First of all at the end of day two we went to see a Comedy Show at the Victoria Hotel - Daniel Connell.  He was great, very funny, I had many a good laugh.  I really enjoyed it - I wasn't sure what to expect but the whole show was excellent.  And after the show we found a place called "Max" near our Hotel that was a massive Italian Resturant.  The staff were insane, literally running around with meals and drinks.  Every now and then an old guy (The owner? The manager?) would wander around staring and looking.  I'm pretty sure it was fear of him that kept the staff in utter turbo mode.  Maybe not though. A very different style of service than sleepy ol' Napier.  After Max we found a Gelato shop and had some Gelatos before heading to bed.

Thursday morning we got up early to...

We landed into Melbourne yesterday at 11am or so.  Aus time, I mean.  So that's 1pm NZ time.  We'd been up since about 4am, to make sure we had plenty of time to get to Napier airport.  What losers we were, we got to the airport at 4:50am and the damn thing doesn't even open until 5am.  That's the second time Sarah and I have gotten to an airport before and it's been closed!  Better to be there early though rather than late.

Flight up to Auckland was uneventful, we walked over from Domestic to Intl and then walked through Security and down to get on our plane.  We didn't really have that much time between flights, we didn't even stop to get breakfast even though we meant to.  Once the in flight meal arrived I wasn't going to say no.  The flight passed pretty quickly, we watched movies etc...

We've been worried about Beth the last month or so, she seems to have trouble getting to sleep.  We'll put her to bed at 8pm and she's still awake at 10pm, sometimes 11pm etc.  We've asked her is everything OK, is she worried about something?  Nope.  Is everything OK at school are people upsetting you? Nope.

ANYWAY long story short I heard the other night some little noises and when I walked up the hallway to go into her room I heard the unmistakable "donk!" of her iPad hitting the floor.  I asked her if she was using it "No?" and had a quick look at it.  It seemed unused, but I'm not an Apple person.  I asked her again on Sunday morning, "No Daddy I haven't been using it at night" and so I left at that.  But we thought we'll just make sure, so I got her to...

Saturday took the kids to swimming as usual, then got out and mowed some lawns.  Again it's so nice having proper blades, it cuts the grass so well.  I must remember in a year's time when things aren't great to check the blades again!

Satuday afternoon we took George for a nice long walk, we went down to collect him and then walked him to the dairy and back, via our house for a quick groom.  All up the kids were walking for about two hours, some good exercise for them.

Sunday I got up early and went to Mitre10 for some really boring stuff, a bulb for the Monkey (only a year late), a new bulb for the Salt Lamp, a new smoke detector. Some No More Bugs.  Really exciting stuff.  Then while Sarah over to Chris and Barb's new unit with Beth, Theo and I cleaned the Wistera...

OK so the last update was a bit dramatic, I'll give you that Diary.  But far out I was just over it.  Again, I know that I should not really bitch at all because there are so many people worse off.  Sarah was saying a number of people only got their power back over the weekend just gone.  That's insane.  It's really not, given how bad things are and the damage that's been done, I just can't imagine being those people and surviving for THAT long with no power.  I hope that a lot of them would have access to a generator by that stage though.

Weekend just gone we had a big party on Sunday night which was really nice.  It was, thankfully, a nice evening with some stunning sun.  The pool was warm (I'd spent the previous 24 hours running the pool heatpump) and the kids had a...

Last Sunday after Sarah talked to Adrian we all went out to Chris and Barb's place to help them do... something.  Anything really.  First of all though Sarah baked quite an amazing Frittata, no mean feat given that the only place to cook it was on the BBQ, we still had no power of course.  We packed up the Frittata, all our gloves, spades, brooms etc and headed over to Chris and Barbs.

Just driving there was so ominous, driving along Pakowhai road was so familiar but so different.  Dust everywhere, huge puddles of mud on the sides of the road.  Cars parked everywhere on both sides of the road, people with so many shoves, spades, buckets.  Everyone wearing gumboots.  We turned the corner where the GAS shop is.  Well, was.  It was pretty knackered by the looks.  It was a slow drive down Brookfields road, more cars, people, recovery. ...

As we woke up on day 2, Wednesday, the reality of the situation started to hit us a little more.  I boiled hot water on the little camping gas hob we have, checked that everyone was alright at home, fed the kids some breakfast (we still had milk in the fridge at this stage that was cold) and got out the radio.  I'd dug it out on Sunday night, the old radio we bought in Syria, and put 4 x AA batteries in it.  It works fine, some of the buttons are a bit sticky and I had to bash the volume key properly to get it to work, but it works.  We listened to that to get a feel for what was going on, and started of course to realise just how bad everything was.  Esk River sounded terrible.  Sarah's limited mobile coverage enabled us to find out that...

Last Saturday and Sunday, I started to prepare us for Cyclone Gabrielle.  The media was full of the usual breathless "It's gonna kill us all" hype that they've trotted out so many times before, so I really didn't believe them very much.  Still it was a big spinning circle that looked pretty scary on Windy.com so I thought we'd better take it seriously.  I got out the emergecy kit, I charged up every powerbank, laptop, mobile phone, torch and battery in the place.  I knew the gas bottle was pretty full and we had a gas BBQ and a seperate gas ring to cook on if we needed it.  We had bore water to drink should we need it.  I thought we're pretty good to go, really.  Not expecting that much really, but I did take a "before" video just in case the worst came to...