Photos of Tilly's birthday

Only a month after the event....  Here are some photos of Tilly's party and of present opening on her actual birthday.

We visit the hellhole of the Pacific* and celebrate our anniversary

It's our wedding anniversary on Wednesday and this year it's Dave's turn to organise something, so this weekend we finally got out of Auckland for the first time and went to Russell in the Bay of Islands.

Tilly gets a bigger present than expected...

Momentous occasions down under!  Tilly turns 2 and gets the entire contents of a 3 bedroom house all wrapped up in a big steel shipping container.

Where is CRXU9358170?

CRXU9358170 is the number of our shipping container and it hasn't been grabbed by Somali pirates, but it's starting to feel as if it might as well have been.

Escape from Pirates!!

Maybe if we sit here long enough we'll see our sofa sail past...

Yeah!!!!  The cargo ship carrying all our worldly possessions is currently ambling around in the Tasman sea awaiting entry into Sydney Harbour, having apparently not been hijacked by Somali Pirates or decided to sink in the Indian ocean.  Just a short hop across to Auckland and then the customs to clear and we can have a change of clothes and some furniture again.  At least Tilly's birthday present is easy this year - we can just give her some of her old toys back!

Work going well for me (Dave), survived my first few weeks in charge of the wards and getting to grips with my dialysis teams.  Hannah's job hunting is gathering a bit of momentum and there's a few irons in the fire, but too early to tell if they'll come to anything yet.  Reuben and Tilly still great, both settling into life here really well and being generally wonderful (most of the time anyway).  All in all positive things to report all round, except that it is definitely winter here now and we've had to invest in new hot water bottles or Hannah was threatening to go to bed in thermals - what do they have against decent heating over here?

We experience our first earthquake

Yes, the earth moved for us at 21:09 last night, but only for a couple of seconds.

Why you don't want to be a fish in New Zealand

So, yesterday evening I was off to the Auckland Fish Market cookery school for the first part of my birthday present from Dave, an evening class demonstration of fish preparation and cooking, followed by a hands-on session after which the participants get to eat the fruits of their labours.