marc.vic.max.elliot

Do you remember this entry I posted a while back about my friend Jamie and how he was killed in a hit and run?  The story gets even more tragic 🙁 My friend Martin sent me an email yesterday and this is an excerpt from it:

Basically, Jamie and his girlfriend were at a party and had a row; she stormed out. Jamie got a call from her ten minutes or so later saying that she thought she was being followed; so Jamie told her to get to somewhere public and generally in view, he would come and collect her. So off he sets to find her, whilst he’s looking for her, one of his drunk mates decides that Jamie has been gone a bit long and decides to go and look for him in his van. He’s driving along, drunk…sees Jamie, pulls over to pick him up but being pissed loses control and runs Jamie over. He realises what he’s done, drives off and attempts to torch the van; next morning the stark realisation hits him and he hands himself in to the police.

Just so bizarrely wasteful.

Got woken up by a few earthquakes last night!  Here are the details from geonet’s recent earthquake page.

NZST: 2004 Apr 03 01:20

Mag.: 3.8 Depth: 30 km

Within 5 km of Upper Hutt

NZST: 2004 Apr 03 00:46

Mag.: 3.4 Depth: 25 km

Within 5 km of Upper Hutt

NZST: 2004 Apr 03 00:10

Mag.: 4.6 Depth: 30 km

Within 5 km of Upper Hutt

NZST: 2004 Apr 03 00:09

Mag.: 4.6 Depth: 25 km

Within 5 km of Upper Hutt

NZST: 2004 Apr 03 00:03

Mag.: 3.9 Depth: 30 km

Within 5 km of Upper Hutt

sheesh!

I just got an email from a friend in the UK to say that another friend of mine, Jamie Sessions, was killed in a hit and run over the weekend 🙁

Jamie and I worked together for almost 4 years in the UK and my trip to New York was taken with him.  We stayed with some good friends of his, Hugo and Megan, and if they read this then all I can say is “bloody hell” The strange thing is that he’d contacted me a month or so ago and we had been in regular contact again.

See ya Jamie.

When speaking to people I find myself saying “we’ve just come back from the UK” when people ask me what I’ve been up to over the last few years.

I was thinking about this today and it dawned on me that in two weeks we will have been back a year!

Where does the time go?

After one day of nice weather the next storm front has hit.  I’m off to Sydney tomorrow for a week and I hope the wind drops a bit. A weather station about one mile away has just recorded a gust of 182kph (113mph)!!

Yay! Our first family all-you-can-dribble illness It seems that Max felt like sharing the bug and now we all have stinking colds… Thanks Boy!

The highlight of the day was buying a new toy – a nice wee Canon A70 digicam.  I’d been after a little, easy to carry camera for a while and this had $150 off! I’ll post a couple of pics when the weather lets up enough to get out. 

Speaking of weather, in my last entry I said the we were having floods.  Some friends of ours live in a small town 2 hours north of here (14,000 people) and they have had no water for 4 days now.  Not much fun when you have two small kids!  We offered them a place to stay but they ended up going to stay with relatives (getting out of town via the one road that was open!) The flooding has been bad all over the area but luckily we’ve escaped so far – and they are forecasting another 100mm/4” overnight 🙁

It is so stormy here at the moment!  There are floods all over the area and trees are down by the dozen.  Many areas are cut off from the rest of the world and rivers are bursting their banks on a regular basis.  I went down the road last night to get a curry and was stopped by police about 100 yards short of my destination.  They allowed me to walk through to the restaurant but I had to be careful as the roof was being blown off Burger King down the road a bit!

The wind was so bad last night that it woke me up at about 03:00 and I couldn’t get to sleep.  After an hour I got sick of tossing and turning and went and slept on the couch downstairs where it is much quieter……..

Hopefully things will quieten down later today.

We signed all the paperwork for the house today (and so did the developer) so the house is ours!  We now have 5 days to organise the financing…….

Here’s a few pics:

How it is at the moment…..

The view