We've rounded out our February  Fun with Whales and Future Guidance at the Hamilton Gardens Festival. Our whales were a fantastic pod of high school students who were committed and amazing, and we had a really big turnout of people to help out. The lake was a bit manky so we did a bucket-splash-refloat like in Auckland. We learned that kids will do a lot to get lollies if you're handing them out. Jen McArthur joined us again as part of the response team and Gareth Hobbs did his first stint in the orange vest. 
Future Guidance happened in a greenhouse, which was beautiful and picturesque and tough and hard to stick a velco timeline to. It was also very warm. 

 Also, the Te Papa audio tour is now unofficially official, or officially unofficial. We also just updated it a bit to take into account the AirNZ exhibition.

We did Whales in Aotea Square on Wednesday evening, and it went really well. We had our first proper chat with someone from Project Jonah, which is interesting because there was that big stranding at Farewell Spit right after ours. Apparently we've got the general idea right, and we were curious to hear that it actually normal to give your whale a name, something that happens a lot in the strandings. Claire was Spot this time I think. Being far from the sea, the end involved fun with buckets.

We visited the US consulate and sorted our visas for New York after much waiting and forms. So we can officially work on the festival.

Break Up was good fun (for us anyway) too. First time at Basement since 2010, and the space and the culture is looking really great. We got the live stream of the show working, which attracted nearly as many people as the live version, which hopefully justifies all the fiddling with internets and webcams. It got pretty nasty at the end but Joel says he is fine and it was only pretend. Six hours is pretty taxing on the old sanity.

Next stop: Hamilton Gardens Festival for Whales and Future Guidance!

We're hard at work on all the things coming up in the next few months- re imagining Whales for  an oceanless environment in Auckland, rehearsing and delving into Break Up, dressing up as bananas and making idiots of ourselves in public, booking flights, stressing about visas, looking for places to sleep, and loving it.

We've had a great response from everyone wanting to be whales in Auckland, and we're pretty excited at all the interest. This and Hamilton will be the fourth and fifth time we've presented this project, and we're learning more and meeting new people every time. 

The bbananas are also ready.