Trampoline Moving, Covid, Crooked Installs, Fake Dinner, Jordan's Wedding
Hello Diary! How's it going? Been busy, as always. I pretty much have to mentally think to myself "Right, I must sit down and type in my diary for 30 minutes" these days to actually get it done. It's not like the old days when I seemed to have all the time in the world. Anyway, what's been happening?
The back deck and pergola are done, though we're still not 100% sure on how the pergola looks. Sarah's a bit worried it looked took enclosed/like a garage. But we're going to wait until the pool fencing and landscaping etc is completed before we worry about it too much, it's hard to figure out how it's going to look at the moment with no landscaping or anything else done. Of course one of the things we found out a couple of weeks ago when the deck was being extended off the house is that the pool isn't straight. It's off to an angle against the house, which is just insane. I rang Monty and spoke to him about it and he got very angry/defense and blamed Charlotte the landscaper about it. She was here on the morning Monty was putting the pool in and helped him with showing where the pool was supposed to go exactly. Monty claims that she didn't then put the lines down correctly. Which is hilariously wrong, there's no way that was Charlotte's responsability. Monty just fucked it up. The whole thing caused some drama because the concrete boxing around the pool doesn't line up with the deck, so some work has to be done to try and hide that fact, extra work of course. I'll try and get Monty to pay for it, it's insane that he's trying to blame the landscaper. This of course is the problem when you've got different people doing the work they'll all point the finger at each other. I guess if have a single company doing it though and they fuck something up, the just wouldn't tell you.
All these things don't really matter that much anyway, it's like a paint job you do yourself, you always notice/know about the minor defects but overall the backyard still looks good and you can't notice the pool isn't straight unless you get down and examine it very, very closely. Which isn't the sort of thing you're likely to do when you're going to jump in on a hot Summer's day.
Next steps are for the pool tiles to arrive and get installed, then for the pool fencing to get installed, then the planting and all that stuff. Then we should be close to being done. Oh and the pool pump shed can't come soon enough, seesh. We also really need to get the back fence repaired so Biscuit can go and live outside again, he's going crazy being inside so much of the time and keeps chewing things. He chewed up Theo's train whistle and he chewed up, fuck him, Reble Sport boat. At least he just chewed the base of the thing, the sail itself was safe. I threw it all in the bin, and took him for a walk that night. But when I got home I took it out of the bin and saved it, I love it and the sail (the cutest bit) is still fine. Damn mutt. Anyway now I try and check the house before I go to work to make sure there's nothing he'll chew, like my Dilbert book etc he did the other day.
I was down in Wellington last week to go and visit a customer and talk to them about taking over management of the LAN. That went quite well, it was odd to be back to being a consultant for a day there. But later that night I had to go into the Exchange and swap over a router for another router, so it was back to being a Grunt as normal. While we were there in Wellington, we went out for dinner. I'm going to just copy/paste the message I sent to everyone about it, rather than type it out again:
I was down in Wellington ~3 nights ago with two of my workmates. Wellington is known as a pretty good foodie place, especially there's lots of excellent burger joints there. So anyway, we've had a busy day and we're walking out into town to get dinner. Walking along the really popular foodies place, my workmate finds a place he liked the look of, but I was talking on the phone to my boss, so we kept walking for a while. I finish chatting to my boss and hangup. We walk a bit further along and my workmate says "let's turn around and go back to that first place on the corner I saw, it's got great looking burgers" so turn around to do that. I charge in the door first after having a glance at the menu (burgers), my workmates follow me in. We sit down. I order the beef burger, called a Mockingburger. Workmate number 1 orders a Hawaiian burger. Workmate number 2 orders the Fried Chicken. Not 5 minutes goes by and the food arrives. That was so quick, but we're hungry so happy with that. I'm munching on my fries, very tasty, washing it down with a beer. I take a bite of my burger and it's... it's odd. It's really mushy? I solider on for a bit and I mention how odd my burger is to workmate number 1, he says "Yea, mines like that too". Then he says to me "Do you think it's a Veggie burger?" I'm like no, no way! I ordered the Beef Burger, of course it's beef!!! I ask Workmate Number 2 what his fried chicken is like and he says "Yea, yea it's a bit frikkin werid and mushy, I don't think it's chicken" Workmates number one THEN pipes up and says "Yea we should have gone to the place I suggested on the corner" And I was all "This IS the place you said!!" and he says "No, that's next door". Then it clicks. The place we're in is called MockingBird. The Decor is quite odd and flowerly now I'm not soley focused on eating a large juicy burger and I look around. I go and grab the menu again. Oh No. The Beef burger is actually written as "Beef" burger. The name of the Burger is a "MockingBurger". It says, in small writing "Vegan Resturant" in the top left corner of the menu. And that's the story of how 3 grown men looking to eat a massive meaty meat burger ended up eating a vegetarian vegan meal.
Of course everyone at work has been giving us/me lots of grief about it. Well deserved though I said, what a stupid mistake! Aside from that incident, Wellingtop and then off to Palmerston North trip went well. I had the Boss' big Ford Ranger type thing to drive, big meataxe Diesel car. What a beast it was, it felt like driving a bus.
Finally, finally got around to moving the Trampoline weekend just gone. I'd spent the previous few weeks getting the Rose Garden area prepared, digging out a layer of topsoil, making it nice and round (the string on a pole trick Sarah told me about was very handy). I put all the top soil in the bin and the greenwaste company wrote me a polite email saying "Our truck can lift 120kg your bin was WAY over, you can't give us soil it's in the rules" to which I wrote back very apologetically saying sorry! My bad. I emptied out all the soil over the weekend and just filled it with greenwaste, chucked all the soil in various garden beds. My god the veggie garden is in a state like it's never been, I've gotta get onto that soon before it just grows up into the sky and kills everyone. Moving the tramp I thought was going to be a nightmare, there's a tool you have to use to bend the springs. I remember what a hassle it was to use putting the tramp together. After using it to remove 3 springs I was sweating and stressed and having trouble removing anymore, it'd already stuffed up and I'd hit my finger realy badly on a flicking spring. There's 52 springs around it too. I went and double checked the manual and... we'd always been using the tool wrong. Backwards/upside down. And it sort of works that way but when you use it the right way, OMG it's so easy. SO EASY. Once I'd figured that out it was a walk in the park to remove the other 49 springs from around the base. Then it was quite easy to deconstruct, move to the Rose Garden and reconstruct. I haven't fully reconstructed it, it's definetly hard to get the mat back on with all the springs, I had to get Sarah to help me with a couple of them. But the mat's on now and I just have to finish getting the safety back on before putting it up.
I also started getting back into running last week, which of fucking COURSE means all this week it's just supposed to rain, rain rain. Sarah and the kids had to come and get me from work yesterday because it was just mega rain floods everywhere weather. Honestly this is the 4th time I've said to myself "I'd better get back into running" only to have the very week I decide to do that flood out with rain the whole time. It's so fucking frustrating, because I'm not so keen as to want to get out there in the mega pissing rain at 5:30 in the morning. Which is about the only time I can go because I want to run for an hour, the kids get up anywhere from 6:30am onwards, and if I go running at night I just end up staring at the ceiling for 2-3 hours when I try to go to sleep. It's so annoying. Anyway, fingers crossed it doesn't piss with rain all next week and I can finish getting the trampoline together and do some exercise.
Last weekend was Jordan's wedding, which was good fun! I took the kids over to Peter and Mary's, then Mary came over about 30 minutes later to pick us up and take us up to The Mission. Thankfully for Jordan and Andrea it was a perfect sunny day, hardly a cloud in the sky. They had a lovely wedding on the lawn at the Mission, then some photos etc, we hung around in the garden for drinks and then dinner. Dinner was amazing, one of the best steaks I've had in a long time, though probably being hungry after standing around chatting for 2 hours and drinking helped. But it was a good night, my one complaint would be the DJ didn't really get a very good selection of bangers together, the dance floor was pretty sparse! But otherwise a good night, lots of fun, a great wedding.
COVID is now rife in Hawke's Bay. Beth's friend Ruby got it and was so bad that she ended up in hospital. She just couldn't keep anything down/in her body, so ended up mega dehydrated and had to go on a drip for a night or two. She's fine now thankfully, but yea. I was worried we were going to have to tell Beth her best friend wasn't with us anymore, imagine that! Thankfully not the case. Heaps of kids at school have got it, my work is a ghost town because so many staff have either got it or are isolating because their family have got it etc. I can't believe it hasn't hit the Tech Team yet, but I shouldn't really say that because I'm sure it will hit us soon. Not looking forward to it I tell you.
Took the kids to Rollerskating on the weekend. Theo gets so crabby when I say that because of course he's rollerBLADING Daddy. Same same but different. They had a great time, Theo's really into it, Beth's into it if she has a friend to talk to/play with. Ruby wasn't there, but she found a new friend from school to hang out with and the she enjoyed it a lot more. So had a good time there, then went to "That Sandwich Shop" (the name, not a reference to some incident) and had some tasty sammies before walking back back to the car/home so I could keep working on the trampoline move.
I'm going to publish this entry now, it's 7am and I've been typing it for about 40 minutes. As always I'm sure I've missed a few things so I'll probably come back it over the next few days and edit/update it. But that's mostly what's been happening. Oh my new passport arrived after all the hassle, hooray. Next cab off the rank is to get the kids Australian Citizenship. I started working on that last night and of course that's a whole Palava as well. Everything always is, nothing's easy anymore. Is that cause I'm old, or is the world just fucked? I guess I'll never know.
Tim