Pool Progress! Kite Day, Swimming
Got a great email on Tuesday! Our resource consent has gone through. Pretty happy that my application was accepted, I mean it was a pretty basic thing we were wanting but yeah, I had to go through and write the 16 page banger or however many pages it was. The council's decision was itself a ~16 page reply. I guess they need to earn their $1,500 fee somehow. Yup, that's right, that's how much that extra bit of fun cost us, $100 for the consent application and then another $500 for the time they had to spend reviewing it etc. It says they visited our property on a certain day but we checked the security cameras and we didn't see them. But I'm not exaclty going to go and argue with them, we've got the permission to dig now so we're good to go. Writing the document to submit took quite a bit of time a couple of weekends ago, I also went up to see our neighbours who'd been through similar and sat down and had a good chat to them. I was quite nervous submitting it in case it had mistakes or wasn't legal enough or something, but I didn't get a single question back on it, just an accepted email a couple of weeks later. So pretty chuffed with that, though damn annoyed we had to piss about with it all.
So hopefully I can organise Monty (the pool guy) and Chad (the Iwi member) to be here at the same time on the same day to dig the hole. Monty's digger guy will dig and Chad will watch to make sure we don't find any bones. Heaven help us if we do because that will cause even more delays and problems and ugh. Don't even want to think about that!
After Beth's Cheerleading group's performance a couple of weekends ago, we found out over the weekend that they won! The came first in their group and 5th overall in the entire competition of ~150 groups. So that's pretty amazing! Well done Bethy.
What else has been happening. A few Friday's ago there was a blood moon. Both the kids were quite excited about it. But when we got Theo out of bed to look at it, he was so tired that he just wanted to go back to bed! We at least showed him. Beth was more interested. We were lucky, at first it seemed like a big cloud was going to ruin the evening, but it slowly floated away so we could see the whole night sky and the redish Moon.
Two weekends ago we went to Holly's for the annual Danniverke Christmas Party. Had a good time there, sat around chatting to everyone. The kids had a great time swimming in the pool. Then at 4pm Beth had a birthday party to go to so I took her to that. She was going to be so tired, swimming practise in the morning, swimming all afternoon at the Mooney's and then she went to a pool party! She took her BC cheerleading bear to the party too. When we picked her up the next morning she had a giant cut on her ankle from where she'd slipped over and cut herself on a tile (not exactly sure what happened) but she was otherwise alright, though very upset because BC wouldn't light up anymore. We tried to see if we could fix him but whatever the problem was meant he wouldn't light up without being pulled to bits to try and fix, which was too hard. She was very sad but she settled down after a while.
Sunday was also Kite Day at Anderson Park, so I took them to that. It was thankfully a very windy day, when Theo went last year (or the year before? I forget) it was nice and windy when we got there, but then it died out straight away! This year it was fine though, nice and windy the whole time. We didn't stay too long though because Beth was already super tired from the party, it was a hot day too. But we had a good look at the various kites before heading home.
Weekend just gone we didn't do a heap, I did a lot of garden work just mowing and tidying and all that jazz. Doesn't really look that much different, damnit. Sunday we went to the Farmer's Market, then wandered around Freedom for a few minutes. I took Biscuit to the dohg wash, the kids helped a bit. Mostly screaming as Biscuit flapped and got water all over them. It's alright for me, I get to wear an apron at the dogwash! Oh yes Sunday we also put up the Christmas Tree, it wasn't even December but it's close enough. So now it's up and flashing in all its Christmasy Glory.
Beth's onto the second Harry Potter book, Theo's reading all the David Walliams books he can get his hands on. I keep having to crab at them in the morning before school, and once it's bedtime lights out, because they don't get their clothes on or get ready, nor do they go to sleep. They just read. I suppose there are worser problems to have though.
Last week Beth came home and told us she had received her school report early. We opened it up and had a look. It seemed a little bit suspicious, especially as the Princple and Teachers names were the same as her friends... [In in case future me forgets, this was an exercise the teacher gave them to do, it was a joke and we all knew it was a joke, she wasn't trying to pretend it was really her report!]
I'm sure other stuff has been happening but as usual I've been too slack and got behind. I'll try and keep up again.
Tim