Where Am Dat Cookin' Fat?

Freya's netball team has played several more matches. Sadly their initial success was just that, and they've lost every single one since then apart from the last three, when they really got it together. These matches were their first matches after Freya attended an all-day training camp and actually got to meet some of the Silver Ferns. Freya is now playing centre rather than goal attack. This was rather an unfortunate change, since I'd been on about getting a practice hoop for several weeks and the moment I buy one, she switches to a non-scoring position. To be fair, she's been playing centre even when wearing the GA vest, so the change was rather inevitable. Watching her play, the level of determination is awesome, and you can certainly tell that she has many siblings. She's like a mongoose on speed when it comes to the toss-up, rarely loosing.

Not only has Freya begun to excel on the netball court, she's turning into a rather useful runner. The school organised a cross country event, and Freya managed to come third in her year. Phoebe wasn't far behind in 5th. Freya's performance was such that she's been persuaded by the very enthusiastic sports coordinator to put in some extra practice and enter the local schools event. She managed 8th in this, and would I think have done better had she not gone for the final push a little too early.

Imogen has also taken part in her school's cross country (actually, along the beach so not really country at all), and managed to come 8th in her year. The top ten are allegedly going to be doing something else later. There may even be a dad-daughter training session at some point.

Rhiannon's sporting prowess couldn't be more limited, however. She was extremely proud of her school report which gave her excellence for everything with just the occasional merit, but exceptionally proud of the "not achieved" grades she got for every aspect of physical education.

Craig has decided he can't stick living with us again, and has moved on. This was I suspect due in part to my realisation that he hadn't been paying his housekeeping since he got back. I'd made an effort not to get on his case about anything when he came back, but this probably wasn't wise since in retrospect. He's now paying more money to live in a house with a broken window. Good luck, matey.

Some of our friends decided they were fed up renting, and were insistent on buying a house. Di thought she might get a sale out of it, but after a lot of toing and froing they plumped for a new build. They also paid more than Di suggested they should have, and we were interested to note that the builder reduced prices by $10k the following week. Ho hum.

Wayne and Vicky have decided to move over to Welcome Bay, since the kids are going to school over there, and they're both paranoid about tsunami. Because they hadbeen renting a furnished place, they had to start acquiring the usual household bits and bobs. Wayne roped me into helping him move a fridge/freezer he'd bought from TradeMe and store it in the garage. We got into a conversation about some of the remarkably good stuff you can get from TradeMe and Wayne went off on one about the possibility of making a tidy living buying and selling items. This prompted me to remark that if he wasn't careful he'd end up being a fridge magnate.

Work wise I seem to be getting a little busier. A few referrals are coming my way and I now have a semi permanent subcontract position which requires me to supervise a bunch of Indian developers as well as several kiwis and basically be the focal point for the customer. This could I am told result in up to 30 hours a week. I've picked up another customer - a church website which someone else can no longer support. There is talk of a monthly retainer and that nothing much happens for 6 months at a time. Clearly the Lord works in mysterious ways, but not as mysterious as the three separate coding styles in the home brewed CMS it's running.

Talking of home brew, the wine has been bottled. Finding bottles that weren't of the screw top variety proved something of a challenge, but there were several Jacob's Creek sparkling wine bottles lurking in the recycling which fitted the bill rather nicely. $10 spent on a corking device made short work of inserting the cork, and I now have 5 bottles of Château les Jezzers ageing nicely.

I have been under pressure for sometime to get a dog. Thus far I have been stalwart in my defences and we are still dogless. Di has however managed to acquire a moggy. There was no consultation, it just appeared one afternoon when I went out. It was apparently left behind by tenants who were neighbours of one of Di's friends. The SPCA were apparently completely full and their response was to hand over a voucher for the vet to check it out and have it seen to. The vet duly made two if the unkindest cuts and sent Di on her way with a free bag of "new patient" food.

Leo is a slightly useless tom cat of about 18 months old. Very fluffy and currently quite smelly on account of his recent gonad separation experience. He seems mostly house trained, or rather conservatory trained for that is where we've posted the litter tray, and isn't averse to being picked up and made a fuss of, but not for too long.

I have a trip back to the UK planned for August and as we've been here nearly two years now, we needed to get our visas updated so that I'd be allowed back in to the country. Or so we thought. The wording on the website is rather confusing, claiming that you need to apply if you've spent 184 days of each of two consecutive years in New Zealand. We duly got all out photos done (fortunately a friend with a decent camera was able to produce these far cheaper than the $8 each we would otherwise have been looking at) and sent of the forms + the $160 fee.

After a couple of weeks we got a call from immigration. Apparently we did not need to reapply because we hadn't been resident for two years. It's the date of the permit stamp in your passport that's the important thing here, not the visa sticker. The guy explained that all he could do was add another 12 months travel extension to the visa and told us we could apply for an unrestricted visa on or after the 2nd anniversary of our initial residence permit being granted. The fee had already been collected from the credit card and refunds were not possible apparently, so we accepted the 12 month extension.

The Return of The Prodigal Son

Craig finally managed to blow his car up. It's taken just over a year, but it's finally died. I'm actually quite impressed that something that sounded like a bag of spanners in a spin dryer kept going for quite so long, particularly as it was getting through four litres of oil a fortnight. This episode was accompanied by the misappropriation of a bicycle and an unusually large number of visits, considering the relative immobility, discussing the "options". Apparently it's a rare limited edition model which means that a ready supply of engines is in short supply. Various schemes to install SOHC rather than DOHC engines were hatched, none of which received parental approval (don't expect the exhaust and engine management to fit/work). Staggeringly, a few days later, a local scrap yard acquired an engine from a rear ended write off. $350 secured it. Fitting it took more of a challenge, even with Craig's landlord's engine hoist. A mobile mechanic was required to bolt various bits into place, and the thing coughed into life, but more the sort of life one expects of a 40-a-day asthmatic. Another couple of weeks and several visits to discuss possible reasons for its non/intermittent starting came and went. Eventually I towed it down to Pit Stop in the mount and got them to look at it. They diagnosed a dodgy distributor and a couple of other ignition related parts, and off it went.

By all accounts, the performance was much improved, and tales of derring-do and 200KPH were bandied about. Deciding to quit while ahead, Craig stuck an ad on TradeMe, and managed to offload it for $2000. That's actually more than he originally paid, notwithstanding the $1000 for engine and fitment thereof.

Having sold the car, Craig decided to change jobs, since the place he was working was continually cutting back the hours. He succeeded in landing a new job reasonably quickly, but this necessitated a.....car to get to and from it. Eyes role skyward at the timing of it all. Thus we set out to find another car, despite my advice of using a bicycle for a month or two (it is only 7k there) and saving up fro something decent. We ended up looking at a slightly scruffy Toyota Celica which was acquired for exactly the same money as the old Honda was sold for.

The new job worked out quite well, but the domestic arrangements were becoming rather fraught, and when a fourth resident appeared in the house, but the utility bills continued to be apportioned in thirds, Craig returned home. It took the landlord three days to notice.

It's a good job that the job is working out OK, because Stig Jr managed to clock another brace of speeding fines, and as a result has no money to speak of, and has to drive everywhere like a monk for fear of loosing his licence. No licence means no job so a double whammy if he overdoes it.

Not content with this, someone reversed into him with a fair amount of force while he was queueing for petrol. The driver gave a false name and address and of course wasn't insured but the police in conjunction with the insurance company were able to trace the culprit through the number plate. The garage has CCTV of the incident and thus Craig shouldn't have to pay a penny towards the repairs. Something to be said for fully comp insurance.

Di now has another couple of sales to add to her total, having sold a pair of houses on the same section to a single buyer. The income is more than useful, as I seem to be going backwards. Various invoices remain outstanding which would go a long way to resolving some of this, and steps may need to be taken in that department.

We were given a rather large quantity of grapes by one of our neighbours, and then another large bunch my another. They didn't taste that great, but a little research indicated that they might make decent wine, if I could find a few more. I went back to the neighbour's garden, since he'd disappeared on another two month excursion to the south island, and pinched what was left - another five pounds or so. The sugar content wasn't quite what I'd hoped, and quite a bit of sugar needed to be added to make the original gravity up to 1100. Fermentation went like stink for about a week, and then seemed to stop almost immediately. The potion is currently sitting in a demijohn, and once I've collected a few bottles, I'll bottle it.

Phoebe managed to spill an entire bottle of blue food colouring over the kitchen cupboard, walls and floor while endeavouring to make her custard turn green. She tried to clean it up herself, but made it worse and then just shut the cupboard, which meant that after I'd cleaned it up, opening the cupboard resulted in the remaining contents of the bottle emptying themselves out and the whole cycle starting again. Custard will be yellow from now on.

The kids are back at school again, which is a relief. Freya was a little reluctant to take part in netball this term, because it was on a Saturday morning and it would apparently interfere with her "plans". He former teacher persuaded her by pretending that the team was short of players. Last year, the team, with the exception of a couple of girls one of whom was Freya, were rather girly and not quite with it and they got hammered mercilessly by nearly every team they played. Perhaps the constant substitution of the oversubscribed team and the frequent alternation of playing positions didn't help. This time however, they all game out fighting and showing plenty of aggression, particularly Freya who was instrumental in the 8-3 victory. Playing goal attack, she scored two goals and was frequently running back to defend and making good interceptions. No surprise that she ended up with the player of the day award.

Back on the Blog

So, here we are, three months since the last entry. It was I suppose somewhat inevitable that the frequency of entries would lapse a little when things settled down into more of a routine. It's also the case that when one farts about with websites all day, the last thing you really want to do is fart about some more later on, even if it is just adding content. Looking back, I see our last entry was just before Christmas, so I guess it makes sense to pick up from there.

Christmas eve was rather "awesome". We decided to have a BBQ, and thought what the hell, and rang round a few folks. Most of them turned up, and quite a few jumped in the pool. A damn fine evening was had by all and I have a suspicion that we might have to actually organise something for next year. Christmas day passed off OK. Another BBQ - but nobody fell out and the kids managed to get on with each other.

Di has switched agencies and took her listing with her. She managed to sell it which was a relief to the household budget. Not a lot of people seem to want to focus on web sites over the summer/Christmas holiday, so my modest income dropped somewhat rapidly. Di has also managed to list a few other properties and sold one of those within a couple of weeks. It does look as if the market is improving at the moment, with the Mount properties selling at realistic prices. The quid pro quo is that Papamoa has stagnated.

One night we were laying in bed, and all we could here was some rather loud music from a party happening at the end of the road. It was 1:30 AM, so I thought it not unreasonable to ask them to turn it down a bit. Bad move, space cadet. It turned out that the house in question was occupied by maoris, most of whom were worse for wear having been on the pop for rather a while. Despite being polite, I got something of a hostile response (although the music did get turned down) and I had to leg it PDQ with insults of f***ing white pig (Pakeha), go back to your own country etc. following me down the road. It wasn't just insults that followed - several of them took it upon themselves to stagger along too, but they eventually lost interest when one of the grandmothers reigned them in.

The new school year started back in February, which required the compulsory photo of the usual suspects. As usual there was an amount of non co-operation, but this one came out rather well, mainly because one of them farted causing all the grumpy faces to loose control and giggle. Not long after term started, we held a joint birthday party for Phoebe and Freya. 20+ girls and a swimming pool makes for a vast amount of noise, not least from the pool pump from which the most enormous gob of hair had to be fished out since it makes it through all the filter into the impeller causing a rather unpleasant throbbing sound.

Imogen got herself a paper round - delivering the BOP times six days a week. She's taken to doing this on the roller blades she got for her birthday. Sadly it appears that they're not meant for any serious mileage, since she managed to wear the brake out inside 3 months. Needless tosay the shop deosn't stock spare parts, but in the end other parts such as the straps started to give up, so we took them back for an exchange. Rhiannon does half of the paper round and they share the cash. The downside to all the newspapers is that everyone's hands seem to be rather grubby, and I've begun to doubt the wisdom of painting all the internal walls white, such are the number of finger marks that appear everywhere.

Phoebe has finally lost most of her front teeth. She lost one months ago, but three more came out over a three week period, and the tooth fairy was extremely busy. She was less impressed at being likened to a great white shark though.

The girls have started a caterpillar collection, which threatened briefly to take over the conservatory. The monarch butterfly is a rather splendid, four inch wingspan variety that is very common in NZ. Its caterpillars love the "swan plants", which they have decimated. Fortunately most of them have now pupated and even begun to hatch, which means that we might actually get some of the conservatory to ourselves.

We've had the "pleasure" of Kylie a few more times recently. She seems to want to play musical beds, eschewing sleeping with Di in favour of various girls. Except Rhiannon, who will have nothing to do with the mutt.

I finally got round to building a new PC. I endeavoured to use the motherboard I'd brought from the UK, but managed to by the wrong processor for it (it needed core2-duo, not dual core) so I ended up buying a new motherboard anyway. IT's a Gigabyte board, and has a rather insane overclocking facility that would apparently take the CPU speed up to 13 Ghz. SO far I've pushed the 3.06 chip to 3.4, and it seems happy enough and the performance thus far is dandy.

News of the Japansese earthquake was something of a shock, and the impending Tsunami that was supposed to hit NZ was a serious concern for a couple of hours or so before it became apparent that it wasn't going to do us any damage. It didn't stop Vicky and Wayne making a run for the hills though.

The final piece of news is that I've booked a flight to the UK in a few months time, so that I can catch up with the family and indulge in a few beers and the odd curry.