Howzat? Ouch!

On Friday we found our house on the Internet. We were rather annoyed to find that the pictures taken for valuation purposes, which included all our worldly goods were displayed for all to see. Di spoke to a knowledgeable friend who was of the opinion that we were within our rights to insist they were removed. This we did via email. Half an hour later, the estate agent was at the door apologising and generally being smarmy. He wanted to set up a couple of sessions where prospective purchasers could come and view the house. I didn't agree to anything there and then, needing to consult with Di who was out shopping. He was also not very complimentary about our rental agent who he accused of jumping up and down without good reason. He was insistent that it was the landlord's responsibility to tell us of the sale and that even though the bank was now the landlord that they weren't responsible. No one seems to be able to give us a straight answer on this.

Di and Vicky went out to the Rain Bar to celebrate the birthday of a mutual friend. As Sam was at home, it seemed like a good plan to nip over to Wayne and demolish a few beers. Strangely, Wayne concurred that this was indeed a very good plan and thus we spent several hours staring at the stars, drinking beer and making erudite observations on the state of the universe. One of these lead to me accepting a request to umpire at a school cricket match on Saturday. I duly accepted.

Rather worryingly, Saturday arrived with a thick head. It was worrying because we honestly hadn't drunk that much. Maybe "NZ Pure" isn't as pure as it claims to be. The match was due to start at 12, and so I got a move on straight away and swatted up on the various umpiring signals that I would need to know. Some I already new, but others such as "run short" and "dead ball" where new to me. The match was a 40 over affair between Mount College and Tauranga boys. I took the first innings and made it through to lunch without making any bad decisions. However the innings was not without incident. Each team was allowed to field one adult. Tauranga boys had such an adult, who was a little bit on the competitive side which was rather painful when he decided to play an aggressive hook shot straight to square leg. The square leg umpire gathered the ball in his ample belly. It bloody stung, I can tell you.

After lunch I tried my hand at scoring. It was rather more frantic than umpiring, since there are zillions of boxes to fill in and not much room. I made rather a hash of it, which wasn't helped by 3 no balls and 5 wides in the first over. After the drinks break I resumed my umpiring duties, presiding over a spell of hostile bowling in which four wickets fell to one bowler, who apparently played for a county team. One of these wickets was a plumb LBW I had no issue giving out. Tauranga eventually won by about 30 runs, bowling out the Mount in 35 overs.

After all this fun, I headed home where Di had prepared a BBQ to which Wayne and Vicky were invited. We watched the sun go down while stuffing our faces.

Sunday we didn't do much. We kept off the beach because of the tsunami warning. I did manage to get another AJAX website thingy working though, which was nice. Rhiannon lurked in the mount and had to be retrieved a little later than she wanted, although it was quite late enough as it was a school night. A torrent of bile was flung my way all the way home. I love her so much.