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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.

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…

written by Marc

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)

written by Marc

Leaving the get together mentioned below

written by Marc

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….

written by Marc

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.

written by Marc

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!

written by Marc

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!

written by Marc

It’s been a while hasn’t it? Even worse is that it’s not like nothing has been happening either it’s just that I haven’t posted

So what’s happened?

Max has been at school for about seven weeks and after a rocky start, where he didn’t want to be left, seems to be doing well. We had our first parent-teacher meeting last week and Miss Wylie, Max’s teacher, didn’t have a negative thing to say about him. He’s slightly advanced in reading and maths and really focusses well on the task at hand. We are very proud of him but realise it’s a looooooong road

Elliot starts kindy next week (I know, so soon!) which is about six weeks earlier than we had originally been told. I think he’ll do OK as he spent a lot of time there dropping off and picking up Max anyway so he should feel OK……. we’ll see!

Easter was spent with a “honey-do” list which included the following: clear the bank (cliff!) of brush in preparation for the planting of native plants and trees, move about 2 tons of a topsoil/compost mix into the new vegetable garden, lay a concrete slab along the side off the house which would have been OK but we couldn’t hire a mixer on the day and I had to mix all the concrete by hand. It doesn’t sound like much but all four days off were very full and we felt pretty good about things when it was over

More travel with work. Now that we’ve hired a person in Auckland (yay!) my travel will decrease significantly once he’s up to speed which should be within a month or so.

The golf game mentioned below was good fun.  Our team didn’t win anything but supposedly we’ll all receive a really nice golf club travel bag over the next few weeks just for showing up – sweet!

I think that’s the major points. Once Vic reads this I’m sure she will point out anything I’ve missed and any mistakes I’ve made……..

written by Marc