Garlic 
I've been daily raiding the garden for fruit and vegetables to turn into juice. My ultimate this week was kale, spinach, silverbeet, carrots, figs, plum, and for an extra bit of spice, a spoonful of crushed garlic (it's healthy, apparently). It reminded me of the spicy cacao brew that Monteczuma used to drink before going in to see to his women. On Friday, having finished the antibiotics, I bought some pro-bio yoghourt. I mixed half of it in with the fruit and vegetables. It did the trick, but I certainly don't recommend mixing yoghourt and garlic.

Bronwyn's been out doing the census collecting again. Earlier in the week, she visited a woman and saw that she didn't look right, so she asked if she was OK. She wasn't; she'd just been called into surgery for cancer after two years in remission, and she was in a right state. So Bronwyn abandons the census forms and offers meals, organises flowers and hay for the horses, and rings around for help. I'm proud of her.

She's also taken on another couple of delivery areas that weren't doe well the first time. She was out for 4 hours yesterday and about 5 hours today. Seems like a lot of the houses have already done the forms, but it hasn't filtered down to her yet. Which is annoying, but at least they're all off the list now.

It's going to be interesting at my work in the next couple of months. Our side of the business has beed sold to an Australian company, and they've got great plans for the Australian market. They wanted to start things early, so I've been doing extra work for them directly. We're hoping to cut down on office costs, so my boss has been planning to rent a house somewhere so we've got office space as well as a few beds for the Aussie guys to sleep on when they pop over. I'll have to learn the lingo too...

[ add comment ] ( 5265 views )   |  permalink  |  $star_image$star_image$star_image$star_image$star_image ( 3 / 2001 )
Chocolate 
Sarah had her friends round for an easter egg hunt earlier this afternoon. Meanwhile, Rachael's just come back from camp and wants her share of the chocolate. Always the way...

Looks like Rachael had a great time at camp. She's brought back a video of the highlights, the main one being The Blob, involving a large inflatable. One person jumps onto it, and another sits on the end, and gets catapulted into the water. Plus the water slides, flying fox and dozens of other activities. Fortunately she doesn't have school tomorrow!

Bronwyn's thinking of starting a playgroup at the church. An official, funded playgroup, rather than a church one. There used to be one a few years ago, and all the equipment is apparently still there, locked in a cupboard. There's already the church playgroup of course, so negotiations could be delicate...

HelpX seems to have woken up. I recall it was really quiet in February and March last year. Now that the air fares are lower, everyone wants to come to New Zealand. And stay on the farm of course.

[ add comment ] ( 3602 views )   |  permalink  |  $star_image$star_image$star_image$star_image$star_image ( 3 / 1971 )
Nope. 
Haven't been too well for the last couple of weeks. Not sure which is worse, the illness or the antibiotics. I've stopped the antibiotics a few days ago. Now let's see what the illness was like...

We had a hacking incident last week. One of the Australian schools had their pages defaced. The message was "Welcome to NOPE". The last one read something like "We are legion. Unlike Denise's password, which is Legacy". At least they had a sense of humour. The school tracked him down using the IP addresses to an ex-student. And I believe they've also had a good lesson in choosing passwords.

Rachael's off to e-Camp next week (the junior version of the Baptist Easter Camp). I've got to drop her at church at 7am. Should be fun...

Bronwyn's had her handover, and offered to help with the mopping up of all the people who haven't done their census form yet. Meanwhile, I've been working on a job for the Australian schools. And there will likely be An Announcement Soon. But fortunately I won't have to move to Australia. Interesting Times are ahead...

[ 1 comment ] ( 1655 views )   |  permalink  |  $star_image$star_image$star_image$star_image$star_image ( 2.9 / 1965 )
The luck of the Irish 
It's St Patrick's day. And it's raining. At last. The whole North Island and large chunks of the South Island has been declared a drought zone. Bronwyn says she's come across paddocks with large areas completely bare, and dams run right dry. Fortunately, our dam is huge, and is only a few inches below the overflow pipe. And we're only down to 60% on the water tank. We haven't had a lot of rain, but it should be enough to get the grass growing.

Bronwyn has finished. Yes, there's still a few houses who weren't in, or haven't got round to doing the forms, or refused to do the forms, but she can hand them over to the district coordinator to sort out. This is a little tricky, because her district coordinator resigned last week after working far too many hours. So Bronwyn has been talking to the area coordinator instead. There's the handover next week, and she's got a lot of paperwork to sort out. You wouldn't think that it would be quite such a complex operation, but there's all sorts of things that might go wrong. Including the one house where Bronwyn got no answer, and saw some, um, paraphernalia on the table, and had a quiet qord with the police...

I've been really busy at work. And we've now got a big Australian contract which I've been doing in my spare time. Didn't feel well last week. I had to take some time off sick, and they just had to do without me!

Allan's sweetcorn is mostly harvested. We're onto the last third. He put an advert on Facebook and sold seversl hundred cobs. He stuffed a suitcase full of them and shipped them out around the lower South Island. I've got some stashed in the fridge and freezer. Meanwhile, I'm working on the carrot patch. Still plenty to go there, and at least it lasts longer than the sweetcorn does!

Rachael has found a new friend. Well, she knew her before, but now they ring each other up every night. Rachael got a story published a month or two ago about autism, and how she'd worked to overcome it. Charlie spotted it. Charlie has aspbergers, and had a really rough time at school last year. Meanwhile, Charlie's mum has left and gone to Tauranga, leaving her with her grandparents. So we've all been helping out. I upgraded their PC from a 2002 version of XP to something that generally works, and got her grandmother set up with an email address, which wasn't easy since they're only on a wet piece of string for internet, and rain has been hard to come by lately...

[ add comment ] ( 1576 views )   |  permalink  |  $star_image$star_image$star_image$star_image$star_image ( 3 / 2048 )
A screwdriver in the dark 
Bronwyn's been struggling with asthma this weekend. Fortunately, she's finished all her deliveries, so it's all set for The Big Day on Tuesday. So long as the forms actually got delivered. Apparently some postman has been collecting the blank forms back out of the mailboxes, and posting them back to HQ...

Had some rain this morning. Didn't last long. Don't think we'll get any more this week. At least it pays to be complete tramps at this time of year. We've still got 75% left in the tank. I've been sticking the hosepipe at the base of the trees and leaving it on for an hour or two per tree to get them some water.

Last year, we had problems with the old filestore at work. It was a bit on the slow side. So someone offered to set up some storage space on his shiny new machine, and link it through to us. I had to get up just after midnight to switch it over. This year, I found out that this guy was charging us more each month than the old filestore was worth. Someone else offered to install a spare server he had, which had high speed disks and plenty of space. However, he decided that we ought to be able to fit all our servers into a half size rack. So in anticipation, he installed the thing in the small rack, with a cable to the main rack. Of course, our servers aren't going to fit in the half rack, and we haven't got the cash to buy shiny (and smaller) new ones.

He'd also installed a version of Linux that I'd never had experience of, and failed to get the network configuration working, thus leaving it unreachable. I ended up taking it back to the office. He'd also prevented anyone from reinstalling a different operating system on it; there was a password on the BIOS config. But I got it working, and put it back, in the main rack of course.

I got up at midnight again and tried to switch it over, but it had crashed that evening, and I ended up fixing the chaos on the rest of the system instead.

I went in again, retrieved it and gave it the old screwdriver-across-the-battery-contacts trick to clear all the settings. 'E wake up. 'E know nothing. I set it up properly, and then returned it.

Got up at three yesterday morning and switched it over. Fingers crossed, it's still running...

Four redundancies, and now the boss has resigned. And there's some talk about Due Diligence. We shall see...

[ add comment ] ( 3340 views )   |  permalink  |  $star_image$star_image$star_image$star_image$star_image ( 3 / 2009 )

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