I am baking a tasty cake in the oven at the moment, it's a Caramel Mudcake. Each Monday morning at work a bunch of people bring in a cake, usually about 4 people, and we taste them all and vote for one of them. It's a bit of fun and you have to vote with a gold coin, so all the money raised will be given to a charity at the end of the event. My entry is tomorrow so I've been in the kitchen cooking up a storm! Wish me luck.

Update: Well, I didn't win. In fact I came pretty close to last! As a mudcake I think it was a little too overcooked. There was very tough competition today though! And it's all good fun.

A few weeks back we bought some wooden planter boxes to sit outside for a herb garden. Yesterday we put them...

Oh yes. It's back in action. Finally (and $614.50 later) it's alive. Overall it had a number of problems:

1. Faulty Fuel Tap
2. Faulty Coil/Computer
3. Faulty HT Lead and Cap
4. Loose battery earth wire
5. New Engine Seals fitted
6. A few other small items they noticed and fixed
7. Full service as well

Bit of an exhaustive list and took quite a few days for them to diagnose and fix everything. They said they spent over 10 hours trying to figure out why it'd go for a bit and then die, but then they only charged us 2 hours labour which was nice. They said it was one of those seemingly impossible to fix jobs!

But Sarah's just ridden it back from work where I'd parked it up after collecting it. All good! It's almost a new scooter again!

Tui's also a happy cattie today, so all's right with the world again.

Tim

We got home last night and Tui didn't flab out to greet us. Not a big worry, now that it's cold she's often inside sleeping on the couch. But when we went inside and she wasn't there either we got a little bit worried. After standing outside and shouting and waving the biscuits around (pretty much a Tui magnet when she hears biscuits shaking around) she still didn't come so we were quite worried.

I went outside with the torch and looked around, looked under the house, up and down the street etc. No Tui. I spoke to the next door neighbour who said he'd seen her sitting outside at about 4pm so we didn't think she'd have gone far.

Anyway after a couple of anxious hours I went back outside and had another look and found her hiding under the house (she hadn't been there the previous times I'd...

No more real news on the Scooter. I rang a few times on Friday to see what was happening, the mechanic had made it back into work (only a bit sore) but didn't seem to get much work done on it. Long story short they replaced the float pin in the carby and that fixed the problem it was having with flooding, but there was some other issue it was having that meant it wasn't sparking properly. Hopefully tomorrow we can pick it up, it's been a week!

Otherwise whew, what a weekend it's been! Peter and Mary drove up on Friday night, we ordered some curry and sat around in the lounge and enjoyed tasty curry, a couple of beers and a good chat. I gave Peter one of my homebrews and he didn't seem to think it was too bad, so I'm pretty happy with that.

Poor Sarah...

It's been inorganic collection weekend this weekend. That's when you can grab all the crap you've had lying around for ages and chuck it out on the street and the council will come and get it. That's if the hordes of people don't get it first. It's serious business, everyone drives around in their trucks or, more often, their bongo buses, and they send out recon people to stand in front of the piles of rubbish to "get the good bits". I'd only just put the old CRT monitor down when a lady drove up and took it away. We're talking about 35 seconds from ground to van.

We went out to the airport on Sunday to pick up Holly and Adrian who'd just flown back from their honeymoon in Malaysia. They had 2 hours between their International arrival and their domestic flight back, so we brought them back here...