We were going to drive down to Napier on Thursday night (after we'd put Tui in the Cattery Thursday morning) but we got a phone call from Brendan and Lyn saying they'd be arriving at Auckland Airport on Friday morning. So instead of going down Thursday night, we went out to the airport Friday morning to pick them up to take them down with us. It was so lovely to see them again and to have time to have a proper talk/chat with them, it was all so busy when we saw them last March for our wedding that we didn't really seem to get a chance to talk to them.

Friday afternoon was the perfect drive down, the sun was setting and the trees are all just starting to turn yellow and red so it was a pretty spectacular site to see as we drove. I didn't think to...

Happy Easter! It's miserable and raining here today and has been all day. We went and did a bit of shopping and it seems most of Auckland had the same idea because every carpark was mental as people were getting pissy and they searched for car parks in the pouring rain. It wasn't fun.

Bottled Beer Batch number 2 and started batch number 3 on Sunday. Also bottled round 3 of Ginger beer. This time I bottled into lots of little stubbies instead of big bottles, we were finding the big bottles go flat.

Sunday morning we had a little egg hunt. Only a mini one, was a bit of fun. Easter's great fun, apart from the fact all the shops are shut.

I put up some cool little shelves we bought. I stuffed one up though and got it quite off centre. I don't know how, I measured it...

Great News Everybody! The homebrew is getting much better with age. I've just had a sup and a bunch of the nasty flavours have gone, leaving it with a mostly beer taste. I say mostly, it's not perfect yet but it's getting a lot better.

Also drank the last of the ginger beer on the weekend. After ~2 weeks it had got really good, the over-sugary taste was gone and it was nice and bitey. I made some more on Sunday as well, I hope this lot turns out a bit better as I chucked in a bit of extra yeast to give it some oomph.

Mowed the lawns on the weekend. I mean really mowed, got the beast out there and did some chopping. It's awesome. It takes about 2 minutes to do the side lawn, it used to take 10. The mower packs the grass in, doesn't take...

Look at this beast of a mower. Stare lovingly at it. Because it is beastly and it mows grass like it is possessed by Satan himself.

Which makes me very happy! I mowed the back lawn in about 5 minutes last night. I had to put the ear muffs on because when ol' beasto fires up, everyone knows about it. But it starts first pull and it mows really well. It was a total bargain too, the lovely Sarah is a great TradeMe bargain hunter and snapped that up for $160!

Went for a run last night with Scott while Charlotte stayed behind and chatted with Sarah, then we had a lovely dinner. For someone that hasn't been for a decent run in about 3 weeks I managed the 7km track with no issues, quite happy with that!

The ginger beer has been really good this week, I think...

It's been a bit of a tough week with no car. We'll get it back today though thankfully, 7 days is plenty of days enough with no car. I did a lot of walking to and from work, I didn't have to of course I could have caught the bus. But it's not that far to walk (about 5km) and takes about an hour. It's a good way to start and end the day.

Today though we'll have a dead sexy almost new car! I wish. But it'll work. Sigh.

The weekend was a bit boring with no car, though we did manage to get out of the house a few times for breakfast and down to the supermarket. The little French cafe near our house is fantastic, we love going there. They're all "Bonjour! We! En Frenchie Words" etc. The food's awesome and so's the coffee.

We also discovered...

Warning: Long cry-baby sook ahead.

Arrrgh what a week! It's only Tuesday but already I've had enough and I want to give up and get under the doona and do nothing for the rest of the week.

I took our car into the workshop on Monday. After having driven it around illegally all weekend. Who cares, we needed it and it's not like it was one of those cars that other people drive around for 3 years with no WOF. So Monday morning I took the car in and dropped it off. I was somewhat buoyed by the fact the guy at the shop said that he didn't think it'd be over $1k and that he'd not seen a Subaru before with a faulty steering rack. I was almost happy as I left.

I caught the train back into Newmarket (where work is) and found the car keys in my...