Cheerleading, Swimming in the Mud,
Boy oh Boy was it hot yesterday. Stinking utterly hot, it got up to 30c I think. Just the perfect day for Beth to have to spend ~6 hours in a hot tin shed doing Cheerleading! She was very nervous in the morning, not her usual chatty self at all, I guess she wasn't sure exactly what was going to happen and was a bit hesitant becasue of it. We dropped her off about 10:30am and then Theo, Sarah and I went and had brunch down at East Pier then went for a walk around Ahuriri before giving up due to the heat and going back home. Oh we saw Jan, one of carers from Kindy who amazingly remembered both Beth and Theo's name. Despite Theo loving her at Kindy he didn't really seem to remember her very well when he saw her. Still as Sarah pointed out that was an ego ago in the timespan of his life.
Come 3pm we went back to Cheerleading to see Beth's performance. It was stonkin' hot in the Cheerleading shed. They had fans and the doors open but it was super uncomfortable. When we found Beth she was bright Red from jumping on the bouncy castle all afternoon. Sarah got her refreshed and put on fresh lipstick and she was ready to go. Holly, Isla and Grandma joined us to watch. Beth's performance was great! We didn't realise but she had her own little bit where she did a cartwheel in front of everyone else! We were super proud watching her, she did such a greate job. You can watch the video of her performance here.
My god I'm so over the pool stuff. We got our building consent sorted out - yay. Not that difficult overall at the end of the day, just had to send them a lot of information etc and it got signed off after about 3 weeks. Then even better, on Friday we got confirmation that all Iwi were happy with our proposal! Hooray, I thought. Now all we need to do is submit a simple resource consent, show them we have Iwi signoff and away we go. So I asked the Council how to do this and they very helpfully came back and told me that my Resource Consent application just needed a simple Environmental Impact Assesement attached to it. What's one of these you ask? It's a lot of words, about 26 pages looking at the example one they helpfully provided. You can get one written for you for the small cost of $2,500+GST. Thankfully, you can also do it yourself so I spent a good chunk of Saturday afternoon reading and writing my own Environemental Impact Assesement. It's currently only about 10 pages, but I haven't finished it yet. I went up and spoke to our neighbours who have been through similar and they very kindly printed out a copy of their resource consent. So that's been helpful to inform me of some of the headings/sections and legal mumbo jumbo that seems to need to go into the document. Worse case I submit it and they reject it due to whatever, and we have to get someone to write one for us. I hope it doesn't come to that but I might as well have a go for free instead of just waving goodbye to another $3k and having to wait until the middle of Jan before anyone can do the report for us. I went from being super happy thinking we were done and dusted on Thursday morning, to being fucking pissed off and angry Thursday afternoon. Anyway like I said I've written a decent chunk of the consent now, I will hopefully get it finished tonight.
Had a full day power outage last week, and we have another one this week. No idea what Unison (power lines company) is doing but I hope whatever it is it stops the fact we seem to have about 5-6 blackouts a year. I mean if we lived in the REAL country I'd understand it, but we're 5 minutes away from central Taradale. But for some reason it seems we often have blackouts. Sarah had to go and work from a temporary workspace last week and I think she's doing to do the same again this week. Not to mention that it's a teachers only day today, so the kids are at home having a great ol' time. Probably spending all day watching their iPads.
Stood up the Sydney PoP at work last week. Took a little while with a few mistakes (not mine!) on the Sydney cabling end, but we got there in the end. Was quite happy to stand up our first non-NZ PoP!
Theo's really showing some interest in Karate which is good. Hopefully this really sticks. We'll see. His reading though, gosh it's gone ahead in leaps and bounds. At the start of the year he used to complain he couldn't read, the weekend just gone he finished Charlie and the Chocoalate Factory. We thought maybe he'd read all the words but not really taken it in, but he told me about the various naughty children and their fates. Though once he'd finished he couldn't really tell me exactly what'd happened at the end, but I don't know if that was because he didn't understand it, didn't remember, or didn't want to. Anyway he seemed to really enjoy it and he really stuck at it, reading the whole thing in about a week. Go Theo! Beth meanwhile is getting stuck into Harry Potter.
That'll do. Oh we won the T20 final, so I'm wearing my Cricket Shirt to work, of course.
Tim