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i didn’t mention yesterday that we were going out for a surprise 25th wedding anniversary party for our good friends and down-the-street-neighbours debbie and warren.  they’ve recently started reading this blog so i didn’t want to spoil the surprise (about the party – i suspect they already knew they have been married for 25 years, or at least debbie did)  😉

anyway, it was excellent of course and we all had pictures taken in front of a nice bit of curtain with speech bubbles.  great idea.  (pictures stolen from tracey – hope she doesn’t mind).

today was back to work for me.  highlight of the day (beyond my 112 emails which wasn’t bad for me) was a new printer being installed by my desk to replace the old one.  little things like that make all the difference to an otherwise mundane day in the modern office.

then this evening we had a home group social where debbie and warren (again), laura and thomas came round to eat the same cakes as last night but in a different location. it was jolly good.

esther went with her friend for a horse riding lesson this morning and loved it which is a bit of a worry.  and kezia bought two pairs of shoes which is also a worry.  and jane went coffeeing with her chum fleur.

on day 2 we got up early, defrosted the car then drove in to town to go to a church service in the cathedral

unknow(e)n to us, it was a family service involving a story about noah’s ark

although noah seemed to be wearing joseph’s cloak and the main characters were the bats

it was a bit of a morality tail rather than anything particularly christian

although no one was offended which i guess was the idea

the cathedral choir were involved too – here they are singing the theme from titanic

my favourite character was the octopus.

we went back to the church for traditional sung evensong later that evening and the octopus did the sermon.  again, managing to say not much.

here’s the version of ‘all things bright and beautiful’ which you can use in your own devotional times 😉

bit of a chilly one this morning bro.

a (hopefully) rare frost overnight made it very chilly this morning

 

esther and i went to the local dairy (mini supermarket/corner shop) for some milk and to take a few photos

 

the creek behind our house hadn’t frozen, but i think that’s because it’s tidal salty sea water

 

but it was fun to see all these exotic plants all frosted up

esther and i had a really nice walk and the milk was a bonus

  

church was good this morning (and warm) so we then headed off to mitre 10 (local DIY shop) to buy three more electric heaters in an attempt to stave off the freeze inside our house.  we’ll let you know how that goes

then this afternoon we spotted a couple of tuis in the garden.  Tuis are much loved new zealand birds and it was lovely to have a pair in the garden

they seemed to like the flowers on this plant

and i decided now was the time to put up my tui feeder.  so i did.  i now have to add some sugar water for them to drink and we’ll see what happens

no wonder they don’t have teeth if all they eat is sugar (sounds a bit like my diet too)

i went off to get my big camera for some better shots, but of course they’d flown off by the time i got back.  ho hum.

and here’s something from today’s paper.  a 72 year old woman saying facebook is ‘pretty wild’.  so there you go

see you on facebook chums !

 

we had an early start on saturday morning to get our flight which went at 6.45am or something.  it’s an hour’s drive to the airport and we needed to check in so we left about 4.30 (it’s all a bit vague writing this a week later). 

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anyway, check in was quick and easy as it is for domestic flights and then we headed to the business lounge which i could get in to for free thanks to my frequent traveller card.  i can usually take a friend in when i’m travelling, so just for this trip i let jane be my friend.   And the girls got in as well as they looked cute (i recon)

 

the girls were excited as this was their first trip on a plane since our big journey.  esther and i sat together doing the air new zealand quiz which appeared on the screens above the seats.  We also watched new zealand slip by underneath us, and once we were in the south island we started to see the mountains.

people warned us christchurch was going to be cold, being half way down the south island.  it was cold, but in a nice crisp british way, rather than a soggy damp auckland way which was really nice actually.  especially as we’d all got our best thick coats on.

we then picked up our jucy rentals hire car for which we’d paid the extra so if we crashed it to pieces we wouldn’t need to pay anything.  that makes the check in and out really simple as they don’t care what scratches it had on before or after you rented it.  And it somehow makes driving (and parking) more liberating !  the car was a toyota corolla which is the same as my normal car, only this one was a manual one which was a novelty and i had to remember how to drive with gears like a grown up, rather than the funny automatic dodgem i usually drive.

we were due to meet an ex-colleague i worked with a few years ago when at BSkyB in town, so that was our first destination.  unfortunately it was only when i turned our satnav on that i realised i’d forgotten to load on the south island maps, so all we could see was a white screen with an arrow and a few scattered geocaches which i had managed to add.  (it was a quick job to load on the maps which i downloaded from the excellent NZ Open GPS project in the evening when we finally made it to our holiday house)

so, instead jane navigated us there with the excellent set of maps she’s brought along.  despite the excellent instructions, the combination of manual gears, an unknown town, big coats, a car stacked full of suitcases and bags, the early start and a lack of agreement on which side of the car was left and which was right made for a more sonically challenging journey than anyone present would have liked.

still we made it on time and had a lovely hour sat outside in a sunny court yard chatting with matthew whilst eating chips. the cafe we met was in the art centre which contains loads of little arty shops and was excellent.

then we got the tourist tram round the town and hopped (hoped?) off at the cathedral

at the cathedral they had a mobile organ which must make for all sorts of japes during the service. 

if you don’t like the hymn they are playing you could just push them out the back door ?

the weather forecast for the week was looking pretty bad so we took the opportunity to climb the tower to get a bird’s eye view of christchurch

 

outside the church there were some maori singers who were drumming up trade for a show

there seemed to be less of a maori influence in christchurch where most of the street and place names were british in origin rather than being maori words.

there was some big chess going on outside the church too, even on rainy days

this is where we got our weiners.

then mid afternoon we headed over to our holiday house to check in.  we had low expectations of a warm accommodation given our experience in rotorua earlier in the year. 

however, it was really warm and really lovely thanks to a heat pump (we were vigilant to strange noises)

it was also within 2 minutes walk from 2 identical supermarkets which was a bit strange, and our neighbours were a nightmare of noiseyness between 11pm and 7am for the first two and last night, and we had to wash all the crockery and cutlery before we started) but other than that it was all excellent.

so there you go.  the end of day 1.

to be continued …

 

hey, guess what guys ! we’re back.  I’ll do the obligatory day by day recount of our Christchurch holiday over the next few days in parallel with the daily updates.

but for now, can you guess what’s going on in the photos above which haven’t involved any fancy camera work or digital editing ?

(and the weird thing is jane thinks the bottom picture looks like her, but i think it looks like me)

we’re off on holiday for the week – normal updates should resume around the 11th July.  See ya

excitement today was my photo shoot being cancelled at the last minute meaning i had more time to do some actual work which turned out to be very handy given it was my last day at work for a week.

at 10.30 we went over to see a couple of colleagues who work in the access network part of the business so they could show us inside some street cabinets (exciting or what!!!).  when we arrived we were surprised to see them dragging one out of the lift.  but this was only the demo one and we were soon outside looking at a proper one.

we all had to wear orange vests because we were standing on the pavement.  despite this one of our guides managed to walk really hard in to a glass door and drew blood !  During the day i also got some really good feedback from the seminar yesterday so i felt i’d ended the week on a high.

anyway, it was the girls that did fantastic today as kezia came second in the ‘take a picture on the way to school’ competition in the middle team.  and esther came runner up in the older team.  you can see their photos here.  Kezia won all sorts of goodies for her photo.  esther won some lollies for her photo and she won a prize for something else too but i’ve forgotten what that was

 

they also had their first violin lesson with their new teacher and swimming lessons so it’s been a busy day.

and now we’re busy packing as we’re off on holiday to Christchurch for the week and we’re leaving home before 5am. 

We’ll probably not update the blog whilst we’re away but we’ll give you a day by day run down when we’re back.

see ya

bit of an exhausting day.  i didn’t seem to go to bed until midnight, and it took me ages to get to sleep.  then i was up at 5am to get a taxi to the airport for a daytrip to wellington.

as usual the view out of the window was quite stunning.  here’s mount taranaki out of the airplane window. 

it really does look that spookily round as per the google satellite view:

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Anyway, the reason i was in wellington was to take my very old boss down there to give a lunchtime seminar to various industry bods.  which i did.  and it was all good.  then we came back

   

hopefully we’ll get a nice view of this again on saturday morning when we fly down to christchurch for our holiday

meanwhile back in auckland the girls had a short day as this afternoon was parents evening/afternoon.  jane is happy to report that both the girls are doing tremendously at school, and kezia’s teacher didn’t even realise she’d skipped ahead nearly a year when we moved planet which is good.

 

jane’s now gone out to crafty chucks and i’m off to beddy-byes

definitely one of those days.  jane was a parent helper at a choir course/trip thing at esther’s school where various schools got together to rehearse a massive choir thing and also for each school to perform a song for other schools.  apparently it was a bit stressful with chaos and noise everywhere.  but everyone survived.   jane’s out at her grown ups choir this evening so i didn’t see her very much today – i got the message about the stressful day via the medium of text message.  very modern.

i’ve just finished a work call (it’s 10pm) to ex-colleagues in the UK who are doing some work for us, and tomorrow morning i’m off early to Wellington as i’ve arranged for another british ex-colleague to present a lunchtime seminar to a load of lawyers.  i’m quite looking forward to it actually, although the pressure is on to make it worth people’s while.  And that means encouraging a decent debate after the talk.  We’ll see.

i was also asked to do another photo assignment at work, but that’s in auckland tomorrow so i can’t do it which is a shame.  although i am doing the MD and some interviewer off the telly on Friday morning.  and there’s also some interest in using this photo for something as it shows our new work building at the end of the fat rainbow !

i got up at 4am today to forward an email from the UK to my boss, and on the way back to bed i spotted a cockroach which i managed to catch and dispose silently which was impressive seeing as i’m a squealy girl when it comes to cockroaches. [no offence to actual squealy girls]

anyway, the result was i slept through my alarm and ended up getting a bus 15 minutes later than i would normally, and because it was a different bus i got off at a different stop so i could walk past the fruit shop, and saw this fantastic view thanks to a puddle on a bench.  The photos are straight out of the camera without any colour processing (just a bit of cropping).  i’m quite pleased with the results !

anyway, another really busy day for me, which was good as it whizzed past.  Highlight was jane coming to visit me for lunch (which i seem to have not photographed unfortunately).  Then this evening we’ve had home group which was even more random than usual so plenty of smiles.

jane’s day involved meeting various chums and having a nice time. The rest of her time was spent printing out words on to giant pieces of coloured paper for the church kids.  The girls had a good day at school and enjoyed friends round after school.

that’s all i have to say about today.  good bye.