It's Monday but it's a holiday here today.  We've just finished having our breakfast and we're about to go down and collect George as part of Cuddles 'n' Care.  He's a lovely big white fluffy dog, I think I mentioned him last time.  Anyway it's not raining today, which is a nice change, though it did rain over night.  Yesterday was, thank fek, finally a proper Summer's Day.  It was hot, we all got in the pool.  The pool was a nice 28c which is perfect for just jumping in and enjoying it.  I fact I better get out there in a mintue and take the pool cover off again.

Theo's playing Mario Kart, something which he utterly utterly loves.  He's figured out how to play it online (now we've paid for the stupid subscription to be able to play online, I hate the new modern age) and enjoys doing...

WHAT A WEEKEND.  My God.

Friday morning up bright and early, took Biscuit to the Kennels.  He gets so excited now when he goes in the car, soon as we turned up the street to the kennels he got even MORE exicted, running around in the back etc.  Dropped him off, all good.  Back home and we all got packed up to head up for our big trip to see Elton John Live in Auckland! We'd been talking to the kids about it heaps, imagining what it was going to be like etc.  Sadly earlier in the week I'd read quite a few stories about how it was going to be quite a week weekend, always annoying.  So we made sure to pack raincoats and shoes for rain and we even had some little plastic ponchos left over ready to put on if it really started to rain for the...

Hello Dear Diary.

It's been ages sorry, I haven't been motivated to write because I've always been doing something or being busy with something.

I'll recap what we've done over the last month, which isn't really that much.  The weather over the "Summer" holidays was utterly terrible, just rain rain and rain.  Something like the first 14 days of 2023 were all days where it rained apparently.

It's Thursday morning as I type this, though I'm sure by the time I actually copy it out of VIM and paste it into my Diary it'll be later than that.

We painted the Pool Shed.  I say painted, I mean stained.  Stained the poolshed black.  It looks really good now, it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb in your eyesight, so it blends into the garden much more.  I really like it.  It was harder to paint than we thought it...

Well Dear Diary, since my last entry many thigs have happened including Christmas!  Let me try and start from the start and we'll go from there.
The kids got their school reports, I posted those to my diary as the last two stories.  We're obviously very proud of the two of them, both got excellent school reports.  Beth was a bit sad she got one "working at" not "working above" like all the others, but we stressed to her that doesn't matter because it says she's putting in all the effort she can.  That's what matters.
The last day of Tennis was on the Saturday, the kids dressed up in little bit of Christmas themed happiness and Santa gave them a lollipop at the end of the session.  Theo was quite annoyed with Santa for giving him a lollipop that he wasn't very impressed with the flavour.  Bad Santa!  Then...

Finally got around to checking the water filters the other day.  I took the first one off and it was brown.  Which is to be expected because the Bore water here is full of iron, but I probably wasn't expecting it to be quite as brown as it was.  But still it's two years since we got the new filter system installed, so it was about time to replace them.  You're supposed to replace them once every year, but then filter systems always say things like that because they want you to spend the money every year on the new filters.  ANYWAY.  I took the first one off, realised it was beyond being able to just clean with a hose and ordered some new ones.  Once I'd collected them (and a new UV Lamp) I, with Sarah's help, installed them.  Installing the new water filters wasn't that hard, but...

What a day Saturday morning was!  Earlier in the week I went into town to buy some mud gaiters on the advice of my old workmate Anthony who said when he'd done the run earlier in the year (it was the 2021 run postponed until early 2022) that it'd been super muddy and a pair of gaiters had really helped with all the mud and stopped it getting into his shoes etc.  So I'd gone into Macpac and gotten the cheapest pair they had, $23 bangers.  Anthony kindly offered to give me a lift out to the run on Saturday morning, so having carefully prepared all my gear the night before I jumped in the taxi at 6:40am and headed to his place ready to depart for the run.  What a strange morning it was, very foggy and overcast.  But at least it wasn't raining!  When I got to Anthony's...

This weekend is the Cape Kidnappers 21k Half Marathon run.  I've been doing a bit of training for it, not heaps, but not a zero amount.  I've lost nearly 10kg since I started training for it and already my knees are much happier for it.  I did a 16k run on the weekend just to gauge how well prepped I was and I did pretty well, I wasn't super fast or anything and I'm going to be a lot slower on the actual run itself because it's all uphill and downhill vs the flat that I've been running on.  But hey at least I've done some training, I've tested out running with my waterback thing a few times.  I'm pretty much as prepped as I can be I think.

We had Isla's birthday here on Sunday - she wanted a pool party birthday and Holly and Adrian are still finishing...