A few things

As D-Day approaches, we are less and less interested in what is going on outside around us and more focused on what is going on in my uterus. I think mother nature designed it to happen this way. It can't be helped.

But a few things to comment on this week:

There was a great thunderstorm on Wednesday night, the first one we'd seen since moving here. We watched the hills over our house as a herd of cows rushed to lower ground to find shelter. We were battered with wind and rain. The lightning here was different from lightning we used to see in Arizona. There were no distinct bolts zig-zagging across the sky, but just general light in the sky. Not sure if that's a hemisphere difference, or just a characteristic of this particular storm.

My birthday was also this week, so I had to take part in a new birthday tradition. Here, it seems, the birthday person buys cake for the non-birthday people. This is a new one for me. And I'm not sure if it's a New Zealand-wide thing or just a quirk where I work. I asked around, but no one seemed really sure. It seems the concept is not unusual in NZ, but at my work it has become part of the culture. So the rule is, when it's your birthday, YOU bring some cake or other treat to share with everyone. There is another person in my office who had a birthday this month and who has still not brought in anything to share, and he is hassled about it on an almost daily basis. So I was not about to break this important tradition. I brought a triple chocolate cake. Everyone was pleased.

There is a story in the NZ Herald online today about a Kiwi couple who moved to America and then committed suicide "after growing disillusioned with their US life". Eeek. I don't remember it being quite that bad over there... then again, we didn't live in Utah... (kidding, kidding!)

Of course, the very biggest thing going on this week (bigger even than my birthday) seems to be the U.S. Congress passing health care reform. This story made the front page of the World news section in our local paper. The general sentiment over here seems to be, "what's the big deal?" People here understand this is not universal health care, or "socialised medicine", but just a few tweaks to the existing scheme to make private health insurance more accessible. One woman in my office cornered me at lunch with the newspaper in hand to ask why Americans were so upset about this legislation. It's a little weird being asked to explain how "Americans" feel about something, especially when the view I need to explain is not one I personally hold. Personally, I think health care reform is long overdue and that this bill is only a step in the right direction. It's hard for me to understand those people who are shouting it down, but I did my best. My best is this:

In New Zealand, health care is a basic human right, much like education. But in America, it just isn't. It's something you have to earn.

It seems this is really hard for anyone outside of America to understand. A story published in our local paper (which was actually taken from the Times of London) said just that: Europeans will have a hard time understanding Americans' violent reaction to this bill. (I'm paraphrasing there.) At least in my small world here in Christchurch, that seems to hold true. No one can understand how it could be controversial for the government to ensure access to health care for its people. The rest of the industrialised world has been doing it for decades.

But anyway, this is not a blog about politics, so I'll leave it at that. I'll go back to watching the little man in my belly try to climb up my ribs...