We went to Art In The Dark last night, it was very impressive. It's artwork that uses light, so you walk around a park in the dark and check out all the exhibits. We saw lots of very interesting bits of art, some just static nice things, some that were very interactive, some that used sound as well as light. It was a great experience, walking around the park (it was packed with people) and I was amazed at how much bigger the display was that I thought. We had such a nice time walking around, I really enjoyed it.

Before the light display we met up with Ben and Di and a couple of their friends. We went for dinner at the local Thai place in Ponsonby, it was nice but the Jungle Hot Curry wasn't. I mean it had a bit of zing, but it wasn't going to...

The Quizzy Rascals were a man down last night, Sarah was at the Ben Harper concert with Kelly. So it was just the 3 of us that had to solider on, and solider on we did like machines. It wasn't until the last round that we snuck ahead and won, we played the last two rounds as our double points rounds and we got a perfect 10/10 for both rounds, so that's a total of 40 points! It bought us screaming into the lead by 2 points.

This was a real achievement, as Mrs Gandhi had 6 people and we had only 3! It'll be another scary round next week too.

I forgot to mention in my last update the installation of the kitchen bin. For any normal DIY person, it would be nothing. For it was two hours of sheer terror. I had to understand the German instructional...

Got my lawnmower back on Saturday morning. I don't know how to repair a lawnmower and mine had all sorts of issues. They're all fixed now though, it starts with no hassle, the stop/go lever works again, it has new sharp blades to properly mow the grass. It's awesome. So I mowed the lawns, because they hadn't been mowed in about 3 weeks.

Saturday night we went with Ben and Di to see the movie Argo. A really good movie, really enjoyed it. It's been ages since I've been to the movies and haven't walked out feeling ripped off, so it was a pleasant surprise that this was a good movie, good acting, great story and all those other bits that make a great movie. Highly recommended.

The kitchen is nearly done. There's not much more for the builder to do, mostly just stuff for us, Painting and finishing the...

We went to the quiz night again on Tuesday night, we're becoming regulars at it. It was another hard fought match again the resident experts, Mrs Gandhi (which as the quiz master pointed out is an anagram of Sandringham) but we managed to come out victorious against them by one whole point. At the end of the second to last round we were ahead one point, so we needed to score a perfect 10 in the final round if we were going to beat them, because they're teachers and the last round was Authors.

Edit: Watch a video of me at the top of the harbour bridge during the half marathon.

Even the quiz master made a bit of a joke about wondering who would win, knowing the teachers where pretty unbeatable.
I didn't hold out too much hope until Ben got the final sheet of questions and...

Holly, Adrian and Joseph came up on Saturday, we went out to collect them from the airport. Joseph handled his first flight very well by the sounds of it, sleeping most of the way. We managed to pack a suitcase and the pram into our little car, I'm amazed that it all fitted but somehow it all got in there.

We had a relaxed Saturday morning, then we drove over to Takapuna for a bit of a walk along the beach and some icecreams. We noticed on the way home signs around the place with km's on them, all in preparation for the (half) Marathon we'd be running the next day.

For dinner we went out to Covo, an Italian resturant that Sarah found on the Internet. Their food and service was excellent, we had a lovely meal. Adrian and I were a bit sad because we could only have...

I did it! I ran a half marathon without stopping in 2 hours and 24 minutes. I'm so happy, I managed to do the whole thing without stopping to walk, in fact the only times I ever stopped jogging where to get a drink at the drinks stations, even then I tried to keep moving as fast as possible.

Adrian and I got up on Sunday morning at 4:30am, donned our running gears, made sure our timing chips were attached to our shoes and then woke up Sarah at 5am to drive us down to the Ferry terminal. There were people everywhere, all heading to the ferry. Some drunk blokes where cheering everyone on except for when they saw me wearing my Australian Cricket top and said "Australian! I hope you come last!". Pretty funny.

The ferry thing was very well done, we just lined up and got on, it...

Sarah, myself, Di and Ben headed back up to Prague on Tuesday night for another attempt at being crowned quiz night kings. At least this time I felt like I brought something to the table, we doubled up on a section called "Lateral Thinking" which I proclaimed I'd be good at. Everyone was a bit nervous but I mostly came through with the goods, we scored a perfect 10/10 for that round. In fact we did quite well overall, we came 2nd and won a $30 voucher. The group of school teachers still kicked our arse though, they're very good and only got something like 3 questions wrong all night!

Otherwise not a lot of major excitement happening. Physio reckons I'm ready to go for the half marathon this weekend, a bunch of us from work are heading down to collect the race packs Friday lunchtime. That'll make it very...

Thursday I arrived home to find that the new cupboards had been installed. These were additional cupboards we ordered after the first ones went in. They've really made a difference to the size and feel of the kitchen, it seems complete now and there's proper places to store the cups, mugs and glasses. Now all we're waiting for is the tiling to be done and then we're pretty much complete! Amazing!
Friday night we all went for dinner to La Zeppa. Nice food, but the place was really noisy. Tapas are always tasty though.

Sarah's parents have been up for the weekend. Saturday was really nice weather, so we drove to Matakana to visit the farmers market. We also met up with Ben and Di, plus Jo and her friend Sarah. We had a really nice look around the farmers market, though there was a little bit of...

We went up to the local pub on Tuesday night for their quiz night. The bar's called Prague and it's probably one of the smallest bars in the world! There's about 4 tables inside and 2 outside. Ben and Di joined us and we become the "Quizee Rascals" and took on the other teams. We totally blitzed the first round, which was music, but after that it got a bit harder. It was really well run, the quiz master would come by and give hints and joke with us. Sadly, we didn't win a prize because we came 3rd and there's no prize for 3rd! Bugger. Still great fun though.

Sold my old phone and also the old egg bar stools on TradeMe. I had to post the phone to Christchurch, the ideal of posting a fairly expensive item always makes me a bit worried, but I woke up this...