Dress Update

A friend sent me a text during the week informing me that she had forgotten to let me know she had left a dress she thought I might like in our garden.

I was touched by the kind thought.
She has always said she liked that colour on me, so I should have guessed it was her.

So mystery solved. Thank you Wendy

Identification Needed

On Sunday it was reported that a ladies body had been found in a local park in Hamilton.
She was discovered by 2 teenage boys as they walked through the the park.
It was decided that the lady had unfortunately been unable to negotiate a bend on a steep path whilst riding her bike and had hit a tree and fallen into the knee high water, were sadly she drowned.

I did not know the lady, but what struck me as the sadest part was that it took her family 4 days to realise she was missing.
Because she was out cycling, although she wasn't wearing a cycle helmet, she had no identification on her at all.
It turns out that she was a 40 yr old lady who lived alone. She had seen her family the night before and because of that they didn't notice her not being around until about Wednesday.

Now I can see this happening very easily, my mum lives on her own, (an hour away) now ok my brother lives 500m down the street from her, but I can happily go 4-5 days without talking to her on the phone. If my brother didn't live so close then I wouldn't know if anything was wrong until I tried to contact her and couldn't. So it is not unusual.

But what I am trying to stress here is the importance of ID when out running or cycling on your own.
This lady had keys with her and nothing else.
It would have been so great if she had a card on her that said her name and emergency contact details.

So if you have a friend or loved one who loves going for long runs or bike rides on their own, then encourage them to make a card that is about credit card size, that they can slip in a back pocket of shorts etc that gives their name and emergency contact.
That way, if anything ever happened to them whilst out, someone would be notified immediately and not have the whole town wondering who this poor person is and who do they belong too.

Beef Anyone?

In our freezer currently, we have 1/4 of a beast.
Yep that is what I said, 1/4 of a beast. 1/4 of a cow is frozen in our freezer, in pieces obviously, in fact even in different pices.
Several roasts, stewing steak packs, eye fillet steaks, porterhouse steak, rump steak and sausages.
More mince than you can imagine recipes for and even weiner schnitzel.

A friend has always had homekill meat, and seeing as we live in the middle of cow country, then where else would you acquire fresh homekill beef?

The mince is so red in colour, hardly any fat in it. It has not been processed 6 times, like you wonder if the supermarket stuff has? It is fresh smelling and gorgeous.
I guess we could class it as prime mince beef which currently sells for about $14.99 / Kg.
I currently have the equivalant of about $120 worth of mince in my freezer.
If you then add to that the sausages (at least $6.99/Kg ) the 10 roast (at least $22.99/Kg) I have and all the steak I have that can run at at least $19.99 upwards then there is a lot of fresh beef available to us.
And we paid all of $305 for the lot!
Apparently it works out at about $5.99 / Kg for everything in our freezer. I was quite impressed when I worked it all out and said yes to the 1/4.
Steve loves the taste of fresh beef and was very happy to accept. But yes, you do need the freezer space for it all and I thought we had more than we do, but it all fitted so no worries, but we may be having beef on the menu a lot in the next few months!

I have been good though, before I placed it all in the freezer, I made a list of what we have so I can cross off as we use things and then I know what is left. This will also make sure I use things within a reasonable amount of time and not find something lurking at the bottom of the freezer in 2 years time!

Pink Dress Update

The pink dress is still with me.

I have tried it on, just in case someone thought it was for me, but alas, it is a tad way too small. Wish I was a size 8 on the top! It is a Laura Ashley silky material (thus the creases) dress, would suit being a very nice party dress or even a bridesmaid dress.

No one has knocked on the door to ask if we have found a dress because it got left in our garden by mistake.
I still think it might belong to someone in the street, and they are waiting for a friend etc to drop it off. Maybe they will wait a little longer and then contact the person involved and ask them about the dress. Hopefully that person will then be able to remember where they dropped it off!

If it hasn't been collected or claimed in about 4 weeks time, then I will give it a nice send off to the local op shop round the corner, because it is in wonderful condition and they may as well benefit from it.

Pink Dress

Last night I took the washing off the line in a hurry as a light shower was passing and I had just managed to dry all the clothes.
As we have the gazebo still up in the garden from the BBQ last weekend, I quickly wheeled the laundry trolley under there and promptly forgot about it until this morning.
I actually only noticed it as I was racing out the door to work, but seeing as it was going to be another glorious day and it was under the gazebo, I decided to leave it where it was till I got home.

This is where the mystery comes in......

When we got home, there was a salmon pink dress laid across the laundry trolley.

No note, no explaination, no nothing, just the dress.
It is a size 8, so way too big too small for me.
Definetely my style, little sleeves and scooped in at the waist, although it won't fit!

But no explaination as to where it came from.
I have searched the garden as it has been a little windy today, so thought maybe the note (if one was left) had got blustered away into the hedge, but no.

So I have this dress that I don't know where it came from or what I am meant to do with it?
Is it for me? It is 2nd hand but in very good condition.

So I will take it into the house today and wait to see if anyone texts me to ask how I liked it, or something like that?

Courgettes

I use courgettes in a lot of cooking, I like them.
So when at the garden centre last year I noticed a courgette plant and decided that we could try growing some.
No one told me how easy it would be and how fast they grow!

From this....

To this.....

To this.....

to this.....

To OMG this.....

The very large one grew so fast I forgot to go and check them and it almost turned into a marrow!

Growing Your Own

Last year we successfully grew a few tomatoes. Not enough to really do anything major with towards our grocery shopping, but enough for Steve to create some Italian Tomato Sauce with that I used in 3 lots of Spag Bog.

This year we have once again grown tomatoes over the summer, along with spinach, lettuce, carrots and courgettes.
The boys have enjoyed watching things grow at super fast speed and also had fun being able to collect lettuce from the garden in the morning for daddy's salad that he takes to work each day.

lettuce and spinach

Courgettes

tomatoes (covered in tomato dust)

finally going red, although they really are taking a long time!

Maybe next year we will venture and try something else, like corn

Complaining

I don't like to complain to companies about service received, but I have now come to the conclusion that if you don't then you can no longer complain about how poor the service is.
If you are not prepared to say anything then what can you expect?

So I complained today about my visit to the Doctors yesterday.

It was long and slow and when in the consultation I had the pleasure of knowing the Doctor was not enjoying his job and that he had written an email to his boss explaining all this!
I only went in with back ache....came out knowing how much the Dr was not happy and not enthused about his job.
Not what I wanted on a day I was feeling not 100%, not information I even needed to know, although that does now explain his lack of enthusiasm and effort towards the patients.

So I called the surgery today and voiced my complaint, it was duely heard and noted and I am happy now. As I said to the lady, there is nothing that can be done to change the consultation from yesterday, medically I am now fine and do not need to see another Doctor today to feel happy about my condition, but felt that he really wasn't interested in what we had to say yesterday and felt they needed to know this.

Now I feel better, it is not bugging me so much now.

Game Time

Yes it has finally arrived, the much waited for Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, Canada.

I love the Winter Olympics

I just love everything about it, the thrill of the down hill skiing, ice skating, luging, curling just everything.
I would, if possible, take 2 weeks of work, resign from the human race and veg for the whole time watching it. Even if this meant I had to live nights and sleep during the day to capture the coverage with the time differences!
Which given we are always in the midst of our summertime when ever the Winter Games are on, is pretty much, all the time!

So, having just enjoyed the intense Women's Moguls, and it was thrilling, USA Gold and Bronze, Cananda Silver, and I so wanted the young 18 yr old Canadian to get a medal, unfortunately she came 5th, I have some very busy evenings ahead of me catching up on the days events that I will be missing whilst at work

For Christmas, Steve brought me a new game for the Wii, 'Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympics'.
The boys have loved playing this game and have grasped some idea of downhill skiing, iceskating etc so I am loving being able to show them real people doing real games, although they do keep asking when Mario and Sonic will be competing!

But now my computer is back up and running, I will sadly have no time to get on it because I will be glued to the tv every evening.
So I am back, but just got way laid on the way for the Olympics.

Enjoy the games!

Valentines Day

Happy Valentines Day to all my friends and family, near and far, old and new.
Think about you all often and wish I could catch up with you all more often.

This is also my Anniversary
Not for my wedding but for the time I moved to New Zealand.
As of 11am today I have been here 12 years.
WOW, where does the time go...?
Look at all I have achieved in this time....

Also today is my Sister in Laws Birthday,

So Happy Birthday to Karen, hope you have a good one.

Up and Running

We are back on line.
Yea for modern technology, well yea for me for working out the problem whilst the tech support guy was here!

New modem and we are running nicely.
Now if we could only get the tv to work and we will have no electrical problems to sort out.

Computer

I am still here, but unfortunately we have internet issues!
We are currently running at about 450 kbps (kilobites per second) and it should be somewhere between 1000 - 3000 kbps!

I can get online but am never sure what it will allow me to do or how long it will last.
They assure me the fault is being looked in to but I am not so sure, it is taking too long!

So I am checking your blogs when I can and I am updating here when it has enough power to let me post something.
Hopefully things will gp back to normal soon, cause I have lots of pictures of things we have been doing to share with you all.

Have a great weekend

Storms

We are getting some wicked heat during the day at the moment and this in turn is leading to wicked lightening storms at night.
From about 7pm onwards the skies get really dark and we have the joy of lightening all over the sky for several hours.
Yesterday it started at 7pm and finished about 11pm.
The sky was a light all evening with a spectacular electric storm but hardly any rain or thunder.
They say that there was about 1700 strikes of lightening last night across the Waikato area in just under 3 hours.

The whole sky just rumbles a low growl for several hours, luckily not enough to upset or worry the boys.

The only thing is that it manages to keep the heat until the rain comes down about 10pm, then you get wind and rain and it goes quite chilly for an hour.

New Shop

We have a new shop that has just opened round the corner from us.
A good old fashion Green Grocers

You know the type I mean, like our parents tell us about when they reminise or the ones you can remember going to with your Grandparents when they did their weekly shopping. The ones where the fruit and veg are huge and juicy looking, fresh and so inviting you just want to buy everything and race home and make a salad of some kind.
A friendly neighbourhood shop where you know the owners name - Paul - and they are always ready to help you with anything you want to know. And you know they have been up since 4am because that is when they have visited the fruit market to get the latest and freshest stuff.
If you don't know how is the best way to store a certain fruit or vegetable and want it to last, then just ask and advice is freely flowing.

We visited the shop last weekend prior to doing our weekly shop. I don't think we spent too much on the gorgeous items, but I did happen to have the receipt with us when we got to the supermarket.
I didn't feel that the items were too expensive in the Green Grocers, in fact it turned out that some of the stuff was way cheaper than the supermarket but others things were pretty much the same price.
So it was a little of swings and roundabouts, what you saved on one made up for the other.

As a friendly local shop then I will try my hardest to support it and hope that it stayes.
After all, it is nice to have the personal touch with shopping again like we had in the olden days.

Computer Problems

At some stage or other everyone puts up a post about this!

Our computer is fine, no problems there but our internet speed is in basic words 'crap'

Last year I adjusted our monthly amount so we never had to worry about using up all our usage. Went from 1MB to 5MB a month.

Never had any problems with it and it there ever was a problem with the internet connection then I just unplugged the modem, waited 5 minutes, plugged it back in, waited another 5 mins and hey presto everything would work again.

For the last week I have noticed that we are running ever so slow, I mean slower than dial up, if there is anything that slow anymore!

Once you had one page open you never stood a chance if you wanted to open another tab at the same time, it was like an internet death sentence!

So I finally called the company and asked if there was any problems in the area that we should know about?

His answer to me was 'Do you always run at that speed?' meaning we are running at 10x less than the minimum recommended basic speed.

So after having to unplug all the telephones in the house he did a quick line test, still running slow. Quick change of the filter on the modem and everything was fine but still slow. So now he has logged it with a technician.
So now we sit and wait for them to organise a tech to come and look at the exchange in the street, hopefully that will be before the end of the week and maybe by the weekend we will have fast internet yet again.

Sleeping

Whilst at the caravan Alex decided he didn't like sleeping!
When Grandma was with us we put a small tent up and the boys got to sleep in this.
Ben took to this very well and in fact ended up spending 7 or 8 nights in by himself.
Alex got fussy and decided that he didn't want to sleep in the caravan or the tent.
After getting annoyed and loosing my temper I told him to just go and sleep anywhere!

So he did, he took his pillow and blanket and snuggled on the grass outside the caravan.
It was a little cold this evening so he snuggled himself in a little cocoon on top of the pillow and promptly went to sleep.

This is him, all curled up and fast a sleep under his blanket.

We did finally move him into the caravan but not before we had checked that he was still breathing under the blanket because he had his whole face totally covered.

All our friends walking past kept stopping to find out what was going on and as they are all parents they soon laughed and knew exactly where we were coming from.

Christmas

Not the one in 11 months time but the one we have just had.
We were lucky enough to get to spend it at the caravan again.
Mum came over for several days to camp with us and we had some good friends who joined us on the day from their caravan.
Of course like any NZ Christmas day, it was spent outside in the sunshine with a BBQ for the main meal and leftovers for the evening meal.
So a mixture of chicken and steak for the big people and sausages etc for the little ones.
I have added some pictures for you to see us enjoying the sunshine.

Our little Chrismas Day camp

Of course we had crackers on the table at lunchtime

Steve cooking part of the lunch

And Gary in his sexy get up cooking the other half

He gained the apron for his birthday but decided he was feeling shy and so needed to cover the top with a little vest he acquired! We still had a lot of fun with him over it though.

So that was Christmas Day for us. I wonderful day of eating too much enough, and spending time with family and friends.

Life and Police

I feel like I haven't been here at all for the last few weeks!
I have been checking up on the blogs I follow, but with it being summer here at present I feel that there are always other things to do in the lovely temps we are having than sitting and blogging on the computer.
That doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about you all, I have, I have even got lots to blog about, I am just enjoying the summer at present.

I am also enjoying my new job. I have been there 2 weeks now and it is great. I now work in Cath Lab at the main hospital in Hamilton.
Cath Lab is the place you go for minimal invasive treatment of hearts, things like Angiograms and Angioplasty. 70% of the patients are older and have had some form of heart trouble, mainly Angina or even a heart attack.
It is very similar to Theatre (Operating Room) work although a little more relaxed and the patients are awake. I am thoroughly enjoying having to actually deal with patients rather than having nothing to do with them because they are asleep!
I am also learning a lot because my Cardiac knowledge was none exsistent to say the least.
This means I have been coming home knackered from working and learning so much. This will in time slowly ease off as I come to grips with things a little better.

Unfortunately, whilst I am on orientation to the department I am working full time, something I haven't done for several years!, so this is taking its toll on the rest of the family as well.
The boys are very tired by the end of the week and so weekends are very quiet as everyone recovers from a busy week.

Although if we keep having nights like last night, it will take us much longer to recover!
So what happened you ask.....?

We live in a nice area within Hamilton, unfortunately it is quite close to the University and so therefore many people have brought the houses in the area and then rent them out. This means you sometimes get people in the street who don't care or they are quite young.
The latter is the case in this story.
We have a house 2 doors down from us with young people in it and they are a pain.
They have noisy cars with big exhausts and love to drive them up and down the street several times in 5 minutes.
They have never had a party though and last night was obviously their night.
Now the music from the party was ok, it went on about 7pm and was never too loud that you wanted them to turn it down, it is also summer after all and so you expect a little music in the evenings whilst people are in their gardens.
The guests started to arrive and things were fine, a typical early 20yr olds party.
At 7.30 when I put the boys in bed, I noticed at least 30 people arrive in under 2 mins and when I went back to check on the boys I noticed at least another 20 arrive.
Over the course of the evening, the street started to resemble a carpark and you would have thought there was an important game on somewhere with the amount of groups that kept walking down the street towards the house.
As I mentioned before, the house was ok, the music was reasonable and yes there was a lot of people at the party but it was enough to make you realise that if something went wrong there would be ciaos!
I was starting to get a little restless about 10pm as I realised there were too many people there and they were all very young and that the Police were going to end up here sooner or later.
Unfortunately when a group ended up on the street outside our house at 10.30pm and smashed bottles I called '111'

Turns out I was caller #26 of the evening about the party but as I explained, the party itself was fine, it was the groups and crowds on the street that was letting it down.
Well within 15 minutes we had 12 Police here and the party was shut down. The Police went into regiment mode and suddenly there was a line of Police escorting the whole crowd up the street dispersing them away from the party.
It was an impressive sight to see.

So that was the excitment in the street for the year, may they behave themselves for a while otherwise I can see more people in the street complaining to the local council about them.

Home Again

The holidays have ended!
We got home on Friday evening and have happily spent the weekend tidying, washing and sorting.
We have been active in the garden, cutting the grass and planting more vegetable beds.
Also sorted out the summer flower bed and soon that will be ablaze with colour through the long summer days, although we are already half way through summer saving time, so on the downward spiral to winter already, man where does the time go.

Everyone is now set ready to go back to work, Daycare and Holiday Programme tomorrow morning.
Some long weeks ahead of us before Ben starts back at school, but hopefully we will all just slip into them nicely and without to much agro!

Have managed to grab 5 minutes to change the background on the page to a more summery feel to it, although due to having guests here today I still haven't managed to get the Christmas Tree down yet! Definitely an inside evening job than a during the hot sunny day job, so hopefully tomorrow night I will be able to dedicate it to getting all that sorted.
I am usually a stickler for getting the decorations down on the 12th night (Jan 6) but seeing as we were still away then, I decided that there was no bad luck in them staying up as we were pardoned because we were not here. If you know what I mean?

So tomorrow is the start of life being back to normal....!
Have a great week.

Where Are We?

We are on holiday at our caravan at the beach.

It is a dream, the weather has been up in the 24-30 degrees every day and we are all nicely coloured and healthy.

Santa was good to us this year too and all in all we are having a lovely holiday away.

Steve's hand is healing very nicely and we are very happy with it, so is the Physio come to think about it.

My neck is finally on the mend and am feeling much better.

So hopefully I will catch you all at the end of the week when we are home and I have better computer service.

Till then Happy New Year