Tough Guy and Gal, Pool Fencing, Auckland, Bits
It's been nearly a month since my last update and I'm struggling to remember what's been happening so I'll just have to give it a go. Beth did the "Tough Guy and Girl" challenge on the 2nd of June. She was very nervous about doing it, worried all morning. The hype and size of the event didn't help either when we finally got there. So many people and cars and kids. But she looked really cool with her school ribbons in her hair, and one of the school teachers helped paint her face with a bit of war paint so she was ready to go. Once the start gun went off she was away with quite a smile on her face, and we waved and cheered her on as she went past the various bits of the courses us adults could reach easily enough. The course was only 1.5km for her age group and it took her about 15 minutes to complete. She wasn't too muddy at the end. Once we went and found her at the finish line she just burst into tears. She explained that she wasn't sad though and she'd enjoyed it, it was just the emotion we think of having finally done it after all the build up to it. It was cold though and she wanted to go home, not hang around for the prize giving. Here's various photos and videos I took out at the event.
With the exception of one panel of glass, the pool project is pretty much finished. Though that's not really the case there's still a few things that need to be sorted out. Having power out the back is great though, finally I can run the heatpump. Not that it's doing a lot at the moment because it's Winter and it's farking freezing. But all the landscaping is done pretty much it's looking really nice out there now. I'll be super glad when the whole project is done though. Everyone's over it.
Not a real lot else major has been happening I don't think? The kids have had a few playdates with their friends, Sarah drive to Palmerston North on Sunday to do a ring building course. We've had simply heaps of rain and the whole property is just one big soggy mess.
Dad arrives tomorrow - the amount of hassle to get him issued a stupid Government pass to allow him to travel was insane, but we got there in the end. I will try and write more updates while he's here, now that I'll hopefully be caught up at the end of this.
Managed to flip a circuit breaker last night trying to take too much advantage of my 3 hours of free power. Ooops. At least these days it's just flip the breaker the other way, not having to replace fuse wire.
Went to Auckland a couple of weeks ago - moved MDR-BR1 from Level 3 in MDR to Level 2 and upgraded it to talk to the network at 2 x 100G. All went very well, quite happy with it. All the pre-work I did to build all the circuits meant it just stood up straight away, with the exception of one small problem where I forgot to enable MPLS on the MDR-CR1 Nokia. But once I realised and turned that on I was away laughing. Glad it went so well. Didn't get a lot of sleep the night of the migration though, we finished at 3am and I was up at 6am again doing a few more small things. Fun fun. Still plenty of migrations etc left to do though, there'll need to be another trip to Auckland again soon as well.
Can't remember if I said this previously or not, but I had to get the bearings in the main pedal/crank thing of my bike replaced. It was making a click/clack sound everytime I peddeled. Turned out the bearings were just worn down majorly from all the riding I do. I think it probably means they were shit at well, it's only done 6k and most people thinkg they should last for ages past that. Anyway it was only $40 to get it all fixed up and now it rides so much better again.
Beth's Teacher Ms Godwin has recently shared with the glass that she's engaged to her partner, and then more recently that she's expecting twins. Such great news until we found out yesterday that she's lost her twins. Sarah talked to Beth about it last night, Beth doesn't seem to upset, though it's hard to know what goes on in her little brain sometimes. Poor Ms Godwin, she's such a lovely bubbly happy person, I feel really bad for her.
Spoke to Uncle Shane last week - he's moved out from Pat's now and is living with Auntie Leanne and Uncle Paul. He sounded good, though I think he's not really doing that well. Mum said he's on Oyxgen etc. It was nice to talk to him though, he sounded good.
I took the kids for a walk on Sunday while Sarah was in Palmerston North. She had the car, so legs/bikes were all we had. Beth decided she wanted to find a four leaf clover and blow me down if she didn't find one 10 minutes later. And then Theo found one! And then I found one. All up I think we found about 6 of them. It was good fun and a great way to pass the time on a very wet, cold and miserable Sunday afternoon.
Which also reminds me Beth lined up most of her toys the other day for a "School Photo" and then talked through them all. She was quite sad the night before because Pengy the Penguin finally ran out of batteries and doesn't make the noise anymore when he's squeezed.
Ditched Zorin on my laptop. It was good, but it was also klunky. If you rebooted it you had to enter your password, it can't/couldn't store the encryption key in the TPM like Windows 10. But it was when after a kernel upgrade, that resmuming from suspend would make it just.... start up like it was freshly booted. So it would lose all my work/open programs. I tried to fix it, it didn't work so fuck it. Back to Windows 10. It's not a perfect operating system but it does just work so much better. So a bit of a failed experiment really. Alas.
Oh yes, last weekend Sarah had the stroke of Genius to implement "iPad Tokens" for the kids. Each Sunday both kids get 2 x 30 minute and 4 x 15 minute iPad tokens to use up using the week. They can also do other chores etc to earn another token. This has instantly stopped the whole "Can I use my iPad" question that we used to get every 5 minutes, and blow me down if they don't actually play together, or read a book, or all those other things kids used to do back in the day. It's such a great system - they still get to use their iPads but they are having to think "Do I really want to use this token now?" because they understand if it's used up before the week's end, that's it. It's a great system and even though Beth burst into tears and stormed off into her room when it was first explained, she's taken to using it quite well. I'm really glad. They've never really understood/cared for the value of money even though we've been over it many times, but the value of iPad tokens? That's what they understand.
OK that'll do, it's 5 minutes past having to wake up the kids so I better go and do that.
Tim