ATAAHUA ORA

Our friends Agata and Tom had moved most of their stuff into our garage before going on the big holiday to Europe. Now they were looking for a new house and after some misadventures (it’s pretty hard to get a good house for reasonable money these days!) with houses being let before they even had a chance to look at them, they got lucky and rented a two bedroom apartment in Titirangi (a very green and bushy suburb of Auckland, about 10 minutes drive from us). The apartment is brand new, with brand spanking new kitchen (which made me decide to do up our kitchen in the foreseeable future!) and lots of room. And a view to die for! From their bedroom they have big ranch doors opening up to a view of the Waitakeres and sunsets in the evenings and closer to a nice garden. I always get really excited looking at other people’s houses. Wonder why that is?

Lukas was let loose in the house, armed with a crowbar and a hammer. The victim: the wardrobe wall in our bedroom. This was always one of the projects on our list, even from before we moved in we knew we were going to remove this wall and make our wardrobe into a double. I must say he did a much better job with this wall than he did with the inside wall separating the wardrobes before we moved in! Must be experience… Now all that’s left to do is gib the opening and order some nice looking sliding wardrobe doors. Then paint the bedroom (choosing a colour is always a challenge!) and I already have some ideas on moving the furniture around! Renovations are fun, if only they didn’t take this long to complete!
Some pictures of progress:

So, what happened? There was a power outage in Auckland and our servers went down. My brother turned them back on but didn’t notice that the router was still disconnected. We, on the other hand, were suspecting the DynDNS service, which was setup a week before we left on holiday and wasn’t properly tested. This only goes to show that if you want reliable web hosting you have to either pay someone or have a UPS
Anyway, we’re back and being home bodies for a change. My plan is to slowly recreate the entries that *would* have been entered if the service was up. Photos are up, still working on the comments so you might want to wait a few more days.

Christmas on the Antipodes falls in the middle of summer. Which means long days, warm weather, barbecues on the beach - very un-christmassy. The typical Christmas atmosphere, i.e. short days, cold weather and sometimes even snow make an appearance in June or July so some people celebrate mid-year Christmas around this time. You can book yourself a full Christmas dinner at most of the restaurants, complete with crackers and turkey and christmas trees.
On this note, I decided to celebrate mid-year Christmas this year by buying myself a very expensive present: a new snowboard. After a week of research conducted in Auckland snow shops and then on the Internet, I chose a Ride Vista snowboard and Burton Mission bindings.

Next weekend we’re going to the Snowplanet.