I get home last night. I see a new shoebox.

Me: "Did you buy more shoes?"

Sarah: "I was sad and they were 50% off"

Guess I can't argue with that logic. And they are nice shoes.

We asked the agent to withdraw our bid on the house. His counter off was silly so we didn't see the point of going on anymore. The house is now up for Auction! I can't see how an Auction is going to help, but maybe the last few weeks have just been him gathering an idea of how much to sell for before Auction. We'll keep an eye on it and I'll go out to the Auction just to see how much it does/doesn't go for.

In other news it's a long weekend this weekend, bonus! Peter and Mary are coming up so we'll get to hang out with them. It's...

I didn't win the iPhone! I came in second with a grand total of 98 votes which was pretty damn impressive I thought. The winner had 115 though, so I was close but no cigar! Oh well, time to start saving my $10 a week!

We've put in another offer on the house today, so we're waiting to see what, if anything, the seller comes back with. There's talk of going to Auction now, which makes no sense to me if it's only had one offer thus far. But I guess we're not privy to everything that's going on.

UPDATE: Just got a call back about the house we offered on, came back with a silly high number so I think we'll pass on! Back to the hunting...

We looked at more houses in the weekend just gone, but there was nothing we really liked. Certainly a few we could...

Another weekend of house hunting and we’ve finally found another house that we like.  Even better, this one isn’t an Auction, but it is by negotiation.  It’s probably going to be out of our price range, but we’ll give it a go and see if they accept or not.  I can’t hurt to try, well, except to leave us out a little bit of pocket on lawyer fees maybe.

So we’re excited about that, though there’s still a bit of stuff to have happen before we know where we stand.  That’s what tomorrow’s going to be all about though, in between work and work and more work!  It’s going to be a nuts day at work tomorrow and I’m not looking forward to it.  I’m especially not looking forward to getting to work, which is going to suck.  It’s supposed to be a wild windy and rainy day tomorrow.  Not...

It was Budget day today in New Zealand. Usually I wouldn't give a stuff about budget day, it's about as interesting as biting off your own face. But now that I'm married and we're trying to find a place to live, things like the budget are slightly important.
So it's good that this year we actually end up better off. Sure GST goes up, but we get tax cuts so we actually end up better off if we don't spend it. Which is what we are trying to do.

In other news, I had a meeting today that was just insane. I can't really talk about it here in public, but boy it was a real riot. If I ever need to give a talk on "Right Twunt, How To Be One", I'll just refer back to today's meeting.

House hunting is still ongoing. We've seen heaps of places. Some...

We're still hunting for that elusive, perfect house in our price range. It has to be out there somewhere, we just haven't found where that somewhere is yet. We decided against the one we really liked for a couple of reasons: It wasn't in a very good area and some of the work they'd done hadn't yet been signed off by the council. Stuff getting on that roundabout (especially from your hospital bed recovering from being attacked on the way home!)

We've got a few more to checkout this weekend and there's a small but steady flow of properties coming on the market. There's the ever helpful real estate agents who ring up to say "This new one is on the market" and when you ask about the price it's 20% higher than you can afford. Maybe they just enjoy teasing people? It's hard to tell.

Thanks everyone who has...

Hello from the train early on a Monday morning. Well I guess that 8am isn't really that early but it seems early. It's a meeting-free day though, they're the best days when you look at your calander and you don't have any meetings. It means I might actually get some proper work done today, instead of just discussing work.

We drove down to Napier on Friday night, we got away about 5:30pm and it was an easy drive down. There was hardly any traffic on the road which made a nice change from the last time we drove down at Easter.

Saturday morning we were up fairly early to help a bit with all the setting up. There wasn't a lot to do though, most of it had already been done. The lights had been strung up, the shelter out the back had been enforced with wind breaks and the...