Well, blogger locked me out of my account for awhile then, as my old email address at the hosital was the account holder, and the NHS must have finally deleted my email after I left there um… 18 months ago!

Anyway, we are both well, I think I have caught up with most of you on Facebook, but for those of you not addicted to facebooking madness, we have had a fairly busy few weeks.

Mark was supposed to be starting a job working on the fire engines for the council, but days before he was due to start they called to say they had a budget cut and they coudn’t start him. Needless to say we were a bit mad because they hadn’t exchanged contracts yet, so we couldn’t do a thing. Poor Marky was gutted, seeing as work is quite hard to come by at the moment. He managed to get some work in a warehouse for a few weeks but it was back-breaking and boring, and as I keep reminding him, he isn’t 18 anymore. I was still working so it wasnt a big deal money-wise, we didnt have to live on beans all week!!

We were then looking at moving to a place called Whangerei, about 3 hours north of here, where there were a couple of possible jobs for him. We have been there before ( where the photos of the waterfall were taken) but I didnt really fancy living there to be honest. It was quite a small town and miles from the beaches so we were hoping something would come along. Lucky for us a job came up in Auckland 2 days before we had to decide whether to go! So we are still in sunny Auckland at the moment. He seems to like it so far, fingers crossed they keep getting work through. Everywhere seems to be struggling at the moment, probably due to this mini recession we are having. Good job for me there will always be baldy men!!

Otherwise we have been enjoying some excellent weather, getting down to the beach for walks and even an icecream or two! It is still too cold to swim yet, but it shouldn’t be too long until we can. It is shark season soon, so I will be trying to avoid being eaten as well.

I don’t know if you saw on the news about the ‘whale vomit’ thing they found on the beach here, everyone has been going mad about it, as it is a valuable ingredient of some perfumes and things. It looks horrible, like a big lump of fat! People were sneaking down in the night to steal a chunk off it, and now it has all gone! We see some random things on the beach all the time tho – last week we found either a horse or cow skeleton (hard to tell) but it was enormous. I overheard a mum and her children talking about it later, and the mum was arguing and saying it is fish bones, and the kid was like “some big fish mum” made me laugh for ages!!

There were even a few coconuts floating around on the beach at the end of our street the other day when I was on my way home, I bet they had come from somewhere nice and tropical like Fiji or Tonga! I love how you can go to the beach and find all sorts of things. I think I would miss the sea if we moved away now. you can smell it all the time and hear it at night (when the cicadas finally shutup!) It’s lovely!!

I have a long weekend off this weekend, as I worked my day off last week, and will spend it cleaning the flat – how exciting!! Spring cleaning time though – the sun is showing up how dirty everything is and its bugging me!! how sad I have become…

Hope you are all well, lots of love to Auntie Beryl and Uncle Jim. I hope you got our card and email and hope to hear from you soon.

Love from the kiwis xox