AMS Tiki Tour 2023 / SDWAN Upgrade / Green Belt
Wednesday night at School was the 2023 production by AMS "Tiki Tour 2023". I biked into town from work and "reserved" a parking spot for Sarah by parking my bike in it, then staring down all the people who tried to park in it while I waited for Sarah to arrive. She had to take Beth out of Cheerleading to get there. Once she arrived she helped Beth's friend Daisy put her Makeup on, and then we all walked over to the Theatre. Sarah dropped Beth and Theo off at the entrances for the performers, then we went inside. We met up with Holly and had a chat before it was time to go in. Soon Peter, Mary, Chris, Barb and Adrian arrived too and we all took our seats.
The lights went down and the performance started! It was great, the first major performer we noticed was Joseph, who had a role holding up a stop sign and recite some lines, which he did fantastically. Next up was Beth who had a little role speaking as well. Then we had Beth's class performance which was great, Beth danced with a huge cheerleading smile on her face the whole time.
We'd just finished the 7th stop on the Tiki Tour and the two leads came out to introduce the 8th stop. But everything was dark, and they had no audio on their mics. We sat there confused for a few seconds before we realised the house lights were on, and all the exit signs were lit - emergency lighting was on. Oh no. POWER CUT. In the middle of the damn performance!!! We were SO gutted, the kids had been practising this for months, they'd had their big dress rehearsal the same day and everything was fresh in their mind. After about 30 minutes the principle came out to announce they were assessing the situation. Our on mobile phones people had been reading that there'd been a "loud explosion" at the Napier substation and power was out all over town. Another 10 minutes later the Principle came out to say "We're going to have to call it off, we'll bring all the children out onto the stage to get them ready to be released back to the parents". All the kids were walked out onto stage under the light of mobile phones. Then the Princple got up again to say "Thanks everyone for coming, and a huge thanks to the two teachers who have helped put this all together, they have put in a huge amount of effort" and just as we were cheering them on in the darkness, the power came back on! Everyone cheered as they realised. The principle shouted out "Shall we continue the show??" and the crowd ROARED back "Yes!!!!"
So it took another 20 minutes to get the show back on the road, but eventually the curtain went up and the Wearable Arts kids came out. Turns out it was a good thing they'd gotten to do the show on the night because they were basically "sewn into" their costumes, so getting them out and able to re-use them again on another day/night would have been hard.
And then it was time for Theo's performance, he was a Purple People Eater. I'm so, so glad he got to do his performance, I would have been so devastated for him if he couldn't have done it on the night. Especially because Beth had been able to do hers. Anyway that didn't come to pass, the show went on and everyone got to show off the extreme hard work they'd put in over the last couple of months. The Principle came out again at the end and thanked everyone and talked about how hard it'd been to organise etc and that they wouldn't been doing one next year due to the amount of effort!
It was such a great night anyway, really amazing. The songs were great, the performers were great and the whole night was just a huge bunch of fun, with the exception of the nerve wrecking 45 minutes when there was no power and we were sure the show would have to be cancelled.
The Saturday before, Grant and I did the huge SDWAN upgrade at work. VSD 6.0.11->6.0.14->20.10.R1->20.10.R13. Grant came and got me from home about 5:50am and we started the upgrade at about 6:15am. And we finished about 7pm that night. Took ages and we hit a few minor snags, turns out there were already a few devices in the network with issues and so it wasn't the fault of our upgrade that they went funny, though our work did exacerbate their problems. 3 hours with Nokia on the phone though and we got them resolved.
Monday the 26th June - Theo did his grading at Karate and is now a Green Belt!
Now it's Saturday morning and we're down in Wellington. I took a day of leave yesterday, we put Biscuit into the Chesterhope Dog Kennels (they're open again, hooray) and dropped the kids off at school. Sarah went into town for an appointment and I just tided up the house etc. We drove down yesterday at a nice pace, stopped in Danniverke to get some Subway for lunch, and we had fish and chips (well, Chicken and chips) for dinner. This morning I got up and went and got coffee and some cereal etc for breakfast, and soon we're going to head into town to Te Papa and then the Lego Brickman event.
Finally, diary, I'm up to date again. For the moment.
Tim