I'm On My Way

Last Sunday I took the garage carpet to the "Transfer Station". This is what they call the council dump over here. There's no such thing as free waste disposal in New Zealand - you pay for everything you chuck away. There was quite a bit of carpet and getting it all into the car would have proved a challenge had I not savaged it with a Stanley knife first. With it all fitted into the boot, we drove to the station, on to the weighbridge, deposited the carpet in the appropriate receptacle and returned to the weighbridge 60Kg lighter. This 60Kg cost $9.80 to be rid of. Later we had V&W over for a barbie and to check out our new house. Somehow this turned into an impromptu jam session, aided and abetted by a tablature download of the Proclaimer's I'm on my way.

Di went into work on Monday - not much doing as she is not yet licensed but she came back waving her new business cards which she had been told she was not allowed to give anybody until the licence came through. I finished writing up a quote for some more work on an existing website and emailed it to the client.

Tuesday was a useful sort of day. I went to visit the guy I met at the networking meeting to show him a CMS system and allay some of his suspicions. This mini demo went well and the prices I came up with didn't seem to phase him. However as always cash flow is non-existent so it may be a couple of months before anything happens. I got back well before 12 when we were expecting the pool man to show us the ropes. He failed to show until about one-ish, and then only after a chasing phone call. The solar heating is now working - we just have to turn the valve the right way. All the electronic gubbins is apparently no longer in use. He suspected that there was a temperature controller there at some point, but it seems to have been disconnected. He also indicated that the pool level was rather low and could do with a top up. This necessitated a trip to Bunnings to buy a hose with which to fill it. It seemed like it took several hours to raise the level a miserable couple of inches. This does not bode well given that we are on a water meter.

Di was back at work on Wednesday - same story as Monday really. I got the nod on the quote and got to work. There's going to be a little bit of AJAX in there - which is nice and sexy.

Thursday morning started with Imogen being deposited at school at 6:15 for her trip to Auckland zoo. I made it back home in time to be picked up and taken to my 2nd networking meeting. Thursday was also a bit of an eye opener. We went to the pool shop to pick up some chemicals which the pool man had indicated we needed. We came away with the equipment we needed to "vacuum" the pool. This consisted of a long telescopic pole, an equally long hose, a nice bakelite plate to sit over the pump inlet ($50!) and a brush head to sit on the pole and connect the head to the plate via the hose. We've no idea exactly how much this lot comes to, as the chap said he'd bill us. Scary, really, as we don't know him at all, although he does know the pool. In fact he knows it a little too well - it needs repainting apparently. He cheerfully informed us that it's not possible to simply repaint it. It needs to be blasted by a specialist at a cost of around $3000, and then painted with $150 a tin paint. Not much change out of $5000 apparently. Try not to weep too much.

I took the opportunity to present him with a website quote since he didn't have one. We got into a discussion on the benefits of site generators etc. but at the end of the day he wasn't biting. We stopped off at Lighting Plus on the way home and bought a couple of lamps for the living room and a few energy saving bulbs to replace the 100W spot lights in the hall which get left on all night to stop the kids panicking. Diane had an appointment later in the afternoon to smarm all over some developers of some rather posh apartments, so I had to collect the girls from school and take Freya and Phoebe to their respective netball sessions. Freya's team got hammered again, like last week but this week they actually managed to score - just once. 11-1 is far better than 15-0. Finally we picked Imogen up from school at 8:30. The highlights of her trip apparently were the hippopotamus testicles and the tortoise penis. Sigh.

Friday was notable for me breaking the new pool brush. In mitigation, the plastic pin holding the (necessarily) heavy head on to the pole is something of a design fault. Returning it to the shop we were a little taken aback to have it repaired by means of a nut and bolt. Kiwi ingenuity and all that. Perhaps if the manufacturer used a bolt as opposed to a plastic pin it wouldn't have dropped off anyway. Di had a phone call saying that her licence had been approved and she is thus a pukka real estate agent. We paid V&W a call shortly afterwards and were able to assist with emptying a few beer bottles.

Saturday was a miserable day - it heaved it down and I was rather glad I didn't fill the pool up as the rain had a damn good stab at it. We had a visit from some of our new neighbours - a retired builder and his wife. Nice folks. I discovered that we seem to have used 75% of our monthly broadband data allowance, which 3 days into the month is a worry. I finally managed to get through to Mumbai or where ever Telecom's call centre is and the mailed me a more detailed analysis of the usage. It seems that between midnight and 8AM, we managed to *upload* 320Mb/hour, every hour. This is rather a good trick with all of the PCs switched off, and the router, too. It corresponds to a flat out upload of something really big, like 4 CD images or half a DVD. I suspect Monday will be spent arguing the toss about this. A little Googling suggests that there are more than a few instances of this sort of cock-up floating about. Of course they were blaming the wireless router - insinuating that the neighbours are stealing bandwidth. No - not with it switched off and WPA/PSK active on the router. And they'd have to be parked on the driveway which would be rather obvious.

Sunday Di was learning the "open home" ropes with another of the agents she works with. She seems to have acted as a lucky charm - the house in question had failed to attract any visitors for several weeks but Di's presence attracted four sets of visitors, one of whom was extremely enthusiastic. A potential sale, but sadly as she's not officially conducting the open home session there's no commission.