Hello from a still freezing cold Monday night in chilly Auckland. We flew down to Napier on Saturday morning, after piling up the cat's food bowl with 3 extra helpings of food to ensure she'd make it through the weekend. We got the airport and our plane was delayed for ages, turns out it'd hit a bird when it'd left Napier to come to Auckland, so they had to spend a while checking it to make sure it was still safe.

We arrived in Napier and everyone picked us up from the airport. Sarah and I went back to Peter and Mary's, Sarah started getting all the Baby Shower activities ready. Just as all the girls were starting to arrive Adrian came to rescue me. We headed over to his Dad's place and picked up the new car he's recently bought.

Once we'd picked it up we cruised around the...

Hello from the St Lukes bus stop. I'm standing here in the crazy weather trying really hard not to be blown over. It's a really miserable Winter's morning, I've got my squirrel coat on to protect myself from the elements.

We went to the movies last night, Sarah had a voucher that we had to use. The only thing that was on at the time we wanted to was "What to expect when you're expecting" which we both gave a review of "Terrible". It wasn't funny, it dragged on too long and just wasn't an enjoyable movie. The best part was the popcorn.

Afterwards we went to the Lone Star cafe because we had another voucher to use. Dinner was much, much better than the movie. My steak was like one from the Ball and Chain in Hobart. Really tasty!

So we had a nice night. Shame the movie was...

It's really, really cold in Auckland at the moment. Even with the new insulation it seems like it takes forever for the lounge to heat up. I'm starting to think that we'll have to put bubble wrap on the windows in an attempt to keep the house warmer. Certainly we'll have to do something ready for next winter to ensure the house is a little less heat-leaking.

Sarah picked Peter and Mary up for the airport on Friday afternoon, ending their nearly month away traveling Europe. It was lovely to see them as always. We all slept in really late on Saturday morning, I wish I could blame jet lag but I can't. We then decided to visit Crave cafe, to give them one last chance to not uncook the food. Sadly they failed, it was again quite undercooked and not that tasty. Which is a shame because the first...

Went to the Ranga ginger beer party last night. There was bottles of Ranga all over the place, lots of people dressed up like gingers and a the "Ranga Mobile" parked in the back of the shed. It was a good party, though we didn't know too many people apart from Bevan.

Went for a jog today, it rained on me heaps. I went during the week as well and got pissed on, doesn't make the jogging heaps of fun though, but it's got to be done. I had a dream last night that I realised the day before the half marathon it was the next day and in hadn't done any training. But that won't happen in real life!

Tried upgrading my Android phone to the latest and greatest Ice Cream Sandwich on Friday night. That was a bad idea because by lunchtime Saturday I'd managed to crash it...

We went to the Auckland Botanical Gardens yesterday. Sarah had been there the weekend before with her garden course but suggested we go out and have a look together. It was the perfect day for it too, really cold and crisp but no clouds, so it was nice and sunny. It was quite warm as long as you stayed in the sun.

Here's some photos from the gardens. The silver statue thing is actually made out of garden spades, then spray painted Silver!

Saturday night it was time for Flight on the Conchords! We drove into town for some dinner first of all, both Japanese places we wanted to go to where chocka, but we found a place called Q next to the comedy club that was actually a lot better than we thought it was going to be. So we had a nice little meal there before heading...

Tui's back home after a couple of days at the Vet's. She had a lot of really bad teeth caused by gum disease, apparently there's not much we could have done to know! It's a good thing Sarah picked up how badly she stunk when she did.

I dropped her off on Tuesday morning and got the call about 11am that they'd need to take out quite a few more teeth than first thought. So when I went to pick her up at 5pm she was still quite drugged and groggy so they wanted to keep her overnight. Sarah and I stopped in to see her on Wednesday morning and she was heaps better, so she came home on Wendesday night.

So she's back now minus at least half of her teeth. We both thought that was terrible, but the vet assures us there's tonnes of cats running around out...

Busy weekend! Friday night I joined Sarah at her work for Bevan's Ranga party! A few months ago I was asked by Bevan to make some ginger beer for his trial, well he's gone from trial to full blown production. In fact you can buy Ranga in the supermarket now, though it's a bit hard to find at the moment. Here I am showing off a 6 pack of Ranga. It's a pretty tasty ginger beer, it has a nice zing to it and is very morish.

Saturday morning Sarah dropped Tui and off at the Vet's, while she drove out to her weekend garden course. Tui was at the vet because she's started to pong really badly, her breath hasn't been good at all. The vet attempted to look at her through the hissing, plus attempts to bite and scratch. After incurring only a few wounds the vet said...

Lovely long weekend to celeberate the Queen's whatever it is we're celebrating. Good on you Queenie. Saturday we went to the hardware store to ask them about paint and how to redo windows. We love Bunnings but this time around they were pretty useless. So we went to the North Shore instead and visited PlaceMakers who where much happier and better. They patiently explained what we had to do and how to do it, so we came back home armed with all the tools we needed to reputty the back windows. It was a team effort, Sarah with the putty scraper removing all the old dead putty and me with the new putty, filling in the gaps. I think we did a pretty good job, the new putty looks fairly neat and even. We'll know in a couple of weeks time when we go to paint it.

Sunday we drove...

In my last story I totally forgot to mention the work thing that we had where we had to make a couple of videos. Which also meant we had to dress up. Which means that I ended up in a Kermit The Frog costume.

Read on for one more video...

It was a fun day, though the Kermit costume was very hot and hadn't been washed in about 100 years so it stank like a mofo.

Tim

Yesterday morning just as we were prepared to leave to pickup a cabinet we'd bought on TradeMe, we got a phone call from a guy about the Subaru. This was good, because it'd been for sale for the last 3 weeks on TradeMe with only one other call about it that wasn't serious. The crazy thing is, we needed the Subaru to go and pick up the cabinet, it probably wouldn't fit in the Tiida.

Update: Mini Challenge Photos.

We picked up the cabinet no worries, from the most amazing house in Grey Lynn. It was like a movie star's house, though the person living in it said he was just looking after it for a year. It was like something from a crazy movie, an amazing house but inside it looked like it hadn't been cleaned in about 3 months, stuff all over the place. But a lovely...