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everyone’s pretty exhausted in the simpson family household this evening.  i fell asleep on the bus on the way home which is quite impressive given the rodeo like movements as it lurches round corners.  i woke up in time to get off though.

meanwhile jane has been unpacking further and we’ve discovered the loft roof space (our only loft space) is all space and no storage which is a shame.  but there’s plenty of space in the garage itself so things will live lower down instead.

the girls are still having fun at school but were also very tired.  it’s probably the weather and stuff like that.

i also found out i need to go to wellington for the day on thursday.  that’s not a problem, but it is weird only knowing you might be commuting by plane a day or two before it happens.

and did i mention i’m off to Sydney on Saturday ?  I’ve go a conference next Monday and Tuesday there so thought i’d go out a day or two early to do some preliminary site seeing in preparation for a family trip at some point.  it’s only just over ‘the ditch’ (3 hours away).

right, get to bed everyone or you’ll be tired tomorrow.  see ya

i promised you a picture of some spirulina and here it is.  i have a spirulina smoothie at work most mornings. Despite looking like swamp food it’s actually quite tasty.  Although now i’ve done a quick google and found out it’s actually algae, i’m not so sure i still like the idea.

Anyroad up, we went to a local cafe after church this morning with some new friends from church which was really nice (and where i got my spirulina drink).

Then it was back home for some more box unpacking before heading out for afternoon tea at one of jane’s friend’s birthday drop in/out type things.  we had a really good time and it was good to meet the people that jane’s been hanging out with during the day.  i was beginning to wonder if she was just making up an elaborate group of imaginary friends, but they seemed real enough.  They also go to the church.

We’re back home now.  The finishing unpacking touches are being put to esther and kezia’s rooms before we start our sunday evening telly watching.  It’s now become traditional to watch Sky+’d recordings of Coast (to remind us of the mother-land) and The Goodies (to remind us, of, er, the 1970s).  The Goodies is a fairly typical example of British TV as seen by Kiwis.

Right, best be off.  We’re putting the bins out for tomorrow before telly starts and I’m being called.  See ya.

I owe you some pictures, so here they are.

jane too these pictures of the removal men emptying the container.

jane takes a good photo – and her dad in particular will be pleased about the lack of wonky angles 😉

and below are pictures from our picnic at the beach on friday evening

and the family game of frisby

finally, here’s the flat stanley chldren at long bay beach

I’ve found my desktop computer, and managed to reconnect the various hard drives and backups, and we’re now back in business. hoorah.  Hopefully normal and family blogging will be back to its usual speed rather than laptop slowness.

today has been mostly unpacking boxes, although we had some excitement along the way.

i woke up this morning to the sound of esther happily singing away as she rustled and unwrapped her bedroom items.  I then got to work constructing computers etc.

then late morning we went for afternoon tea at the new house of the people who used to live here, which was really nice.  we could also pick their brains about how things work and why things go clonk in the night !  we stayed there for a couple of hours then whizzed back here for lunch.

we saw these fab post boxes on the way

we’ve still got cockroaches in our letter box, so kezia has been less enthusiastic about extracting the post each day.  it’s like some japanese game show thrusting your hand in to a writhing mass of the unknown and coming out with the booby prize of a coupon for 10% off a pizza.   (actually it’s not that bad.  i think there’s only one or two in there and you can see what you are doing during day light hours)

after lunch we caught the end of Art in the Park just a few minutes up the path behind our house.  I’m thinking i might try and do a stall next year.  we’ll have to see how that works out.

then it was back here for more unpacking which carried on past and beyond bedtimes.  we did stop to watch Robots on DVD (and i used the sitting time to replace a load of plugs on the various appliances we’re beginning to unearth)

tomorrow is church and then afternoon tea at one of jane’s friend’s i think.  and no doubt lots more unpacking of boxes.

when we’re done, i promise we’ll give you a little guided tour of the house by video.

right, enough from me as usual.  see ya

it’s been a busy few days for me.  i’ve got plenty to tell you and even a sound file to dazzle you with, but that will have to wait until another day as spare blogging time has been eaten up with box unpacking and paper/cardboard based chaos.  i’ll write the words today and pop the photos in later …

i managed to miss the delivery excitement by being in wellington for work for two days.  it involved a stay in a rather tired hotel, but i got upgraded to a suite so had a fantastic room with a fantastic view

[photo will be inserted here!]

This was the ‘lounge area’

i went out in the evening to an experimental film festival which sounded a lot better than it was.  in the end it was more like an amateur music concert where the musicians made up for their lack of talent with enthusiasm and long hair.

the finale was an electro-noise jam which was quite something to watch.  i was expecting distorted guitars but we had people playing two clarinets at the same time whilst hitting the body of a guitar with a stick.  you had to be there to believe it, but seeing as you weren’t (or at least i didn’t see you if you were) I recorded it for you:

[insert sound clip]

i gave a couple of presentations to work colleagues on Thursday which went very well i think, then caught the plane back to auckland.  i then did a geocache by the airport before heading over to the planetarium for a preview show and then a look at jupiter (and it’s moon) down a telescope.  And i also saw the eath’s moon down a telescope which was quite bumpy.  oh yes.

[maybe add a photo?]

i finally got home just before midnight, but it was fine as i worked from home today (friday)

however, it was kezia’s bring your dad to school morning, so i just popped in for the first 30 minutes. luckily i managed to slope off just as ‘morning fitness’ was starting.  i was very impressed though – out of the whole class there were only about 3 or 4 dads not represented !

late afternoon (after school and work) we went to long bay for a picnic on the beach.  it’s so close our pizza picnic was still hot as we ate it.  it feels like things are warming up here now which is nice.

today scored 12 out of 10 on the official UV scale which is well in to ‘extreme’ territory.  Kezia’s also been learning about tornadoes and happily informed us that a tornado blew down one of the local churches in the 1990s.  so that’s another thing to add to kezia’s worry list.

anyway, this evening has been spent unpacking boxes, rebuliding things, rewiring plugs and generally making things incredibly messy.  it’s amazing how the contents of the boxes expand when they are released from their packing paper.

right.  bed time.  i promise to slot in some photos over the weekend.  possibly when i get my desk top computer up and running again.

tomorrow promises morning tea with the people who used to live in this house before we did and an art festival in the park which our house backs on to. should be some fun !

see yas all.   dave

I haven’t found the kettle yet! It must have been in one of the last boxes to be packed, but doesn’t seem to be in anything marked kitchen.

Unpacking seems quite difficult as I don’t really know where to put things as the room lay out is so different. I need to wait for Dave’s input.

Today, we had to go shoe shopping as Esther’s trainers have split. No Clarks in NZ. I did find a shop which measured the length of her feet and the lady pressed Esther’s toes, but only because I asked her to.

Esther has gone into ladies’ sizes so no more velcro to do up her trainers. I have taught her to tie her laces. I feel a bad mother that she reached the age of 10 before knowing how to do this.

Hi Chumz,

no photos today – although I did take some, but I don’t know how to upload them. Well, the people came to fetch the hire furniture today, closely followed by the removal company and our container. There was a humourless foreman called Errol and 3 lads who were quite jolly. They tended to have a more casual attitude to our worldly goods then I did and I had to work hard at being civil when one of them dropped a box labelled glasses. I haven’t opened all of that one yet. At least all our stuff actually fitted inside the house, I was a bit worried that it wouldn’t.

In the afternoon MAF the biological police came along. Victor, our inspector, told me right away that all horse items have to be sent away to be cleaned and that is mandatory. No-one had told us that – if I’d known I wouldn’t have bothered cleaning it so well, so I phoned the lady who had been dealing with us to ask her who would pay for this. Hopefully not us! She also said it was a bit arbitrary this mandatoryness re horsey stuff. He also found 3 dead leaves in the girls’ craft stuff – I’d had no idea they  had anything like that there. He had to take them away too – but I don’t want them back.

Everything that I had cleaned passed the test! Then Victor asked how many riding hats there were. 2 I replied. There was only one in the box. Victor tells me he will be there for 15 more minutes and if I haven’t found it by then, they would have to come back out to collect it, which would be even more expensive. There followed a frantic search in all the boxes labelled “shed” to find the hat, which I did. Phew. Meanwhile someone came along to do a quote for tidying up the garden.

Fortunately, my new friend Debbie (pronounced Dibbie, though not by me) picked the girls up from school and took them back to her house for an hour or so, so they missed the riding hat fun. Debbie has been like an angel sent for us. She had lent us some bedding and some toys and when she came back with the girls this avo, she had brought some dinner for us too. And some one else lovely from church is going to bring us our dinner tomorrow night.  How brilliant is that!

Currently we have the kitchen table and the dining table in the same room. The removal guys were quite confused about that.

The girls are very pleased to have their own stuff around them, I know Dave will be pleased to have his computer back. I fell bad about moaning about the amount of dust left here, when I saw the state of some of our stuff. I am glad to have it all here, but predict that I will feel a bit sad now, as having it all here really means that this is it, here we are on the other side of the world. Ho hum.

Just looked to see what Dave had written about today and seen the answer is nothing!

So no photos today. We had some friends round for what the Kiwis call “Afternoon tea”. That’s tea and a biscuit after school. They don’t seem to go in for feeding the guest children their dinner and sending them home after that, the invitees go home at about 5. We had 5 children here and 4 ladies. I only offered tea because I can’t do nice coffee, but I did have 2 types and some nice cakage!

The weather was quite hot this afternoon.

Container arriving tomorrow.

Byee

i got the bus in the centre of town this morning to see if i could see our container ship at the dock. there is a space for a big container ship to park up right next to the bus station but there was a cruise ship nearby instead (the thing that looks like a hotel), so i suspect they decided to park them down the way a little so as not to spoil their view

anyway, i walked up and down the front a little before eventually giving up, as the boat must have been parked further out so it couldn’t be seen from the road.  how inconsiderate i thought, and got another bus up the hill to work

as i was on the bus on the way home this evening i spotted our container ship as we went over the harbour bridge.  it’s the one with the subtle ‘nyk line’ written on it

and here’s an update on the mystery object which has been further built a little further.  should be easier to guess now !

Well, the weather wasn’t so great today, so we did some geocaching in the afternoon. These woods looked quite English.

Here is an interesting spiders web thing. It felt like plastic to touch it.

Here is a treasure that was in one of the caches.

And here is what we found at another. Don’t worry, it isn’t real.

Have you heard of the Flat Stanley project. You have to make a flat version of yourself and send it round the world to have adventures. We have some friends in Boston, who sent us their flat people, so now we must ensure they have an adventure. Here they are outside our house – I know that isn’t that exciting, but you have to start somewhere.