A couple of weeks ago Sarah won an action for some second hand pool parts. Our pool, bless it's little fake inground-ness has these metal rails that sit on top of the rubber pool liner and give it a bit of a better appearance. But for some reason they made these things out of metal, which of course over time combined with water and chemicals, well they rust. Some of ours have rusted quite badly. Anyway Sarah won for $200 a whole pools worth of replacement rails, some of which have surface rust but none of which are totally eaten away like some of ours are. So the plan is to sand them back, paint them up (maybe coat them to death with anti-rust or similar) and to put them on the pool so it looks a lot nicer.
The problem with winning the action was that the pickup was...

Went up for a day trip to New Plymouth yesterday. Those are always fun, day trips, it means 4 flights in one day. We had a really good meeting with our customer though, which makes me happy. Feedback came back today from them too, they agreed it went really well and it's made them happier about how a bunch of things are going. So, that's good, everyone's happy.
I've been playing with Amazon Glacier, Google Cold Storage and Tarsnap. I need a way to backup Sarah's files and stuff for her business, but most of these fancy pants backup plans want to change you some bonkers amount per month to store shit. Google/Amazon offer a much better solution, but of course there's no fancy-pants web 2.0 GUI to make it all work. But when it costs $0.07c (USD) per month per Gigabit of storage, you better believe I'm going to...

We went out to the Farmer's Market yesterday - we weren't planning to initially but Peter rang up and said they were going out there, so we went too because the kids hadn't seen Grandad and Grandma for a couple of weeks. Peter was ill for the whole 2 weeks they were on holiday, poor things, what a nightmare. At least Mary said she had an enjoyable time, though I'm sure it would have been much more enjoyable if Peter had been well. The Market was lovely, a beautiful sunny day without a cloud in the sky. Which of course meant it was super freezing cold.
But they had Pony Rides! They had a big pony and a little shetland pony. Beth said that she wanted to go have a ride on the shetland, Sarah and I weren't so sure but parted with a whole $3 to see anyway. And...

Argh! I've been quite sick again this week, I had to have Thursday and Friday off. Which was kinda annoying with Sarah away so I was looking after the kids too. At least they weren't sick, because that would have been a nightmare within a nightmare! I think this stupid cold is one of those that you think you're over, then a week later it comes back with a vengence. Because that's what happened to lot of my workmates in Wellington and it's certainly what happened to me. Trying to sleep at night was hard, not because of coughing or anything but just the nightmares. As soon as the Panadol/Asprin wore off I was having all sorts of horrid nightmares. Wasn't good.
Anyway I managed to get myself out of bed each morning to get the kids ready for kindy, and at least both of them being there meant I...

It was Theo's Birthday party the Saturday morning after I got back from Australia. Sarah had already been super busy during the week getting the house lovely and tidy, organizing all the bits and pieces for the kids. Cakes, boucy castles, invites, food etc.
Everyone arrived on Saturday morning, Bouncy Castle included. Theo got lots of lovely presents from everyone, especially lots of Thomas the Tank Engine things. Which is good thing because of course Theo loves Thomas! The bouncy castle was also a huge hit, though it took Theo a very long time before I managed to convience him that he should have a proper go on it. Once he finally worked up the courage to have a bounce on it, far out did he love it. He loved it so much, he didn't really want to get off it once he realised what it consisted of.
We had...

It's Tuesday morning and I've been back in New Zealand for the past two weeks. A bit of a pisspoor effort not to write an entry the whole time I was in Australia, but there you go. There was always something more important to do I guess. I'm just going to write a bunch of short notes for the last month or so.

I flew in Thursday the 29th June. Dad picked me up from Hobart Airport about 9:30pm
Friday Dad and I had a quiet day, getting ready for the Hospital. He was on a fasting diet, so we couldn't even go out and get a burger or some dinner etc. I cooked myself a steak Friday night. Oh and I tried to sneak in to see Chris and Simone, I missed Simone but caught up with Chris for a little while.
Saturday I drove Dad to Hospital and...

Crazy few days we got back from Bali. Which was a trip in itself, we checked out from our accommodation after a lovely few days. Thursday we decided that we'd go down to the beach to go swimming ourselves with our snorkels, though the place we stayed at was kind enough to drive us down there and pick us up again an hour and a half later when we'd had enough. It was a nice little beach but it was very windy and the snorkelling at it wasn't great, there was heaps of rubbish in the water and there wasn't heaps of fish to see. It was fun though, I don't mean to sound like I didn't enjoy it because I did, we both did. I accidentally forgot to bargain for the cost of a lounger so we paid 50,000 each for a beach lounger for the 35 minutes we...

It's Thursday in Bali and of course that means that our holiday is drawing ever closer to an end. But never fear, I'm not focused on that at the moment! We've just got back from a nice morning of snorkeling on the beach, our hotel drive us down and we swam around for an hour or so before heading back here to our room. It's a super scorching hot day today, there's a few clouds but none stopping the sun from beating down.

Yesterday was pretty much a lost day. We packed up our stuff from Cicada and our transportation arrived at 11am pretty much on the dot to take us to new place. We thought the drive would take 3 hours but it was more like four, but of course now I think about it we did stop along the way to visit a Luwak Coffee place. That's the...

Hello again from Bali. We're having a great time though we do miss the kiddies. Granny has been great at keeping us updated with what they're up too though with photos.

Our first full day here we walked around for a while to get our bearings, we were up super early because of the 4 hour time difference. We went for a walk along the beach and I was amazed at how many people are jogging and walking their dogs and all those sorts of things. It was a pretty overcast morning really but that didn't stop everyone from doing their thing.

We got back to our accommodation and I spent an our fixing my damn server that does Sarah and my emails, stupid thing decided it was going to lock up totally. Thankfully with a bit of remote magic on my phone I was able to reboot it and...

Oh dear, they might before we go away everyone decides that they're sick. We all went to dinner with Peter and Mary, it took them ages to bring out the kids meals. They brought out the adults meals first and then 10 minutes later the kids. By this stage Theo was so tired he didn't really want to eat the poor little fella, he's usually such a great eater too.
We got home and got everyone to bed. At about 10pm Theo started crying his little lungs out, which is very unlike him. But the cold he has is really giving him a lot of grief. After a lot of hugs and cuddles and some milk to fill his hungry little tummy up he went back to sleep about 11:30 or so. Just in time for Beth to wake up at about 12:40am or so, totally panicking because her cold...