OUCH!

I fell out with Rhiannon while walking to school this morning, so I left her to it. It's not like she really needs me to do it, since it's just end of the road and turn right. It's useful exercise and it's one to one since the rest of the brood are at another school, but if she's going to give me a gob full..

I went to an interview today. It seemed to go rather well, but then they didn't ask me very much at all and most of it was explaining what they did. They asked for some more information on some of the stuff I'd done and I agreed to go home and forward it on. We'll talk again on Tuesday, Monday being labour day.

I finally had an email from Telecom about the port 25 issue. Apparently I'm using the wrong user ID in the router. They never actually told me what the original one was supposed to be, so I can claim ignorance here. Out of the box, the standard "user" and "password" values allowed me to connect so I just of left them. Apparently one needs to append ".xadsl@xtra.co.nz" to one's username (which I chose myself) and reconnect and bingo - my email woes are now fairly and squarely my own problem.

Today was Imogen's birthday. She decided she wanted a skateboard, so we took a jaunt over to Amazon in Papamoa and scored a starter board for $125. It seems reasonably robust and the wheels have decent bearings so it ought to last and remain serviceable for quite a while. Naturally, once we got it home it was tried out by all and sundry, including Freya.

There's a lot of concrete outside our house and the house next door. It slopes down from both houses towards a drain but the side effect of this is to accelerate wheeled objects quite effectively. Thus Freya took off and hurtled towards me. Unable to stop, she stepped towards the back of the board, almost breaking my leg halfway up as the board reared up. I hobbled inside and decided to leave them to it, and Freya crying.

The Inland Revenue very kindly wrote to us and promised to pay 2/3 of our rent every week. Hurrah! Technically this is child tax credit, but it's all money. They haven't back dated it to our date of arrival, so it appears that you don't get paid for the first 6 weeks. They giveth and they taketh away: NZ Customs called to say we owed them $91.75 duty. This is all on the vacuum cleaner on account of it being "new". A tip for anyone else contemplating doing the same thing - take it out of the box, plug it in switch it on, scare the kids/cat/dog and then put it in the container. This will make it "used" and not liable to GST. Don't actually use it, or you'll get all sorts of bio-security questions to wade through. They're paranoid about importing insects etc which tend to get sucked up in vacuums which is why we didn't unpack it. Damned if you do damned if you don't it seems. On the plus side, they could see from the dates of purchase I gave for the scotch, that these were more of a "wine cellar" than anything else, so there's nothing to pay. Had I purchase two crate recently it would have been a different story entirely.

We attended an open evening at Mount Intermediate school, where Imogen will be going next term. She seemed to like it, and was particularly taken with the possibility of drum lessons and also wants to play the ukulele. The school is apparently resisting pressure to merge with the Mount college, and I can see why they want to stay separate - they have a thriving school which is well equipped with lots of space. Amalgamation would reduce this considerably and having just the two years to worry about without all the high school kids muscling seems to be better.