Category: News

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I ain’t afraid of no ghosts!

It was movie night in the Cramer household tonight and the boys had been on about Ghostbusters for a while.  Given that Max is a bit sensitive when it come to scary movies I thought this choice would be somewhat interesting.

After moving from his position in front of the TV to be on the couch with me after the very first ghost scene (to be fair they both did) I really didn’t think we’d get through it but he manned up and rode it out. He was really waiting to see the Stay Puft man and as it was at the end I guess he had to watch until the end 🙂

A couple of things I noticed about the movie:

  1. Everyone always seemed to have a cigarette in their mouth
  2. Sigourney Weaver, Bill murray and Dan Ackroyd looked so young! 🙂
  3. The special effects were pretty crap.  Were they any good even in their day?

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how the boys go tonight. They seemed to have gone of to sleep OK………..

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ye olde tournament

This weekend the family plus Granddad and Ngaire went to a jousting tournament held in Upper Hutt and run by The Order of the Boar (great name!).  There were joutsers from New Zealand, Belgium, Canada, Sweden and the US along with archery, sword fighting and siege machines.  The boys had a great time and loved all the events but were especially impressed by the pageantry and colour of the jousting.

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What else do you expect?

One rare thing that happened was that on one of the runs the competitors hit each other on the tips of their lances.  If you think about all the things that have to align for this to happen you can understand why it doesn’t happen very often.  Luckily I was shooting in high speed mode…

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unlike when i was a kid

Hi everyone – long time no see!  Things have been crazy around here but I think everyone is a wee bit mad at this time of year 🙂  Here are a couple of things that you may find interesting:

  • Vic had a great time in Auckland at the Kylie Minogue concert.  She had asked me a number of months ago whether or not I wanted to go and I’d said no. I suggested however that she take a few days away from the boys and go up herself (we had friends also going) while I took a few days off from work to look after the little ratbags.  The end result was that Vic had a great time shopping, doing lunch and concert-going while I had a lovely few days looking after the boys.
  • Max received his first report card from school.  He did brilliantly and in recognition we bough him a small gift.  It’s really interesting the way they measure children these days and Max scored the highest score in all sections except two.  He also received some lovely comments from his teacher at the end.  Want to see it? Here’s a copy (pdf – 2.3MB)
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sleeping

Our friends Ngahuia and Ian move to the UK on Thursday and we had a get together on Sunday. It was obviously a wee bit too much for little nine month old Charity….

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back from sydney

Vic and I had a great weekend in Sydney and are back feeling worse than when we left 🙂 If you keep an eye on the twitter feed you’ll know all the stuff that we did but here’s a brief synopsis.

  • Left on Friday afternoon and got together for dinner with some ex-Dell bods that I used to work with
  • Saturday morning we headed off on the train and visited IKEA. We used to love going there when we lived in the UK and I was just thankful that we had small suitcases with us on this trip…….
  • Saturday afternoon we headed down to Kings Wharf and had a work-related harbour cruise for three hours which was nice except for the rain that came in at the end. Here’s a pic taken with my phone with the Opera House and Bridge.

  • Saturday night was the work function that was the reason for the trip. The Hilton in Sydney is only a couple of years old and the function itself was well run and very enjoyable.  The rooms were really nice and we had not too bad a view. Again a phone pic as we left the camera on the kitchen bench at home!

  • Sunday was spent wandering around Sydney and more specifically Chinatown and Paddy’s Market. Bought a few presents for the kids and then it was back to the airport for the trip home.
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dinner

I’m taking Vic out to dinner.

Slightly different in that I’m taking her to Dine in Auckland 🙂 We fly out at 11:00 this morning and get back at about 18:00 tomorrow!

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james blunt

The James Blunt concert last night was absolutely fantastic! I was a bit worried that the pretty laid back style of his music would not grab the audience and produce much of an atmosphere but was very pleasantly surprised! He really pumped up the energy in a lot of his songs and threw a much stronger bassline than on the albums.

Another thing that was good was the fact that he has a great voice live. It is surprisingly strong but keeps the wide vocal range that he has.

The highlight for me was the four or five songs that he sang where it was just him and the instrument that he was playing whether it be guitar or piano. Just brilliant!