Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

We have been visited again this week. It was Linda Speight this time, who is the daughter of friends of ours in Loughborough. Nicky and I meet her at the airport early on Tuesday morning before going off to work. She stayed with us for a couple of days, and managed to squeeze in a visit to the museum, a tour round downtown Auckland, and did the coast to coast walk. On Thursday she was collected by her fathers; cousin and has plans to tour NZ for a few weeks before returning to Auckland in November and then back to the UK. It was great to see her and having visitors from the UK is always a pleasure. It has been another busy week work wise for all of us in our new routines. This has been my second week of working less hours at Ubertec and I am just about starting to get organised with using the time for my own business. Nicky had a really difficult day on Friday with things going wrong and being short staffed, but she is starting to settle in at Ranui. We had an Ubertec social evening on...

It has been "change of routine" week this week for Nicky and I. Nicky has started at Ranui Library, Tuesday to Friday (Saturday still at Henderson). It is a nice wee library, and she is still finding her feet with things which are specific to this library, but all is going pretty well so far. Also knowing that she is getting Sunday and Monday off makes planning easier. She is off to see Ruth Duffus tomorrow who is in hospital again having broken her other hip. I have had my first week of reduced hours at Ubertec. I am taking Wednesday and Thursday afternoons off to make headway with being self employed again. I am going to try and get some massage work along with doing Mac support and trying to get more modelling work, but I think it is going to take time to get used to the new routine. At the moment, I get home, have lunch, and then just want to fall asleep - bit like in the evenings really! The weather is starting to improve and I have managed some sunbathing both days this...

Another week, and the end of our fist year here in NZ. I have started writing a piece on the year as a whole but haven't finished it yet...may be next week. I think this week has been fairly average in terms of work and general activities. We have been celebrating our one year anniversary today. Pat and Clem came over with a bottle of bubbles at lunchtime to consume with a wonderful fruit cake which Nicky had made. Then at teat time, the Moss-Mason's and Steve joined us to eat more of the cake, cheesecake which Claire and I purchased and smoked fish which Nicky and bought after I picked Nicky up from work today. All very enjoyable. I suppose our biggest news is with the changes coming up next week. On Tuesday Nicky starts full time at Ranui, a small library further out west. She will be working Tues-Fri to start with and still doing Saturdays at Henderson until she is replaced. Then she will cease the Saturday duty and just work Mon-Fri at Ranui. My work structure is also chang...

I'm back again! Apologies for my absence last week, but life was very busy. I took Tuesday off from Ubertec to spend the day doing my MacOnSite job. Most of the day was at a school near Henderson checking over 24 of their older machines. Then I went into town to make some changes to a backup system. It was a long day, but I was very pleased to be able to easily get to both jobs using public transport. Nicky and Claire had their usual work commitments, but Nicky's life was finally made a little easier with new glasses. She has really been needing them since before we left the UK but has been putting off getting new ones because of the cost. However, she needs to get her NZ driving licence and in order to pass the eye sight examination for this she needed new glasses. I spent Saturday morning with another MacOnSite customer, and then the rest of the day looking at 4 houses . We thought as we now know that we need to move that investigating buying at this point would be a good ide...

Just a quick apology to say that we were out all of Sunday afternoon and my dad had a long week. The blog will be back as usual next weekend.