Blog

it rained lots last night so jane didn’t go off running at 5.30am.  but she did go to her ladies breakfast meeting which was jolly good.

then we all did tidying and chores before the open home. luckily the weather mostly cleared up as you can see from the pics above.

and this afternoon we escaped the house to go to Takapuna for a bit of window shopping and wandering down the beach, before getting ice creams at the posh takapuna cafe

and in case you were wondering about the ketchup / tomato sauce thing

(thunder and lightning outside so updating the blog early in case the electrics go off)

i made it back in to the office today which was good.

then after work i drove to the pool (via home) to meet the girls at their swimming lesson so jane could come back and do some household chores whilst i sat and read a book by the pool (somehow that worked out nicely).

this evening we watched some more of the Antarctic documentary program, then jane and i watched a film

and we’ve just spent the last half hour answering solicitor’s emails from the britain

can you see the cruise ship parked up?  i like how the shops run out and the harbour starts

we’re promised serious wind and rain again over the weekend. hey ho.

this evening esther and i went to the supermarket which was good fun.  we both like standing and looking at the different things on the shelves so it’s ideal really.  we also bought her a usb memory stick thing for school.

i decided yesterday i was going back to work today, so i dragged myself out of bed and nearly made it to the bus station.  however, just after i left our street i decided i wasn’t quite well enough so turned round at the first roundabout and worked from home instead.

in fact esther’s had quite a fun day (despite her streaming cold).  She went to the Howick Historic Village with school which sounded like fun

jane meanwhile had school, then went to her friend fleur’s house, then i think did some more school things.  she got some good feedback from her colleagues about her school report writing too so she’s obviously doing a good job.

we bought 12 mars bars for $10 in pak ‘n’ save and the first two we opened each won a free mars bar.  bargain.

finally, here’s a kiwi obsession – tomato sauce.  they sell it in tins (just visible at the bottom of the picture above) and there’s a difference between tomato ketchup and tomato sauce (seen here in two variety)

hello. 

jane’s bad class turned out to be ok today so that was good. both girls had their violin lessons this evening, kezia had piano at school and swimming this evening.

i had today off work sick so spent the day in bed reading a book about a man who lives off the land in the wilds of the south islands far from anyone. interesting.

i got out of bed around 2.30pm and picked kezia up from school.  then this evening i drove over to pick kezia up from her swimming lesson.

no pictures again, sorry.

but you can read esther’s article which was in her school newsletter:

http://www.ajhs.school.nz/site/ajhs/files/PDF%20files%20-%20Newsletters/Newsletter%202011%20Term%202%20Issue%203/Year%207%20Bullying%20Posters.pdf

and look at her photo in the international page where she’s standing with her friends sunny and sonia

http://www.ajhs.school.nz/site/ajhs/files/PDF%20files%20-%20Newsletters/Newsletter%202011%20Term%202%20Issue%203/International%20Dept%20Newsletter.pdf

Hopefully back to work tomorrow.  see ya

sorry, no update today as i’m ill.  hopefully just a quick stomach bug and normal service will resume tomorrow.

school. work.  hair cut (jane).  mortgage papers (me). skype. sneezing (esther).  those kind of things

today was one of those days where nothing seemed to go right.

i was on sound at church this morning which meant a 7am start after a fairly sleepless night.  unfortunately the there were loads of technical problems which turned the job in to a nightmare, but we got through it.  i think

i got home just before 1pm then had a recovery sleep.  the rest of the afternoon was spent wrestling photos on my slow computer and generally feeling like technology is against me.

meanwhile jane and kezia and esther had a nice trip to the library, and then this afternoon kezia had two flippa ball matches so they were spared my misery.

now the grown ups are still tired (jane’s gone to bed) but the youngsters are about to skype their UK chums.

back to work tomorrow …

(no photos today either, sorry)

highlight of today was definitely kezia’s swimming competition.

kezia’s first race was butterfly with just her and two other swimmers.  as it was the first race of the day poor kezia didn’t know what to expect and missed the starting signal so dived in at least 2 seconds after the other two.  she still managed to come in a close second though so would have definitely won if she’s started on time!

she came second in her ‘freestyle’ race too.  freestyle is front crawl rather than ‘make it up as you go’ which i would have done. she was also in a couple of relay races at the end too.  (the times on the program were estimates from her teacher.  she beat both of them hence the ribbons above)

we got home mid afternoon hungry and with the house in a mess when an estate agent phoned to say they wanted to bring someone round to look at the house in 7 minutes time!  we did some quick mad tidying, showed them round, then went to the food court at the mall for a celebratory meal. 

Then jane came home and the girls and i did a spot of window shopping before getting a lift back from jane who had been doing school work.

this evening i watched Round The World In 80 Days with kezia whilst esther’s been out at some fancy inflatable park somewhere which sounded a bit like that TV program Wipeout.  Hopefully she’ll be back in one piece later this evening.

here are some videos.  in the first one she’s in lane number 8 (one in from the far lane).  i think you can see which one she is on the second one!

http://www.funkypancake.com/nz/flash/110611_s95_mvi_3983.mp4

http://www.funkypancake.com/nz/flash/110611_s95_mvi_3986.mp4

(by the way, if you are on a windows PC and can’t view these videos [which are in MP4 format] you can download vlc viewer for free here – you might want to uncheck some of the file associations when you install it if you use other things for music playing)

kezia did some inter-school cross country today.  she came 6th last for her age group, but did well to even qualify.  it’s been chucking it down with rain all day, so it was amazing they still had the race

apparently there was a bit of the race which went through a river or a big puddle or something.  it was so deep it came up to the neck of one of kezia friends and up to kezia’s waist.  and it was so slippy for kids to get out that they had a couple of dad’s in there to scoop them out!

so the fact kezia even survived is good news!

i drove in to work again today (second time this week). it took less than 30 minutes door to door and the parking is as cheap as the bus.

i was at my desk at 7am to do my annual appraisal form (yawn) then headed out before lunch to an office on the north shore to give my second and final presentation to the industry group board.  And that all went very well, and they all thought my proposal was a good one.  hoorah.

seeing as i was nearly halfway home (of my 30 minute journey!) i worked from home this afternoon which was also very successful. 

whilst i was working the landlords had arranged for the estate agent to bring round a building surveyor to get an independent view of whether the house is leaky.  their guy seemed a lot more positive about the house than anyone else so that’s probably good for our landlords.  The landlord’s have also suggested they’ll let us our of our fixed term contract at the end of July (rather than end of October) so that will save us a bob or two as we’ll only be doubling up on rent/mortgage for 2 weeks rather than 3 months.

i took the girls to their swimming lessons this evening so jane could get on with her lessons. like last week i sat and read my library book on my ipad and avoided getting splashed.

this evening we watched a bit more of Ice and a little bit of dancing on ice to celebrate the fact we’re in winter.

sorry about the lack of pictures today.  too wet and busy/driving.

i sorted some of the details of our mortgage today.  you can spread your total mortgage value over a number of products, so we’ll have a chunk on an offset floating rate, and the rest spread over 3 fixed rate (of 18 months, 2 years and 3 years).  no idea how that will work out, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens!  the bank were really keen to give us money which was a bit of a worry, but on the flip side they were prepared to negotiate a bit on the rates.

and we also managed to confirm the removalists who were also prepared to negotiate on price so that’s good.  our moving date should be 16th July.

otherwise everyone is really busy and tired.

here’s a boat which was docking as i walked to work this morning.  the hotel about always reminds me of bracknell.  this morning there were loads of people looking out the window watching the cruise ship emerge from the fog.