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Qantas finally turned up with Mitch’s suitcase at lunchtime – well, ok, a courier paid for by Qantas….

A day of rest and recovery today to get rid of the jetlag for Mitch. Followed by an early night in preparation for our road trip to the Rugby World Cup 2011 opening ceremony in Auckland tomorrow.

Grin

Left work at lunchtime to get changed and back on the road to Wellington to pick up Mitch.

As we were waiting in arrivals, his name was called a couple of times to report to staff in the arrivals hall, if he was in arrivals – things were sounding a bit suspicious:

  1. Was he being turned away for having no passport?
  2. Had his suitcase exploded and was strewn across the aircraft hold?
  3. Was he drunk and disorderly?
  4. Did he fall asleep in Sydney and miss the flight?
  5. Did the sniffer dogs find anything suspicious in his luggage?
  6. Was he having an intimate meeting with rubber-gloved customs officials?
  7. All of the above?

Qantas will very nicely deliver his suitcase direct to our house! However, not until tomorrow!

As it turns out, after waiting a worrying hour, his suitcase never made it out of Sydney airport!

Aussies…….. typical!

Although he’s doing it in the past, ie. yesterday in the UK, my “bro” is in the air and flying out for what we hope will be a holiday of a lifetime for him.

We’re both so looking forward to seeing him again.

Let the good times roll, and the alcohol run free (well, at night time and when I’m not riding/driving)

Yes Beer

It also looks like I’ve finally gotten through the block that work was putting on updating this blog – HUZZAH!

Played 5 aside again for the first time in a couple of weeksFrown . Really good fun and a great workout but jeez did it hurt!

 

Back to work this morning, leaving Louise with a mission to unpack boxes. Bless her……

However, I’ll probably never find anything ever again!

Well! What a busy unpacking session that was!!

We asked the movers to put the “easily identifiable” boxes into the rooms we thought they might end up in – that was only about 25% of them though! The rest just got piled up in the garage – luckily the garage is big enough!

However, even the ones we thought we could identify had been repacked by the UK movers – each box ended up being unpacked into 3 or 4 different rooms……..Thanks, Anglo-Pacific……….NOT!

We set aside the “suspicious” boxes that the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) wanted to inspect before they were unpacked. The two girls that turned up for the inspection later in the day were dead impressed by the cleanliness of kit in general (thanks to you too Mitch!), found the odd UK pine cone that we’d missed on the Xmas decorations (we had to virtually take to pieces two of the Xmas wreaths!) and were quite impressed at the box containing “Army kit”. I’d been trying to work out what it contained, aside from the odd pair of combat trousers and a camo jacket. I know for sure what MAF thought was in it! Guns, ammo, dirty trekking boots and the odd mortar! In fact, it turned out that Anglo-Pacific had a strange sense of humour and piled into it all our underwear and anything that couldn’t be thrown into any other box as packing! The MAF girls were not too interested in my underwear (most of it too boring), but were asking Lou where she got hers from!

They also spent an inordinate amount of time on the Xmas decorations boxes (there are a lot after all). At first we thought we were in for a big cleaning bill….. but it turned out that they were just taking a great deal of time ooing and aahing over Louise’s collection! Phew. As it is, they found about an A4 plastic bag’s worth of stuff to clean or destroy and as it was all likely to have been destroyed by the heat used by the cleaning process we had it all destroyed at no cost. Result!

On the downside, the house looks really untidy with “stuff” in it now! Thinking

Never mind, it won’t take long to find a home for it all!

Woohoo!

Up early this morning to get everything ready for our stuff/furniture/container arriving!!!

Just like Christmas morning – but bigger and many more boxes!!

Aaarrrggghh!! The UK movers have “repacked” all our boxes – nightmare sorting time!!

More jobs done today, as well as answering mails and Facebook entries from concerned family and friends. Even the black & white NZ lifeform we’ve named “Poser” came around in a very affectionate mood.

Thank you all very much for your thoughts! We were actually asleep during the quake and its aftershocks, but New Zealand feels so much like home that even Christchurch feels like its just down the coast……

Lots done today. Louise has been sanding down the downstairs hallway, and I’ve been getting to grips with the intricacies of wiring Cat 6 ethernet cable sockets!

We had a quick chat with Louise’s parents tonight. Although I think the severe weather is affecting the internet, their sound was bad. It might have something to do with the 140kmh winds we can hear once we’re outside.

I think I might be taking the car in the morning. The police have suggested that motorcyclists and high sided trucks might want to reconsider their trips for the next 24 hours….

Container in the morning

Ah, they offloaded one or two containers in the night then! Eenie, meenie, mynee mo……..it must be………that one!

Weather cleared up lovely during the night and we had a gorgeous day. We spent the day doing jobs and the garden/lawn soaking up the sunshine.

We didn’t check out the tv or radio until about 4pm and hadn’t heard about the earthquake in Christchurch until then. What a mess!

Christchurch1 Christchurch2 Christchurch3

Fingers crossed for you all!

Wet n windy in Wellington again today!

I had to work late tracking down a possible mail spoof today. I did however manage to spot our ship coming in to the harbour as I left work.

MSC Martina arrives in Wellington

A quick trip home in the gale and I got online in time to see the ship being unloaded.

Container has just arrived

Woohoo! I can’t see any new MSC containers on the dockside yet, but we’ll check again in the morning….

Quiet day today, lots of meetings for me and Louise had a quiet day resting from the decorating!

The container is on its way to Christchurch, although there is a gale coming in from the South. On the bright side, that means the ship is getting blown here quicker!