marc.vic.max.elliot

After two episodes Vic and I are hooked on the weirdest reality show Outback Jack.

12 American city girls in the Australian outback competing for the affections of a hunky Aussie bloke.  The first episode had the girls in limos in LA all tarted up and thinking they were off to some five star resort – then they were told they were going to Oz – then they had to jump out of a plane to get to the camp where the show is filmed.

All in all a real hoot watching them flounder in the middle of the bush

I discovered today how difficult it is to find Chinese currency!  None of the major banks carried Yuan 🙁 I finally tracked some down at Thomas Cook so I now have currency for both Hong Kong and Shanghai.

And one geekily cool thing happened today.  Due to a promotion at work I got a free 64MB USB watch!  It doesn’t look as bad as I thought and even found a review at the gadgeteer

Phew – my visa came through for China today.  I leave on Friday and have two nights in Hong Kong on the way.

In Hong Kong I plan on buying an all plastic “toy” camera called a Holga to play around with

While in Shanghai I would have liked to visit the factory of Shen-Hao to look at their cameras.  I don’t have the time or money to justify a 4×5 camera at the moment 🙁

Thanks everyone for your “stick around” messages – I’ll try to update more often and make visiting more worth your while

? The upacking is slowly going forward.  Once you have all the day to day stuff unpacked the urgent need disappears and the pace of unpacking really slows down.  The 90 day maintanence list is getting longer by the day as well………

? We caught our first mouse a couple of days ago!  AKAIK it’s the only one here (yeah right but no other mouse crap has been found since) We got the best mousetrap and it worked a treat – if I could find a link I’d post it……

? I have a thing for comedy show wives. Debra – Everyone Loves Raymond, Jill – Home Improvement, Lois – Malcolm in the Middle…. not so much.  I’ve discussed this with Vic and she just thinks I’m weird

? Our yard is flourescent green!  They got around to laying the topsoil and then sprayed on a mixture of seed, wood pulp and fertiliser and it’s the brightest green!

? Vic’s Mum has gone to the UK for a month and for that month we are a two car family Since her’s is a manual (stick shift) I’ve been told to use it.  It might look strange but it’s a bit of a hoot to be in a tiny car.  And it costs about half as much to fill up with petrol.

I might as well stay around…… where else would I be able to show how hard we’re working Max before he’s 18 months old

And thanks to Gina for pointing out that it was two years ago today that we first came face to face with Max.

I’m thinking about packing this blog/site in.

This site (and http://www.allthegoodnamesweregone.com prior) was started about 6 years ago to allow the people home in NZ to know what going on in our lives in the UK.  It really served it’s purpose and continued on when we returned to NZ allowing our UK based friends and family to keep track of the three of us over here.

One thing that really frustrates me though is not knowing who’s visiting and what they think of what’s going on.  There are about 5 people that comment on a regular basis and for a site that gets about 250+ hits a day that sucks!  I took away the need for registration some time ago hoping that if all people had to do was give a name and an email address that it would increase the frequency of comments but that didn’t seem to make much difference.

Now I must admit that things have been a bit slow on the posting front lately and that’s a mixture of being really busy and wondering why I’m doing it at all.

If you read this site and would like to see it continue (I know Vic would) then please just leave a quick comment – it just takes a second and at least it would give me an idea if it’s worth it.  I’m not going to ask for a specific number as I’ve seen done in the past but just want a feeling of whether it’s worth it for all of us.

Cheers

At last Telecom got my broadband installed.  This happened on Thursday and I’m getting about 3.5Mb/s (vs 7Mb/s into the old house) Still faster than dial-up though They did however completely forget to transfer the business line until I rang them and they sent an engineer out – useless!

Still no pics as the house is still a mess (Vic’s orders) so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a few more days yet Gina

We went to my Mum’s place last night for her annual midwinter Christmas dinner and had a great time.  Vic had more to drink that normal and had to go back to sleep when I bought Max down for his breakfast (a bowl of yoghurt and then a boiled egg and toast – the boiled egg was in the truly tacky Noddy egg-cup that I got as my “less than $2” gift last night )

Other than that there’s not a lot going on. We’re still settling in and I start back at work tomorrow after 10 days off (boooooo!)