New Car Day!
Today we go and pick up the car we just bought, a 2011 VW Golf GSI. I hope it's a good car - we got a mechanic to look at it and he said it seemed fine and had no major issues. The people we're buying it off see nice and genuine, they're selling to to upgrade to a bigger car. They even texted me last weekend to say they were looking at an X-Trail and to ask what we thought of ours. I went to ride my bike home from work last night for it's last official ride home and the damn thing had a flat rear tire! I took it out at lunchtime to head into town to return a Visa card I'd found on the ground at a petrol station, on the way back I've run over a little bit of metal. So that was a bit annoying, at least Kent was kind enough to give me a lift home.
School Holidays are over, I don't think they'd even started when I wrote my last diary entry? Oh yea I just went back and checked and I had. Anyway so the first week of school holidays was Sarah's last week of working for Discovery/Warner Brothers/Mediaworks call it what you will. I'm super glad it's over, it's been a real stressful thing the last year or so and I'm glad to see it over. She went up to Auckland on Thursday afternoon to say goodbye etc, they gave her a $250 gift card for Farmers which was nice. While she was away I worked from home to look after the kids. Biscuit was being really funny though, not his usual self and just drooling everywhere. It was drip drip drip drip so bad that inside was disgusting with dog slobber so I had to put him outside. When it hadn't stopped by 1pm I rang up and got him an emergency vet appointment.
They looked at him and said it wasn't related to his teeth/gums but rather his stomach was really bloated and that would be causing him pain and making him think that was he going to vomit. Thus all the drool. They gave him a shot which they said would ease the stomach pain and also sedate him a little bit. And sure enough he was quite drowsy for the rest of the afternoon, I put him up next to me to sleep for the night and he was fine. The next morning I thought he was still drooling but he was just excited for his morning breakfast, once he'd had that he was happy and back to his usual self. So that's good, $180 later but hey at least Biscuit is back to being Biscuit again. We're not sure what caused the problem but I caught him licking something while we were taking him for a walk on Wednesday afternoon, so I expect whatever that was is the thing that caused him the issues.
Ben, Di, Jacob and Abbey came to stay with us on Sunday and Monday night. It was nice to see them, Sunday we just took it easy and had pizza for dinner, Monday we all went to Ocean Spa (I had to work, everyone else hung out for the day) in the evening which was nice. Then Sarah cooked a lovely lamb roast for us all. Yummo. The rest of the week was just normal, Thursday morning at 5am I had to restart OSPF on VPK-CR1-CORE which was an "ospf shut ; ospf no shut" command. Soon as I hit the shutdown command I lost all access to the node. Turns out my out of band access wasn't properly out of band, I'd used my Phone as a Hotspot for it's 4G access, but I'd forgotten to disconnect it from the home Wifi so all traffic was still going that way. Anyway I had a backup plan to get access to it which I used to unshut OSPF and everything came back as expected.
I can't remember if I mentioned that work got me a Mac Mini to work from home, it's a nice little thing. Very performant for what it is. They also gave me a HUGE MONITOR to use with it, it's fully massive. Huge. Here's a photo so you get the idea. Anyway it's nice and it'll make working from home easier.
UPDATE: We've just been to pickup the car, it's great. The stereo is even better than I'd hoped, the Bluetooth works great and it's got Android Auto built in and that works. It's a shame it's the older version where you've got to plug the cable in to get Android Auto, but better than nothing.
I think that's about all that's happened in the last couple of weeks worthing writing about - as always I'll probably come back and edit this when I remember something else.
Tim