Monday was, as previously reported, a very wet boring day.  I sat down with the kids and tried to teach them to play chess for a bit, thinking they might enjoy it.  Turns out Beth already knows quite a bit of the rules and the way pieces can move.  Theo knew of Chess, but only via the "ChessKid" app on his iPad but he never really understood what he was doing.  Anyway we played for a little while, I tried to explain the rules to them and they both did a pretty good job.  Theo seemed to enjoy it too, but it was probably a bit much for him really. Still it was something to do rather than just sit around bored.  I was telling my workmates about it yesterday and one of them said he had a lot of success teaching his to play checkers/draughts instead, because it's a...

It's a long weekend (Waitangi Day today) and man oh man is the weather shit. Woke up this morning and it's just been raining solid all night, the pool is about to overflow (doesn't really matter) and I can imagine the ground is wet and boggy outside.  Hopefully parts of Jervoistown don't flood again, it certainly doesn't seem as bad as the time it did flood.  Saturday we did the usual, I took them up to do their swimming lessons.  Beth's getting good at swimming fast, and her dives are getting better.  She's also starting doing tumble turns, she did 3 amazing ones but sadly the 4th one I decided to film to show Sarah how good she is getting, she fluffed up.  Oh well. Theo's coming along well too, he's starting to learn to breath on the side and seems to be doing quite well at that.  Once swimming...

I only wrote one story for Jan. That was a bit slack. I feel like I don't have anytime to sit down and write anything. So really quickly before the kids are up

We have Omicron now.  So NZ is getting ready to ramp up cases etc.

The went back to school this week.  They seem to be going well so far, though I think Theo finds it hard to understand the teachers because they're all wearing masks most of the time.  Beth has to wear a mask too but seems to be coping with that fine.

The pool landscaping will hopefully start this week.

We got a replacement for Blueberry and it seems to work fine cleaning the pool.

I repaced the blades on my lawnmower all by myself. Not a big thing but a big thing for me.  When I started it up they didn't fly off and...

Here's my diary notes I wrote up while we were driving back on the Sunday afternoon from Hamilton.  The drive back was much better than I thought it was going to be, usually the Sunday of the last day (for most people) of Holidays is mental.  Heaps of traffic leaving Napier towards Taupo, but quite a quiet road in the direction that we were travelling.

Sunday 2nd Jan: We packed up the car, fitted the topbox ontop, loaded that up.  Took Biscuit to the Kennels, got everything into the car, said goodbye to the house and set off for Hamilton.  Because it'd be a 5+ hour drive directly to Cooks Beach we split up the drive by stopping in Hamilton for the night to stay with Di's parents.  They have the most amazingly beautiful old house.  Huge high ceilings, probably a 1920s house I guess?  It's on this huge...

Here we are, 31st December!  We've had a great few days since Christmas Day, pretty much all spent at home.  I've tried to get on top of some of the gardening with some success, the kids have spent hours and hours in the pool.  Mostly managing to avoid getting sunburnt too, even though the sun has been beating down and there's no cover when swimming!  It's just sun sun sun.

Anyway let's skip back to Christmas day

The kids were all excited (of course) on Christmas Eve and left out letters, carrots for the Reindeer, Milk and Cookies for Santa.  When they woke up in the morning the carrots had been munched and Santa had gulped his treats.  Santa had left them lots of little presents in their stockings, Mummy and Daddy left Theo a brand new bike (with gears!) and for Beth a $100 voucher so she could go...

Only 10 days since I last updated but already it seems like an eon has passed.  So the pool is now in, in.  We can swim in it.  The filter is running, the temporary fencing is up.  The kids spent 3 hours in it non-stop on Wednesday, Theo was so tired afterwards that about 30 seconds after I put him to be he was splayed out on his back fast asleep.  The kids love it anyway, though there's been a few complaints that it's not big enough.  Sorry kiddies, you'll just have to deal with it.  I think it's plenty big.

I felt like I had heaps to write about, but now I've typed it up, it's not much.

Monty our pool guy even dropped off a Dolphin Pool Cleaner Robot for us!  I got him out of his box and put him in the Water and he started cleaning. ...

So as previously mentioned, the pool's in the ground.  It was a very, very stressful 48 hours though I can tell you.  Monty our pool guy arrived on Wednesday night, the night before, to just double check everything.  Turns out double chek everything was ask a lot of questions about where the pump shed is going, what height the pool needs to be installed at and a few other things.  Most of which we didn't know the answer to because that was the realm of our landscaper.  We thought the two had been in contact and sorted a few of these things out, especially because Monty'd had a copy of the plans for the last 2-3 months, but it turns out that wasn't the case. So there were a few very frantic phonecalls to our landscaper who, thankfully stepped out and said "Don't panic we'll sort it out" and said...

It's in! It's finally in!  There's a lot more work to go yet, but it's in the ground.

It's happening. It's actually happening.  On Thursday, in two days time, the hole for the pool is getting dug and it's going to go in the ground.  We have our consents.  We have our pool guy lined up.  We have Chad, the head of the Maori Trust that we have to liase with and wants to supervise the dig lined up.  It's happening.  The whole extra Resource Consent bit has cost us another $2.5k that I really didn't want to have to spend, but it is what it is.  At least it's finally happening.  Once it's in it'll just have temporary fencing and I don't think the pump/filter will be going etc as it'll need electricial work, but hey.  It'll be IN THE GROUND and the Council roadblocks will be mostly passed.  What a day it'll be.  I am probably jinxing it totally by writing this.  We'll see.

Saturday morning...

Got a great email on Tuesday! Our resource consent has gone through.  Pretty happy that my application was accepted, I mean it was a pretty basic thing we were wanting but yeah, I had to go through and write the 16 page banger or however many pages it was.  The council's decision was itself a ~16 page reply.  I guess they need to earn their $1,500 fee somehow.  Yup, that's right, that's how much that extra bit of fun cost us, $100 for the consent application and then another $500 for the time they had to spend reviewing it etc.  It says they visited our property on a certain day but we checked the security cameras and we didn't see them.  But I'm not exaclty going to go and argue with them, we've got the permission to dig now so we're good to go.  Writing the document to submit took...