Don't Try This At Home

We took Rhiannon over to visit her new friend over in Papamoa this morning. It was interesting looking at their house, since we were offered it while still in the UK but declined since we weren't comfortable with taking a 12 month let on a house we'd not seen. Just as well, since the acoustics in the kitchen/dining area would have done my head in - very echoy.

I was beginning to feel a bit like a Pom on holiday since the majority of blokes seem to be wearing some sort of shorts and here I am in Levi's 501. Thus a trip to Farmers was in order where I bought a couple of knee length khaki efforts for $120.

While we were in that neck of the woods, I popped into Dick Smith's and bought a soldering iron, figuring I'd have a crack at fixing the remote control - nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that. This turned out to be rather a mistake. I managed to resolder across the broken tracks, and on first try, the remote worked. Huzzah I thought. Sadly, I soon discovered that I could turn the volume down, but not up and some of the channel buttons wouldn't work. I borrowed Di's glasses which while not exactly reading glasses did help me see what I was doing. There can be no denying that age related presbyopia is rather conspicuous these days. Di's favourite trick is apparently to double glaze herself by wearing contact lenses and glasses in order to read the paper. Alas despite the improvement in vision, I still couldn't get the other remote functions to work. It was only after the sound was turned down to almost nothing that I discovered that the freeview box remembered its setting when switched off! I had in fact made things much worse by trying to fix the damn thing. The TV now has to be turned up to full blast in order to hear the freeview box, but there's a slight danger of acoustic feed back if one inadvertently switches over to the DVD

Rhiannon's friend's parents brought her back and everything seemed to have gone well. Various invitations for sleep overs were exchanged, but apparently my warning about Rhiannon's evil trouser coughing were not well received. I spent the rest of the evening getting the evil eye.

The highlight of the evening however was a night out on the pop with Wayne. We started off in Latitude 37 before moving on to Mellick, an Irish bar where I was able to consume copious amounts of the black stuff, which after the first few mouthfuls which were a little odd (must have been the Tui) tasted just fine. It wasn't a particularly busy night, but we ended up sharing some conversations with a few characters, and we ended up outnumbering the natives with out recently acquired Canadian, Greek and Ukrainian drinking buddies. We stumbled back to Wayne's place and tried to get the radio 5 live commentary working. Alas my best efforts to find an open UK proxy failed and I left him to it.