Birthday Parties / Kite Festival / Ditch Update / Water Filter

Beth had two birthday parties on the weekend, busy little chicken.  Saturday afternoon was Daisy's and then Sunday after was Ruby's birthday party.  She had a great time at both by all accounts.  She certainly was utterly exhausted both Saturday and Sunday night.

The ditch digging is slow progress, Adrian is going to get a couple of people to help me.  It's such a PITA, every time I dig down below about 400mm it just fills up with water.  I'm not actually sure if it'll even be possible to get it dug properly before Friday, because it won't f**king stop raining in Napier.  I don't remember it being like this for ages, every day it's wet and/or miserable.  Bitch moan complain.  While I was digging on Friday in the water, I accidentally dug up Tui.  Sorry puss-puss.  I buried her against the fenceline and as I was digging I pulled out a werid bit of material.  And then some bones went floating and I realised oh no, this is Tui's cat bed we buried her on.  Poor Tui.  Cat bone soup.  Anyway she's been moved temporarily and I'll re-bury her (as best as possible...) when the new plumbing is done.  Sorry Tui.  You were a good cat.

Got some new tires for my bike last week.  I'm sick of getting punctures, I've had three in as many months and it's always a $15 replacement.  I'm sure I could do it myself but bugger trying to figure that out, it's always the back tire with the gears and all that crap on it, I have no clue.  So this time the guy said "Look the tires it came with are OK for the odd use etc, but you're riding 15km every day, you should get some of these which are harder and made to withstand almost anything that could puncture them".  So now I have new $50ea tires which ARE meataxe (I read some reviews of them) and should stop almost all the usual puncture crap.  They also make the bike handle so much better, which is odd.  They're thinner and they seem faster, I don't seem to have to expend as much energy to get them up to ~30km/h and keep the bike there.  Long as it's not windy of course.

Sunday I dropped Beth off at her second birthday party, and then went back and picked up Theo to take him to the Kite Festival at Anderson Park.  We took our (Beth's) little Butterfly kite and when we got there, there was a bit of wind to fly it so Theo had a go with it and had a great time.  We walked over to where all the BIG kites were, Stringrays and Octopus etc all flying up in the air, it was great.  We had a good look around and then decided to try and fly ours again and then the wind just died.  Totally died.  All the cool big kites slowly but surely sank to the ground as the wind that'd be there just went away.  So after 20 minutes of trying to get the butterfly kite back up, watching it sink down and then seeing all the big ones sink, we called it day and went to collect Beth from her party.  I'm glad we got there early enough to see the big ones flying and Theo got to have a go with the Butterfly kite.

Got a new water filter fitted to the house, so no more problems with Ant Water.  It has a UV light on it too, so any bacteria that might get into the water gets zapped at killed too.  No more taps blocking up with gunk.  No more odd smelling water in summer.  Just fresh clean water that's not going to kill us. Hooray.

Here's a few other random photos of the childrens.

Oh yea I forgot - took Theo to the Dr yesterday, he's had a few uclers in his mouth.  Anyway to rule out a a lack of B12 and some other things that can cause them, they wanted to take a blood sample.  My gawd the poor kid.  We had to swaddle him in a blanket and I had to basically stop him being able to move at all with my arms pressed against it.  It's so horrible, having to force your kid to do something they are utterly terrified about.  Poor fella.  It was thankfully over very quickly and the Dr was great.  But yea... Not a great experience.  Beth was a star, trying to cuddle him and help him feel better, she was such a lovely little girl.  She's a great sister to him.  I dropped her off at school on time and then took Theo up to the cafe to have a gingerbread man to try and cheer him up, then I dropped him off at school.

Tim