The Lights Are On

The kids went rock pooling on Sunday and managed to accumulate 20 shrimps, 4 crabs, 3 different kinds of fish and a lobster. This was probably the best haul to date.

Monday was a rather illuminating day. I ended up at Wayne's place since the kids had wandered down there and as Vicky & Di had gone off to Zumba he was going nuts with them swarming around his feet. He'd fitted new lights to replace the hideous chandeliers but sadly they weren't working. I had a look, and found the subtle misconnection much to the chagrin of Wayne who claimed to have tried every possible way of wiring them up. I declined to make the obvious point and took him up on his offer to watch yesterday's F1 race (rather boringly won by Ferrari) on the shiny new Sky box. When the girls returned we nipped down to the beach to check out the surf. Alas it was virtually non existent so we both went home.

I spent most of Tuesday wrestling with the steaming pile that is Internet Explorer 7, working on a piece of web design. I might have been less annoyed if all versions worked the same way but they don't. It's even more fun testing, since you can't run different versions of IE on the same machine without severe aggravation. Thankfully, http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/ is at hand.

Wayne rack me at around 5 PM and insisted we go surfing since his new board was rattling around in his garage. I took my humble boogie board and we headed to the beach, which had a 1-2 foot surf rolling in. Wayne seems to have got the hang of surfing. I gave it a go but sadly I wasn't even able to lie on the board and paddle it out, let alone stand on the thing. The fact that it was submerged with me on top probably explains quite a bit. Then again I'm probably just useless. I did manage to catch some decent waves on the boogie board though. Joyce and Michael were in residence when I returned. They've invited us to the pub next Tuesday which seems like a splendid idea.

We looked at a few houses on Wednesday. The distinct lack of job opportunities in this neck of the woods for a man of my talents makes me wonder if property development might be the way to go. We looked at a few that were in need of renovation. One was quite interesting, but the others were in rather naff locations which we didn't fancy at all. Maybe it was the rain that made them look worse than they really were.

Imogen went off to camp on Matakana island for three days. She somehow forgot to take the cakes that Di had baked and that she was supposed to share. Also, her favourite teddy got left behind and has since been adopted by Phoebe. All hell will break loose when she returns and wants him back.

Later we went for a meal with some friends of Di's. We went to "A Taste of Asia" in the mount. I'm still not sure if it was a Thai or Chinese restaurant but it was nothing to shout about, cuisine wise. The menu was rather amusing, with several amusingly title dishes. We ordered our "Kang Bang" for four to start with. It seemed only appropriate that we all participate. All the main courses were rather heavy on the vegetables and light on the meat. The wine list was however the most depressing thing. It had a reasonable selection, but the inclusion of phonetic spellings of all the wines was simply very sad. We stuck with beer, rather than order Sham Pain or Shar Doh Nay. I kid you not.