Hi peoples! I've just got back from my early morning walk, that's 3 mornings in a row now that I've been. I've read that it takes 2 weeks of doing the same thing over and over before your body/mind accepts it as part of a normal routine so I'm going to try and stick it out. There's some really nice places to walk around here and it's not too freezing in the morning, so that makes it a bit easier.

We had a good weekend, took it easy and didn't do much apart from censusing. We knocked over all but one last area and also went back and revisited those houses where no one had been home the first time. It's going really well, we'll go out with a full bag of forms and come back with a much lighter bag. It reminds me of my old Sunday morning paper...

Here we are out and about again doing the census thing. One again it's a lovley sunny night though because it's Friday it seems that a lot of people aren't home. We are doing a fairly small area tonight so we should be home in plenty of time for a nice cold beer.

Not quite sure what we are going to do this weekend, hopefully the weather will stay nice and we can spend at least one day at the beach. They were talking on the radio this morning about how it's the last weekend on summer and it seems crazy that it's over already. This is the first time I can remembr though since I was a child where summer was actually summer, there have been heaps of really nice days especially of late.

I think that's about all I have to say really! Nothing momumentally exciting has...

They just talked about this on "The Rock" (Radio Station), I grabbed a screenshot because I thought TradeMe would probably remove it, about 5 minutes after I took this it's gone.

I forgot to watch the big SouthPark Episode last night, the one that was getting all the catholics upset. From the sounds of it they were all upset about nothing at all, a small tiny joke in the middle of an episode about something else completely.
I did however watch most of the excellent "Dark Side of the Moon" Pink Floyd special that followed. I'd forgotten just how great that album is until I reheard them playing clips from it and discussing it. I'm just about to start downloading it.

Work Time!

Tim

Hello this is Tim reporting live from the trench that is the 2006 New Zealand Census!

Actually it's not quite that glamourous, all I am doing is helping Sarah out by carrying all the forms. She still has to do all the talking to people and filling out her record book. I just stand back and look stupid, passing the time by posting stories on my website from my phone.

I helped last night as well and apart from all the standing around it's quite enjoyable, the weather has been kind to us both nights, lovely warm and sunny.

Not much else to report, my ginger beer certainly is getting better with age, I'm not sure if the same is going to be true of my homebrew.

Enough typing on this small keypad, time to get back to form carrying!

Tim and your Offical Statastics NZ Collector Sarah

Photo Attached!

We went shopping yesterday for a little while, I broke my milk frother the other day so I wanted to get another one. Plus I wanted to buy some new shorts. Sarah was amazed, the first time since she's known me that I've uttered the phrase "I want to buy some clothes"

After a bit of shopping we went to Takapuna beach with our little umbrella, we didn't stay long before we thought about going to the Devonport Food and Wine festival. Then we thought better of it, $25 each just to get in. We decided instead to go the local Belgium Beer Cafe and have our own mini festival. I enjoyed a small beer and a StoneGrill. Until that is Sarah pointed out what a sucker I am for getting StoneGrill, you pay a full "main course" fee and you get a couple of (admittedly pretty good) bits of...

SPCA day yesterday for me, SPCA itself was lots of fun as usual but getting back was a nightmare. It seems that every major road in Auckland it being ripped up and no matter where you go there are just huge lines of cars all creeping forward at 1 metre per minute. It's SO frustrating, especially when I'm taking backroads to avoid the congestion and all the back roads are clogged up too. There's a website that some group's setup, called RevUp, but I can't see a website suddenly building a bunch of roads around the place...
Sarah went to her training for her census collecting, sounds like it went pretty well apart from a couple of people who kept asking all sorts of muppeto questions. There's always going to be a couple of people like that in any large group though.

Friday I had a meeting with some...

How's everyone doing? Lovely Valentines day was it? What's up with Valentines day? It's so ridiculous. This year though The Warehouse had a dozen roses (dozens of roses? literally?) for $19.95, so I guess some people snapped up a real bargain eh? Not Tim though, he went to the Indian four square lady at about 8pm last night where she rogered him spectacularly for a bunch of 10. Nice though, I think it's the first time I've ever had red roses bought for me. One year I got car mats for valentines day. Sadly I didn't win much sympathy though because somebody else at work that day got an ironing board, beating me hands down.

So we did have about 40 seconds of semi-romantic conversation, before I found out how much those damn roses cost, and then found that my big heavy glass vase has a chip in the damn...

When I bought my fridge back in 2002 the sales guy managed to con me into one of those extended warranties. I didn't really realise at the time that they're mostly a rip-off, pushed at you by the sales people because they earn extra commission. Well I'm glad I brought the warranty because the fridge has started to play up heaps, it'll either fill up with water, or if you turn the temp down, totally ice up everywhere. So yesterday I actually managed to find the bit of warranty paper and they're going to send a man out next week to look/fix it. The one time I buy a stupid extended warranty and it's actually going to be useful.

All my beer is bottled now! I tried some ginger beer on Friday just to see what it was like, it's not too bad but it was obviously too early yet...

Saturday morning we all got up bright and early to light the Pizza Oven up. I'd been over to the next door neighbours the night before just to let him know we'd be lighting it (so he wouldn't put out washing and get all smoked out) and he gave me the quick run down on how to get it going. The key he said was to get it lit up early in the morning to give it plenty of time to get the heat pumping.

Once we'd gotten it going we all went out for breakfast, then off to visit friends of Sarah's parents just to say a quick hello. On the way back we stopped in at The Warehouse to buy some tools with which to fashion a Pizza Oven Scooper thing. This is what a professional one looks like, this is what ours looked like. That's right...