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.