HOT NEWS - Archway finished, wallpaper up & carpet down

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A round up of some of the things we have been doing lately

Last Update - 6th June 2001

Bay of Islands - Northland

"June/July"

Over the long weekend (Queen's Birthday) we travelled up north to Pihia, Bay of Islands, to visit an old friend and work mate of George. Vern has arranged accommodation for us at the Bounty Inn, (see above for connection) but no chocolate bars strewn around the floor unfortunately!! It is a 3 hour drive from Auckland and the traffic is fairly light once you get out of the city.
A quick cup of tea and then we hit the town - good job we didn't leave it too late as most places were starting to close down. Finally ended up in a "night club" where George & Vern hit the shooters and Rodger hit the pokies.
In the morning, nursing a few sore heads, we set off for Waitangi Golf Club determined to walk off those cobwebs in the brain. Waitangi's a hilly course and tough going, but the views over the Bay of Islands are wonderful. After an afternoon's nap to recover it was back on the town - but a more sedate evening this time around. It was a good weekend, Vern showed us around some of the smaller bays, visited some of her friends and gave us the Tiki Tour of the area.

At the moment the house is a bit of a mess. We finally bought some carpet to lay through the house and then thought it would be a good idea to make some structural changes (take out the arch between the rooms and square it off) and rewallpaper the lounge and dining room. We've stripped the walls, the builder has been and gone and now we are trying to make a decision as to what to put on the walls!
The original idea was to use plain textured paper like anaglypta and paint it. Now we just want it up and done so we can get the carpet laid and everything back to normal - so it's been endless poring over wallpaper books trying to find the texture & colour that we want. Do you know how difficult it is trying to put one of those tiny colour strips on the wall and then try and imagine the whole wall that colour!!!
We were planning on having french doors put in the new opening but quite like the new look as it is....perhaps later.

We're both going through various changes at work. Georgina's colleague, who shared the training role, resigned to move to Dunedin. So George is carrying the workload herself, waiting to hear if/when a replacement is going to be advertised. She's enjoying the training role and keeps widening the groups who come for calming & restraint training. The next step is production of brochures to promote the courses and establishing guidelines to fit national policies.

After 2 terms of sharing class teaching and ICT, at school, Rodger is back to full time teaching. His colleague also left (is there a message here?), to try something different. Rather than unsettle the class with a new teacher, it was decided to reduce Rodger's ICT role so he could focus on the teaching.
The school have contracted out to have a manager to come in every fortnight and maintain the network. Hopefully there won't be too many things going wrong, though the school has just installed a network throughout the school and has plans to have everyone using electronic mail and the Internet. He'll have to keep a low profile and hide away if too many problems arise.

We're both looking forward to the next school holidays - September/October when we'll use some of our airmiles and bugger off to Australia's Sunshine Coast, north of Brisbane.
The cold weather has moved into New Zealand - snow down south and cold evenings everywhere. Auckland is currently experiencing 8C - 14C (46F 56F) temperatures so the electric blankets and heaters are on. Cold but sunny though so we're able to get out in the garden and on the golf course.
Anyway, the plan is to escape to the sun as it gets colder so off to sunny Oz we go. Some friends moved to Brisbane earlier in the year and we'll meet up with them for a while before moving up the coast to Marcoola. Rodger arranged the hotel booking over the net and hopefully got a good deal at a new hotel called Atlantis hopefully it won't suffer the fate of its namesake and disappear before we get there!!
The plan is to golf, shop, play the tourist and get as much sun as possible in the 10 day we're over there. Hopefully that will carry us through to next Summer.