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i woke a year older and we headed off to church where there was a dedication and four baptisms.  all good

that’s an earwig above.  apparently there are around 20 different sorts in new zealand, and i recon this is one of them.

then i took the girls to an outside market which was a really bad idea as it was chucking it down with rain. we knew that before we went though so it wasn’t a surprise.  so we bought three biscuits from a school run by primary school children then went to the mall for lunch instead.  meanwhile jane was preparing her lessons then went to a choir practice.

we then went to the choir concert which was in takapuna.  here’s a house for sale nearby which is as scarce as hen’s teeth (rare the world over)

i have to say it wasn’t my cup of tea, but they made a good sound and people were impressed.  and jane looked great singing along !

then it was back home for card opening and for kezia to do her report on the sculpture garden (down below this entry)

esther’s new season of flippa ball kicked off (splashed off?) today with a loss, but only 3-0 or something so not too bad a start.

and here’s some of my birthday booty.  nice !

We had to get ready!

  

The man had to open the door to the sculptures.

He kind of looks like our caretaker at school.

This is the second sculpture.

This a giant tuatara.

If you look closely you can see what the patterns are made of:

balls

 

You can’t see what the taller giraffe looks like,

but the smaller one looks angry.

 

 

These 2 things were 3 but we only took a picture of 2.

This plant we don’t know what name it has.

This is a scare-crow.

This is one of the best sinks ever.

 

 

These are all the daffodils we found.

This is a big statue of a possum a real pesky thing.

A big leaf in the sun.

A washing line with wire clothes on. 

A flower that I couldn’t get in focus.

Snow drops!

A metal sheep!

This isn’t just 2 trees, there is a hidden letter ‘I’ in them.

This is a pretty dangly thing.

 

This is a verrrry cool xylophone.

We have balancing kiwi but not this big and its not Christmas trees.

I do not know what this is meant to be.

Daddy’s picture is much better than mine (for this one!)

I love trees!

I think they are wolves.

What a lovely rose.

Wow that’s going fast.

Mummy wanted me to take that one for Julie.

I don’t know what flower that is.

What a big Pukeko.

You knew that flower that I didn’t know its name

well this is a giant one with a different name i don’t know !

This is a metal gate.

This can be 1 face or 2.

By me!

the girls had their orchestra session first thing which went well.  they’ve got a new teacher at last and have their first concert planned so hopefully it’s all systems go

when the girls got back we piled in to the car and drove to a sculpture garden about half an hour away and then this man let us through his secret door in to a fantastic garden

it was quite strange to see daffodils in full bloom (it’s the equivalent of end of January/beginning of February here)

 

and kezia got to work photoing things

in fact, kezia took so many photos she has said she’s going to write a blog post about it, so i’ll not spoil it by showing you too many of the pics now

   

but needless to say it was a lovely garden and great sculptures

   

     

then we drove down the road and had a picnic before going in search of a geocache further down the road.

this involved a walk round an old maori pa site which is the equivalent of a hillfort. making it a proper archaeological significant site (quite rare in NZ)

 

and it had some nice waterfalls

         

and cockrels

then we rushed back to host our lovely friends bruce and fleur and their lovely daughters.

we had takeaway from the fush and chup shop (fleur is a kiwi and kindly pronounced it like that for my amusement)

and after tea we ate this tremendous cake in honour of my impending birthday tomorrow.

here i am doing a big smile and then blowing out.  neither of these are my normal expression (at least not any more)

we also had big fun with the ultraviolet light bulb.  who knew that money, passports and credit cards had so much secret hidden writing on them …

 

unfortunately the camera wasn’t really up to catching the effect of the UV light on fleur’s teeth and eyes which seems to glow rather strangely in the light, much to the worryment of everyone present (especially her youngest daughter)

much fun was had by all. 

see ya !

i had to work at home today as the office is being rearranged with new desks and chairs and that.  and it was a lovely sunny day too which was excellent

i had a kersquillion of work to do but i discovered half way through the day that the information i was working to wasn’t quite what i thought i’d asked for which is a bit of a shame. so i’ll have a busy time next week trying to piece together the various bits i have got ready to send to the regulator at the end of next week.

anyway, around 9.30 a million ladies turned up at the house for their church group.  at that point i made my excuses and went to a local cafe with warren from up the road.  we had toasties and good chatting then it was back to the ladies and the house.  it’s amazing what some noise cancelling headphones and a bar of dairy milk can do to cut you off from idle lady chitter chatter !

here are two tuis on a tree outside our house. i think one of them might be a wee babby (not that i’ve any idea, but the higher one looks a bit fluffy)

here’s fleur writing on the whiteboard.  she’d seen it says ‘dave birthday concert’ on sunday so she’s added ‘dave birthday disco’ for tomorrow which will be fun

and to prepare i’ve replaced the lightbulb in our kitchen with an ultraviolet one which make the pictures glow nicely.

then this evening i’ve been off to church for the men’s group where the special speaker was the maori chaplain at Paremoremo high security prison  which is the NZ equivalent of broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane (we probably live the same distance actually, although i’ve not heard any siren). he was jolly good

 

the girls also went swimming.  jane’s skyping tanya and now it’s now.  good night.

a classic showery day today with a sunny day interspersed with soggy drenching moments which made my walk to work a dance.

jane found out her observed lesson was well received by her department head so that was great.  the teacher even said ‘a plus’ or something which means ‘later’ or something like that. but we’ll assume it means A+

much of my working day was spent trying to reconcile two giant spreadsheets full of data which in theory come from the same source but because they were given to me by different parts of the business are quite different. but that’s fun stuff so i don’t mind it

and the rest was spent packing away my desk ready for the new desks that start arriving tomorrow.  here are some of the new crockeries we might get.  it’s obviously essential we have new champagne glasses for the office.  you can tell our HR department sit on the same floor as us !

then this evening we’ve been for the open evening at the local school that esther will go to in february.  you can read more about it here if you fancy.  i thought it was jolly good and esther’s already excited about the school camps and things.  we went round with two of esther’s class mates so that was really nice too.

 

see ya

jane had a lesson observed at school today and the kids were very well behaved so that’s good.   but she’s also found out she needs to teach them loads of stuff before their exams in a fortnight so that’s a bit of a panic.  and parents evening part 1 was ok last night too so generally things are going well i think

i spent a fair bit of the day learning about our new desks and new way of working which starts on friday.  i’m getting a window seat which is very exciting (although only until we move office in november).  tomorrow is our last day at my current desk as we’ve all been told to work from home on friday to avoid the danger of furniture removal.

various other things are ticking along.  we heard our landlords are happy for us to extend our house contract for another 12 months which is good to have sorted (we just need to sign the paperwork). 

and we’ve also received something from our uk accountants relating to tax on our uk rental property which probably means i should get on with my tax return once i’ve queried a few things.

jane’s out choiring again tonight.  and is meant to be tomorrow too.  but isn’t !

the day started for me with blood letting at 7.30am when a vampire turned up and took an armful away.  i didn’t pass out so that was good – helped i’m sure by lying in my own bed as the liquid was extracted.

a sad side effect of my 12 hours without food was that i had to keep getting up in the night to go to the loo because the blood lady had told me i needed to drink loads of water otherwise she wouldn’t be able to get my blood out. that made jane and i very tired this morning, so although no actual tears we both feel pretty exhausted.  i think we might be a bit under the weather too actually.  ho hum.

anyway i worked from home for the rest of the day which was handy as the electrician came round to replace various lights and look at why the house fuses trip when it rains.  we came up with a few strategies to minimise the effects but no answers to what’s causing it.

 

i walked the girls both to and from school today as well as jane was working.  we all got absolutely soaked on the way back which happens at this time of year.

then the girls did a bit of homework before we packed in to the car and headed over to takapuna (via KFC – my first ever chicken experience (possibly my last too) ) as esther was in a school concert with loads of other primary and secondary schools from the north shore district.

her school choir sang a 1920s song whilst some others did a flapper dance thing

they were jolly good

and i was really proud of esther who seemed to be the most confident singer and was really enjoy herself (she’s on the back right wearing a feathery thing)

we were only allowed 2 tickets per family and jane had a parents evening anyway, so i went with kezia.  at kezia’s choice we sat right on the back row in the middle so we could keep an eye on the sound desk and lighting person.  exactly where i would like to sit too !

we had much fun marking the different ‘acts’ for musical, dance, singing and comedy values.  there were some excellent things, and some really funny ones too. 

above is a rawk band doing a really noisy song.  another band (from the same secondary school) played a guns and roses song with a massively long guitar solo.  seemed a bit out of place to me, but all good value.

and this was a performance dance piece involving brushes

one of my favourites was a school ‘dance’ which just seemed to involved kids running across the stage.  at one point four groups of kids were stationed at opposite corners of the stage and suddenly ran to their opposite corners weaving between people heading across in front of them like some stunt bike show.  except these were primary kids who lost their nerve and the whole thing nearly ended up with a big pile up in the middle of the stage.

but there were also some great musical numbers like the one above doping a latin jazz number rather skilfully, or the people below playing a beautiful and elaborate version of Clocks by Coldplay (but then ruining it by getting someone to sing over the top of it unfortunately)

then at the end there was a massive choir of nearly 500 kids.  esther is somewhere bottom right

we all had a good time, especially esther.  and jane’s parents evening didn’t go too badly either.

i caught the 8am flight to wellington today which is much later than the 6.30am which i often get so that was nice.  but still meant an early start with a taxi from home at 6am.

i caught that flight so i could go with a colleague but he’d changed his flight to the 8.30am one.

 

after a busy day of meetings and eatings i headed back to the airport to get my 7.30pm flight home. 

i booked that flight so i could fly back with the same colleague as the morning flight, but he’d changed his flight and was staying over in wellington for more meetings !

so i arrived at the airport 90 minutes early and had a good slap up feast in the business lounge before i got on my plane.  and that was very handy because i’m on an enforced diet from 7.30pm this evening as i’m having a blood test tomorrow to work out my life insurance premiums.  they take it all very seriously over here you see.

 

jane had a meeting after school so the girls were going to watch a dvd on her school laptop but then it didn’t work so they had to read their books instead. but they were both brilliant (and so was jane i’m sure) so that was ok.

and jane had sore eyes so went to the docs and got some medicine.

and now we’re all tired and are going to bed.  goodnight.

music for me this morning at church went well i think.  lots of loudness and jiggling which is my usual measure of success. here’s the giant amp (gi-amp?) i plug in to at church.  i stand sideways to it and always come home with one ear deafer than the other !

the girls went to the local village tennis courts whilst i was at the second service and then we had a quiet day of pootling about.

it was a lovely day again so we had our lunch outside.  when we were sitting there we heard voices calling the girls’ names from the park on the other side of our fence, and by the method of call and response we discovered it was logan from church (and school) on the way to the library with a couple of other friends.  so they had a quick chat over the fence like people do

jane and esther went out geocaching on their bikes at one point but kezia and i stayed at home due to tiredness.  And then we watched alice in wonderland for our sunday night TV and then i skyped my dad whilst jane put the girls to bed.

bit of a busy week for all of us this week, so apologies if this week’s family blogging is a bit light.  i’ve preloaded the main funkypancake blog but i can’t really pre-write our daily dairy !

see ya

Whatipu is pronounced ‘fatty poo’ which is funny isn’t it.  you can read more about Whatipu here Anyway, we went there for an explore this afternoon after Dave had taken the girls to violin and Jane had done some birthday present shopping. Whatipu is on the west coast and has black sand and v dangerous sea. Don’t go for a swim there kids.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are the long drop toilets. Not too bad as these things go.

 

We decided to go for a walk to see the Whatipu caves. It was an adventure because it was super muddy. Kez was a kiwi girl and removed her shoes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The rest of us just decided to get muddy shoes (and trousers)

 

 

 

 

 

In the evening we went out for a meal courtesy of Nanna for our birthdays. Thank you!

 

Byee