My salad

Made with lettuce from my garden. I am getting swamped in lettuce at the moment.

Kelsy's Birthday

3 years!

Lots of photos

Katya's Mainly Music 10 year part outfit. She refused to actually wear it at the event.
One of Katya's first photos... as in she took it.
The MM party
More party
William VR!!!
Snack time afterwards.
Sharon under-cover
Yum! Cheese.
Chaos.
More chaos.

How to learn to blow bubbles. Drink the liquid and blow!!! I hope it is not toxic!!!
Hudson's blue lollie pop!!!
More bubbles.
A very light weight and balanced VR!!!

An exciting morning

So... Pete has required me to make a post on our exciting morning.

We decided to go to Porirua via the toy library. As we were coming up the Ngaraunga Gorge our ever reliable Toyota completely died. I was in the far right lane so had some quick work to get myself off the left hand side.

All the electrics were working so it was something fuel related.

I got Claire and Katya off the motoway and gave Pete a call to give us a tow. However the place is covered in cameras so the boys in blue (and floro green) turned up. I suppose it is quite exciting to be towed by the cops.

Anyway... looks like a new fuel pump is needed. Not so impressed that a 137km Toyota needs a new fuel pump. Then again it probably reflects the quality of petrol we have in NZ. Interestingly Claire had just filled up at Shell with the tank very empty.

Lots of toys

We got given a pile of toys to sell to help pay for Katya's CI operation.

Check out Trade Me

http://www.trademe.co.nz/Members/Listings.aspx?member=889940

Laura's wedding

Couple of pics from Laura's wedding. I like weddings. However they do make you feel old. This was the first wedding Katya has been to that she has really taken notice of. She was amazed.

Tom and Naomi's wedding

Some pictures and video of the ceremony.

A visit from a friend

A friend and former neighbour, Chris Burton came to visit. He is in WLG for a week leading a Student Life team.

He has changed a bit... especially after being Front Rowed

The New Mac arrives

My new MacBook has arrived. A friend bought it with her from the US where I bought it. It is a refurbished model which means I get a new model but with $700 off the price tag when compared to NZ prices.

My first impressions were not good. I cleared everything off the disk and partitioned it (I always like to have my documents separate from the OS and Applications). I installed everything and used the Migration Assistant to move my stuff from my old PowerBook. This last step proved fatal and resulted in many of the applications not working and the machine throwing errors. I gave up and reformatted the OS/Applications partition and reinstalled and manually migrated my stuff. This has been successful.

I had also bought 2 X 1Gb memory boards to upgrade the new MacBook from www.toshcomputers.com. They are an NZ company that competes against mainstream MAC sellers. I got a really good deal on these boards. Only NZ$50... for two!!! However one of them turned out to be dud and for the mean time I only have 1.5GB instead of the 2Gb I am after.

So... some initial impressions:

>It is pretty fast
>The screen is really nice
>I don't mind the changed keyboard
>Having the built in camera is very cool
>The magsafe is very good
>There is a sharp edge to the computer which digs into you when you type. I don't like this and am tempted to take to it with a piece of sand paper
>OS X 10.5 is ok. I guess I will get use to the new look but there is nothing that would sell me on it compared to 10.4. I certainly won't be going out and buying a family pack for my other MACs
>Office 2004 runs more lowly than my PowerBook. This is because it is not an Universal App and runs in an emulation. It does have an nicer look however.
>Frontrow is awaresome. Enough to make anyone switch to a MAC.
>It is lighter than my PowerBook and does not feel quite as robust.

So... so far I am pretty neutral. I think the real test will come when I do my first sermon with it and use Keynotes cool effects. Then we will see how good it is.

The Red Light Bandit

A friend is getting married soon. I thought she would like to re-live some comical past.

Lone Star

So a whole pile of us went to Lone Star on Sunday night. It was only the second time we left Katya in the care of someone else (thanks Elizabeth).

Home group dinner

At homegroup we had a fantastic pot-luck dinner together.

MASSIVE burgers at TNT

Nathanael's 21st

The birthday boy himself.

Katya enjoyed the party.

Andrea at work

Jo's Wedding

We have just returned from Jo's wedding. 11.5hours up there and 10 hours back means we have driven over 1600km this weekend. Anyway, photos are in My Photos on the right hand bar. But I thought you would love these two.

Makara Beach