Kiwiagogoland

During last week Nicki and the kids went blueberry picking. If you take a look at the Picassa video gallery, you can see how they got on - there is a great clip with Alex doing a guided tour!

They also came across this little chick in a nest, which was such a great moment, I thought I would put it on youtube for everyone to see.

January and February are traditionally the bargain times to book tickets for NZ, even if you fly out later in the year. Currently Emirates will take you from Birmingham to Christchurch for 750 GBP RETURN. That's door to door!

Cheaper offers are available from other airports (549 Heathrow/Auckland fly April to June or during November), but there seems little point at that price. Book by the 31 January and fly out between 10 April and 10 July.

Not sure where it went, really. Saturday morning Georgia and I did the shopping run....Pak N Save for supermarket shopping, Countdown (which also trades as Woolworths - yes we still have one;) ) for the rest of the stuff that we like (mayo that tastes like UK salad cream and a nice tomato sauce). Pacific Catch for the 'fush' and Raewards for the fruit, veg and meat.

We dropped off Sherbet for a haircut before we left and picked her up on the way back at the same place Toffee was done, shortly after they arrived from the UK.

Saturday night, Alex had a friend over for the night and Sunday we went raspberry picking and dodged the hail and storms, before collecting Nicki's car ready for work.

Our BBQ today had 2 new items, never before cooked in our household. Homemade burgers (made by Georgia) that were beyond fantastic and come highly recommended and a local fish called Warehou. It's a firm flesh and has fantastic flavour and went down really well with a nice little cous cous salad Nicki knocked up. Remind me when you visit and we will get you sampling the delights of what is my favourite fish so far.

Nicki has been on holiday this week and from what I can gather her and the kids have had great fun while I've been at work. So much so that none of them have had time to update the blog! I will try and summarise their week with a few posts over the coming days.

At the moment I'm uploading several more videos that they took during their escapades. It looks like they had fun on their adventures. Let me know what you think.

Not us.... the theme of the weekend activity! Friday night, as usual was shopping night. I collected Nicki from work afterwards (she was on a late) and decided that I had better fill up with petrol (the computer was showing 9km remaining!).

Saturday was mix of cleaning and cooking. Georgia did a nice pudding, Nicki a great quiche.

Sunday we took a day trip to Christchurch for one of the "Lazy Weekend" concerts. There are a series of 16 free concerts over 8 weeks, in the botanical gardens.

More in the Christchurch album and the video gallery

Roads have melted, offices have closed and people are down on the beach having a party! Why? Well Christchurch has topped (unofficially anyway) its highest ever January temperature, with highs of 40C recorded by some personal weather stations.

The MetService measured air temperature "officially" up to 35.7C at Christchurch Airport yesterday afternoon, close to the January record high of 35.9C in 1979. But the airport is out of the city, so its cooler due to the fields and airflow. City temperatures recorded 42 in one instance.

The "feels like" factor woudl have been higher too as this takes into account humidity and the effect of hot tarseal, high density housing and metal roofs, which all make us feel hotter.

Of course we really appreciate your comments on our blog post (so if you've you've not done so for a while, or have yet to comment at all, then get your finger out!)

You should know though, that we cannot reply to your comments directly, such is the nature of the system. If you want a reply, you will either have to check back on the comments at a later date, or send us an email!

  You may remember that shortly after we arrived, we found Bottle Lake Forest. Well this time we headed for the beach beyond the forest, during a swealtering day last week. Again the dogs went with us, but Nicki, this time, was working. It was nice to cool off in the surf and even Toffee had her first attempt at swimming in the sea. More pics are in the BLFP and the family galleries.

After a few days of struggle trying to get the Google servers to accept our video uploads, we finally have a small collection on offer! They cover a little bit of our Christmas and New Year holidays. So, if you want the link to the video gallery, please email me and I will send you all you need to know to get access.

Of course, now that we know it works, we'll be taking time out to video some more events to keep you up-to-date with the latest happenings.

  This weekend has seen our first NZ thunderstorm. We had torrential rain, hail and some localised flash flooding. Most of the lightning was sheet, but there were a couple of nice cloud to ground strikes locally. The image is from the Rolleston Gallery and shows Mammatus cloud after the storm had passed.

We found a PYO last week and decided to give Cherry picking a go. It was $3 each to get in, so everyone was under strict orders to each as much as they could! We picked dark cherries and white cherries and saw some huge apple cherries, which were literally apple sized. We had a great time and Alex enjoyed climbing the tripod ladders to get the highest cherries!

We brought home a large bag and if that wasn't enough we also stopped by the farm shop and bought some apricots, strawberries, plums and peaches. It still didn't last more than a couple of days.

Now we've had so many works Christmas events that they all merge into one. It's certainly a time for celebrations and get togethers in this part of the world. Things kicked off with the official Christmas meal, which I mentioned at Busy Weekends. It was a very successful evening and one I would do again. Everyone was very pleasent and welcoming to Nicki and I, the food was great and even better, the wine was free - lol.

Then came the staff BBQ afternoon on the lawn with beers, followed by the morning tea event with Christmas nibbles and a host of goodies from suppliers, oh and don't forget the social "end of year" evening bbq organised by my manager, then there was Nicki's colleagues Christmas bbq last weekend, which we all thoroughly enjoyed too.

Now perhaps you can understand why it went a bit quiet on the blog on the run up to Christmas - lol

Yes, we are the first ones again ;) It has its advantages!

We would all like to wish our avid readers, friends and family a super New Year. It's going to be hard to top 2008, in terms of what we've done. Moved house, moved country, changed jobs, schools, cars, shops, banks ....... the list is endless.

Hopefully 2009 will be a bit quieter and allow for some relaxation and perhaps it will be an opportunity for a few of you to escape the UK depression and pop in to say hello. Well, you never know.

The kids start off the year in style (they still have 4 weeks holiday). I'm back to work, while Nicki gets a week off next week, which will be good.

Don't forget to keep in touch, whether it's by phone, email, skype, msn or good old fashioned letter!