Betty’s Indulgence

Today’s jobs consisted mostly of treating our outdoor furniture with oil.  This is yet another MAFF necessity.  the second coat went on the table and it’s looking uberSexy so I hope that’ll be enough.  The garage is transformed from the old furred up vessel of junk that it was to an almost clinical cleanliness (well sort of).

After getting the first coat of oil out of the way Daddy’s Day treat was a meal at Betty’s.  We love Betty’s and thought we’d take one last opportunity to eat out.  We must have hit the absolute suite spot of when to go because the queue was barely five or ten minutes.  Almost unheard of…  The meal was delicious – I had a Swiss Rosti with garlic mushrooms and Josie had one with Bacon.  Em’s had the very nice Macaroni Cheese which also has bacon and new potatoes in it.  All delicious except for the fact that Lucy decided after 10 minutes that she needed to sleep and nothing else would do.  Much shouting and wailing later and Josie got her snoozing in her buggy.  The lovely people at Betty’s replaced her meal for free, despite the fact that I’d only asked them to keep it warm.  That’s service!

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Pressure Washers Rule!

I have been fearing the task of re-oiling the outdoor furntiure.  Last time it was done it took a significant amount of (someone elses) elbow grease.  I made the glorious discovery today that a decent pressure washer brings up the wood a treat!  No more grey manky wood, beautiful golden hardwood shining through.

A word of warning though.  I got my finger in the jet and it actually cut it!  Drew blood and everything, then Josie clipped the back of her rubber gloves and it cut those open and left a blister on her finger.  Dangerous times.

On a more depressing note, it is criminal what some people skip.  I took the last big car load of rubbish to the dump today.  It’s fair to say no-one would have wanted the old manky bits of rotten carpet and thousands of off-cuts of timber from 6 years ago.  Whilst I was there though, a woman skipped a childs dual suspension mountain bike.  All I could see was wrong with it was the chain had come off.  In the landfill skip there was an entire modern tent in a bag.  And one of the skip monkeys was checking that a black bag in the lanfill skip didn’t contain anything it shouldn’t and found two old passports!

9 days left at work by the way.

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Another job application

That’s another job application done.  There are a few more cropping up now which is good news.  Our Bank of New Zealand economic outlook survey is still reporting growing confidence in the NZ economy so I’m hoping to see more and more roles come available the closer we get to going.

Talking of jobs I’m utterly exhausted at the moment.   At work the last two weeks have been the culmination of 18 months of hardwork and I’m proud to say the project has gone live with a remarkable level of success.  It’s been the most complex yet most successful project I’ve ever been involved with and it’s been fantastic.  I’m going to  use that feeling to drive my applications and keep the confidence levels up.  I recognise now that the biggest obstacle to applying for new roles is retiscence to believe in your own abilities.  Brits are bred to be self-deprecating and we should all just be a bit more happy to say “yes – I’m good at x, y and z”.

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Family get togethers

We’ve been down south last weekend to meet up with half the family before we head off in about 3 weeks time.  Lovely days, lots of people made the effort to get together and we had two great days.  Lots of suppor and positive comments and discussions.  It’s really fantastic to have all this support from everyone.

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