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...

As usual, behind again diary. Sorry.  So anyway, Saturday night I went down to Salamanca to meet up with my old friend Travers. Had a good few pints with him at The Whaler (will always be Knoppwoods) before heading up to Jack Green's for a burger.  The sad highlight of the night was a young lady coming up to me and a tad drunkenly yelling at me "DO YOU KNOW YOU LOOK LIKE SCOTT MORRISON?".  Thanks Lady!

I power wrote this story while I had 30 minutes before getting the house ready to leave. So it's probably full of typos. I might come back and fix it oneday...

Sunday was a bit hung, Dad and I went to get some breakfast (I think) and then we went Bed Shopping down to pretty much where the Airport is.  Spent an hour looking at beds and Dad tested them all out.  Eventually...

Well it's been almost a month since my last update so I better make this one a long one.  I'm currently as I type this sitting in Dad's loungeroom with my work laptop, bashing away.  It's good to be back in Tasmania, even though it's for a short visit.  Anyway before I get to Tasmania I'd better recap the last month or so!

It's the next day after that last sentence now, Saturday.  Last night I went down to Irish Murphy's and had a couple of pints with Rob and Denny Fleming.  Great to see them both, Rob's busy as always with 100 things going on.  I'm amazed he managed to find time to catch up with me, but it's great that he did.  Tonight I'm going to go and see Travers, have a couple of pints and dinner with him which'll be nice.  We were going to go on...

We drove back from Tauranga on Wednesday afternoon.  We went out for drinks and dinner with the Tauranga crew on the Tuesday night and had the best intentions of getting up early on Wednesday to go walk up the Mount, but Greg messaged me at 5:30am to say he'd had zero sleep and didn't want to.  So we canned that and instead just met up for breakfast (I went for a quick early morning walk myself) at the same cafe we'd been at the day before.  It served very good bacon and eggs.  Then we drove into MCY and did our meetings etc, before heading out of town.  I had a minor panic that I'd lost/forgotten my sunglasses somewhere, but after a 3rd search of my backpack I found them. Doh.  We listened to quite a lot of Tool on the way back, Kent's always banging on about them and...

It's Tuesday morning and I'm in Tauranga for work.  Big day of meetings ahead, or probably really just one Uber Meeting.  We'll see.  Arrived last night after a stop in Rotorua to replace an XFP in a switch that was giving a lot of errors.  At least replacing the XFP fixed the problem.  We're staying at a place that looks like it used to be (or still is for a bunch of them) apartments for people to live in.  Greg's room has a shower that looks like it's setup for a disabled person.  Anyway it's a place to stay.

Had a good weekend, mostly spent catching up on 10 years of gardening.  We cut down all the branches on the big fruit/plum tree in the washing line area, and then on Sunday (Mother's Day!) Sarah got into the wooden "thing" next to the Greenhouse and cut all that right back. ...

It's Friday, that's a good thing.  Friday's are great.  The Coffee Machine at work broke on  Wednesday.  That's not a good thing.  It's water tank broke and it's stil broken and it's sad.  I want the coffee machine to work.  I don't want to go and have to pay for coffee.

Horrible week with the boy who died in the Cave Tragedy at Abbey Caves.  I went caving once back at Hutchins and I hated it.  It was dark and underground and just spooky.  I can't imagine how horrible the whole thing must have been for the kids.  Good on that one Dad who thought "Why the fuck are they going caving in heavy rain when the cave is known to flood?" and pulled his kid from the trip.  Insane that it went ahead, I wonder what'll come of the investigation.  The whole thing really made me quite depressed -...

Had a nice weekend!  Friday night they wanted to have a sleepover in Theo's room.  No problems there that's easy enough to pull out the pullout bed from under Theo's bed.  So they had a good little sleepover in there, lots of giggling and noise though so we had to get a little crabby with them towards the end.  But they finally went to sleep.

Saturday up to go swimming. New teachers this weekend, Theo has Paula who seems to have a rep of being a bit mean.  But she did a great job with Theo, he seemed to progress his freestyle in one lesson which is more than I can say for the last couple.  Beth also is doing well too, her backstroke is going nicely.

Once we left swimming I dropped the kids at home before zooming off to Taylor's Pools to get some chemicals to settle the...

Got home on Friday night and my new Pixel 7 Pro had arrived in the post, thanks Dad!  Also wrapped up in it was a T-Shirt of Richie Benaud holding a pint with "Marvellous" on the front.  What a great T-Shirt.  Sadly can't really use my Pixel 7 until I get a case for it, it's fully glass and it's very slippery.  Phone's are a funny thing, they design these lovely devices but unless you're super rich and can just afford a new one all the time, you have to totally "wrap up" your phone in a case etc so you don't damage it.  Anyway I've been updating it and using it and it's super fast and amazing.

After our Air New Zealand battle getting back home, I've had another major battle over the course of a week to get them to refund the money for the rental car.  They...

So I've been feeling quite ratty the last few days.  I even did a Covid test on Wednesday night because I was feeling off colour, but it was negative.  So I went to work (on my bike) on Thursday as normal, rode into town even at lunchtime to get some new guitar strings for Theo's guitar, it's hard work learning on steel strings so I bought some nylon ones for him.  Thursday night I was really starting to feel super average, I didn't even feel like having a beer at work that night (Thursday night beer o'clock because Friday was Good Friday) and I came home.  Friday morning I thought I'd better test again and sure enough it came up positive.  Took a while for the little blue line to appear but eventually it did.  Argh.  Anyway so I'm in ISO now until next Thursday, which basically means Easter Weekend...

Sunday morning we got up and had Hotel Breakfast - thought we might as well give it a go while we were there.  It wasn't half bad either, decent bacon and eggs and sausages etc, coffee juice all that stuff.  Then we walked down and got on the tram, amazingly for race day it wasn't actually that bad either, we basically just walked onto a tram.  One of the helpers said "You're lucky, 30 minutes ago it was chaos" so I guess we just arrived at the right time!  We arrived at the track and I bought some Race Radio headphones - we already had the big orange ones I use for gardening but it's so noisy so it was nice to get another set so we could both have earmuffs with radio.  They were only $100 which sure, not super cheap but actually cheaper than what Sarah paid for...