Fun weekend, we went to a big furniture sale out in Henderson, hoping to find a couch suite for a bargain price. We did manage to find the perfect suite too, but the hard bit was picking a fabric, a task made impossible by a sales lady who would not leave us alone. No matter what we did she would hang around and annoy the shit out of us. In the end we left to mull over the options we'd looked at, but we never ended up going back. When we got home Sarah found the same suite online selling for the same price they claimed was a sale price. I'm really glad we didn't end up buying from them, annoying muppets.

Another mouse in the house last night, poor mousies. Tui tried really hard to eat this one too, but I managed to rescue it from her before it...

Good morning this is pretty much just a test post from the drupal app on my new phone! Hopefully it works ok. It's so much nicer and easier to user that my old blackberry, which I'm glad to see the back end of. I thought typing on this would be hard but with the way I can just swipe letters, it's actually much faster. So I'm happy. Proper update to follow soon.

Tim

Our new little car is great. Really zippy, drives well, has automatic headlights and is a sexy silver colour. There's just one problem with it. It's got a Japanese stereo. Which would be fine except for the fact that a Japanese stereo can't picked the regular NZ FM band. It's a common problem with import cars like ours and there's two fixes:

1) Buy a new car stereo.
2) Buy a $20 band-expander.

Option 1 would be OK except you can't buy a car stereo these days that doesn't flash and blink like a deranged hiphop Christmas tree. They're expensive and all the ones we looked at just hurt our eyes. I want nice sounds, not a pisspoor mini nightclub.

So we decided to go with option 2, at least in the short term. We got a $20 band expander and returned home to install it.

I sat down in...

We've been Tiida-ing around the last couple of days, it's a great little car and goes really well. We went and looked at car stereos on the weekend, we didn't decide on one yet though, we might go and look around a bit more this weekend. They seem to be a lot cheaper than I remember them, only $300-400 for a decent one that can play your iPhone, USB stick and all that sort of stuff. Maybe that's always been the price point, I can't really remember.

Finally we have the home stereo issue sorted out totally. I've got a the little mini-server at home setup so you can stream to it from your iPhone or iTunes, plus you can also play music to it directly. But we still had the butt ugly speakers. Well on the weekend we went and bought a little stereo for $150 from Dick Smith...

We finally got a new car. We have a 2005 Nissan Tiida that we bought at Turner's Car Auctions. It was going at Auction for a suggested price of $11k, Sarah put a bid in for $9k and that won! So that plus the on-road costs and we have a new car. It's only done 80k, directly imported from Japan and seems to be in pretty tippity top condition.

Now we just have to sell the old Subaru, plus get a decent stereo and towbar fitted to the Tiida and we're in business!

Sarah has started a landscape design course. So while she was off learning smart things last night, I was tasked with making a Mousaka. And it turned out pretty damn tasty I must say, though I cut the eggplant the wrong way because the instructions were confusing. Cut it lengthways it said, so I did!

It's so...

Peter, Mary, Holly and Adrian came up for the weekend just gone to celebrate Mary's 60th birthday, which was actually yesterday. They arrived on Friday night and Sarah drew the short straw to go and collect them from the airport while I put the final bits of tidy on the house.

Saturday morning we had a nice home cooked breakfast and then headed off to the French Market for a bit of a squiz. It was the usual massive sprawling thing that it is, people all over the show.

The wait for coffee was 25 minutes which is just mental, but finally we got them. I also saw a Shortland St star which was very exciting. She even sat right behind me, I think she must have known subconsciously that I too am also a popular and successful actor.

French market over we dropped Peter and Mary off at...

Next door neighbours sold their house at auction yesterday. For $800k! Bloody hell. They bought it for $622k two years ago. It seems there's a property boom at least in Sandringham.

Nice Anzac day yesterday. We woke up to find the next door neighbours had left a couple of Anzac cookies by the back door. Very kind of them and very lovely Anzac's, I was very impressed.
Once we got up we went to our new favourite cafe (Crave) and then went to the Auckland Domain to have a walk around the Winter Gardens. I didn't realise it when I suggested it but there was also some Anzac day parade thing on at the Domain, but we didn't go and see that.

The Winter Gardens are really nice, one of those things you forget how nice they are until you go again. Then we walked around a few other bits of the Domain in the sun, might as well make the most of the nice weather.

On the way back home we stopped in Mt Eden for a while. I found...

I signed up for the Auckland Half Marathon yesterday. I meant to do it last year but I didn't realise how quickly it fills up and then you can't. So I got in early this year as soon as I realised it was open. Scott has also signed up, as has Adrian. So it should be good fun! I've got 6 months to train for it.

Just got back from the VTNZ. Took the car this morning to Repco to buy it some new bulbs to make sure it'd pass its Warrent of Fitness when it went back to the VTNZ, which it did thankfully. Now we can sell it.

Work is heaps of fun at the moment. We put out an RFI a few weeks ago and got the responses yesterday. Now we have 50Mb of data to work through, pretty instense. But hey at least we're doing cool...

Phew! Been so busy that I haven't even had time to update the mini status bit of my diary, let alone write a proper entry. At least I have some time now, Sarah's in bed and I'm happy because I just managed to help Peter setup his new iPad without being there. He's happy, I'm happy, we're all happy!

Molly has to go back to shop tomorrow. She's a lot better than she was, but still conks out in the morning when you try to take off. Once she's warm she's alright, but a bit dangerous otherwise because you can't rely on her to accelerate out of a turn or something. So back to the shop for another look at tomorrow, I hope they find out whatever is wrong with her.

Last night went out with a bunch of Sarah's friends for dinner. Tried to get into this Mexican place...