose two primary destinations for this trip: Los Angeles and Midland.

Anyway, MLB and I picked her up at the airport around 5:00, got her checked into her hotel (and watching the young ladies behind the counter try to figure out how to enter a New Zealand address and phone number into the computer system was a hoot), and then we headed out for barbecue (K.D.'s, for the locals who care about such things). Yep, nothing like a big honkin' slab of meat slapped on a sheet of butcher paper to welcome an international guest. I think she enjoyed the meal (I'm sure she'll have her own report up when she returns -- we were joking with each other about who'd get to blog first about this stuff), although I never could convince her that the jalapeños weren't that hot.

Afterwards, we went to our house so she could meet Abbye -- they were quite taken with one another, Rachel being a dog-person and Abbye being a dog-person-dog, if that makes sense -- and we chatted about plans for the weekend, life in New Zealand, and how none of us could do metric/english conversions in our heads.

Some of our plans are tentative due to the uncertain weather: the airplane tour, the trip to the shooting range, the high school football game. I hope some of that stuff works out, because, frankly, we're really pretty boring people when you get right down to it, and I'm sure Rachel will be wishing she'd signed on for one more day at Disneyland if our company is the best Midland has to offer.

We'll let you know how things unfold. Then, in a few days, you can get the real story over at Precipitation.