What, Me Worry?

Israel and Hezbollah have been pounding each other, and the Lebanese citizenry, for almost 3 weeks now, and there’s no end in sight to this proxy war between the U.S. and Iran. The Doha Round of the WTO trade talks officially collapsed last week. Iraq has more or less slipped into civil war. Gas prices in the U.S. are over $3 a gallon, and the Northern Hemisphere’s summer heat wave has seen record-high temps across North America and Europe.
But down here in my snug little corner of the world, winter’s cold snap seems like ancient history - although I read that it was NZ’s coldest winter since 1972. I’ve managed to finish preparing half of my lectures so far – in just over double the amount of time allotted for doing all of them. Needless to say, I'm making slow progess on my final LLM paper.

On the plus side, I now have an office to myself rather than sharing with two other people. It’s one floor up from the rest of my department, so I get lots of exercise going up and down stairs all day to the printer. And I’m making new friends with the folks on the 7th floor. There are a bunch of Americans in the Property Dept which is located here, and we all seem to have some connection to Chicago. One guy was interested in the topic of my LLM paper - securitization in China - and suggested we could do a paper together, as he's interested in it from the finance side, which would be totally cool.

Last weekend we visited with Antonia and her parents, who have a webcam. Their families in Germany have seen the baby more than Ali and me. She's up to 4 kilos now, a full third bigger than when we saw her two weeks ago. Armaz & Angelique said she hardly ever cries, just eats and sleeps. Which sounds like a pretty good plan.


Cheers,
Sandie