It's about time I did an update that's not all photos - so here we go.
What have we been up to? Not a lot really.
It's the middle of winter here and it's been cold! Definitely the coldest since we arrived in New Zealand. We've gone through nearly six cubic metres of firewood, which is as much as we used last year. Hopefully the third lot will see us through. The wood burner is wonderful - it gets the house so much warmer than the old gas fire we had.
It's been a bit shaky recently with a 7.8 Earthquake the other week down in Fjordland on the South Island - the biggest one in 70 years - but fortunately it was centred in a very low population area so not too much damage was done. I felt it up here in Wellington. There have been lots of aftershocks of magnitudes of 5-6. Not to worry though eh!
Things at my work have been interesting - we're currently going through our second round of "consultation" which may or may not end up in redundancies within our team. Fingers crossed - we find out next Monday. The last round two months ago was centred around the team I work in on a specific account. Five of the six roles were "best cost resourced" by moving them to Bangalore, leaving me as the remaining one. Most of the others have new jobs now, which is great. This time it's the wider team across several accounts.
Melanie is coping well despite her school being in one of the hot spots for swine flu! One of the other teachers was confirmed with the virus. For the last week of term she only had eight to ten of her class twenty-two!
Things seem to be better after a two-week break.
Noodle has been a lot better - looking back I never gave an update. After the initial week of being really sick she was a lot better, but then after a week she had another grand mal seizure. She recovered well and was fine for a few weeks, then had several fits very close together. The vet decided to put her on an anti-epilepsy drug called Epiphen, which she has been taking daily since. She loves it because her pill comes wrapped in something tasty like cheese or meat. It seems to be working very well - we haven't observed any more ill effects but think she might have had the odd small fit in the night. For ages we let her sleep in our room because she refused to settle in her crate any more but now she's sleeping in the kitchen because we need to sleep sometimes!
It's only about ten weeks until we come over to the UK for James and Jenny's wedding! The travelling is going to be interesting out via Melbourne to London, train to Birmingham to see Melanie's mum and family, drive up to Leeds - wedding and visits over the weekend, fly back out on Wednesday from Manchester. I go to Qatar then Singapore and meet Melanie there as she's flying directly. Then we fly out to Auckland the next day, stay overnight and fly back to Wellington, finally arriving on Saturday afternoon!
Six full days in the UK plus almost six days of travelling!
It's going to be an endurance test I think.
There's not much else to tell that I haven't covered in my photo posting :)
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