Slowed down...

Due to my enjoyment of watching 'TV on demand', I've used up our download for the month and so we have been super slowed down. Which makes watching 'TV on demand' impossible and all other day-to-day internet activities (email, reading blogs, checking weather forcast, TradeMe-ing) painfully slow.

The good news is that we bought a PVR the other day (just waiting for it to be delivered), so I will again be able to develop my own viewing times for my favourite shows, plus it will save me chewing up the download, so we shouldn't have this problem again.

The bad news is that I haven't been able to watch the last episode of MasterChef NZ and see all the action, before finding out who won.

But what do you do with them?

A couple of days ago I mentioned that we had eaten our first Feijoas and how I would need to find many different ways of cooking them to deal with the large supply of fruit each tree produces. Well I have made my first Feijoa product - Feijoa curd (also could be known as Feijoa butter, or Feijoa honey). It is basically the same as Lemon curd/butter/honey, but uses Feijoa puree instead of lemon juice/rind. Now we can eat the curd, spread on toast, on sandwiches or used as an ice cream topping; or find any recipe that requires the lemon version and substitute with the Feijoa version, such as the 'Feijoa coconut slice' I made for Bible study morning tea.

Wipers please!

I need windscreen wipers. For my glasses, that is. This morning was the second foggy morning for the winter (Monday was the first)... and my glasses fog up horribly while riding to work. So I have the choice of either not wearing glasses and being able to see vaguely, or having completely fogged-up glasses and not being able to see at all.

What makes that more scary is that at least half the cars out there this morning didn't have any lights on at all, despite visibility being down to less than 100m most of the way. I had my bike lights on to make myself as visible as I could...

Dodgy power companies...

When we bought our house, we didn't know who was supplying the electricity and gas - we asked the estate agent and they didn't know. We probably wanted to switch suppliers, but that seemed to require knowing who your current supplier was to start with. So, we figured we'd just wait until we got a notice of some sort from a power company so we could pay the bill and then switch suppliers. Yesterday, more than 6 weeks after living in the house, we got a "final notice" from Mercury Energy saying that they would disconnect our power within a week if we hadn't paid our bill. This was the first thing we'd heard from them. So, last night we rang them up to organise to pay the bill. All fine and good, we thought.

Except that, this morning, our power was disconnected. Obviously they didn't bother actually checking whether we'd contacted them. And they're trying to claim that we now need to pay a reconnection fee. Good luck with that, we're not paying anything more than our bill, seen as we hadn't been given any opportunity to pay any bill to start with.

Needless to say, we're not staying with Mercury.

We just ate our first feijoas!

This means that we really are starting to become locals. The feijoa would probably be NZ's second national fruit (in relation to prevalence/popularity) - just behind the world famous Kiwifruit. We are planning on growing a number of these trees into a hedge on the fence line of our property to reduce the noise from the cars. So we need to get used to eating them and finding many different ways of cooking/using/preserving them, as we will have a large harvest of them when the hedge is fully grown (we currently only have 1 tree planted, so it will be a little while yet).

On dry land...

This morning the kids had their last swimming lessons until next spring. They could keep going right through winter - as it is a heated indoor swimming pool - but I like them to have a break over winter, both for financial reasons and to give a bit of variety, so they don't get bored of it.

Joanna has progressed a lot with her skill level and can kick strongly, paddle her arms and blow a few bubbles at the same time. I think she has really enjoyed the 30min of 1-on-1 time she gets with me during the lesson.

I can't comment much on Ben, as his lesson is on while I'm in the pool with Joanna. But what I have seen is that he is a lot more confident in the water and is willing to try new things.

Did you know?

That red kumara (sweet potato) is the colour of green snot, when it has been peeled, cooked and pureed. And Naomi loves it! (it does taste nice and sweet)

My arms are sore...

from pulling apart pallets. The take a bit of time AND a bit of strength AND a bit of brains to deconstruct into useful pieces.

What are we doing today?

Painting window frames, AGAIN!

Well actually we have finished all the painting we are doing for today. Five windows now have undercoat and 1 layer of top coat. There are still 2 windows left - one has been scraped and just needs sanding and painting; the other we haven't done anything to yet. Plus we have yet to do anything with the windows+doors that cover the whole wall next to the deck! (I'm trying to convince Peter to replace the lot with bi-folds now - which is what we ultimately want to do there - instead of spending hours + money preping and painting it, just to replace later anyway.)

We are now pulling apart and de-nailing a stack of free pallets we got from Mitre 10, so we can use the wood to make some raised garden beds; a chook house; and try selling some as fire wood on Trade-me (the planks that snap/break in the process of us taking them apart).

Picking up the pace

Now that Ben has started morning kindy, it means I can get to the gym 4 times a week (I was only going 2, as there was only 2 days where there was space in the creche for all 3 kids, but now I only have 2...).

I've also mastered my 2km run and so have spent my runs this week working out a new, slightly longer route. The other day it was a bit of a cooks tour, as I didn't know how to get from the bike path I was on, up onto the road (the road is a bridge over a creek and the path follows next to the creek), so I ended up taking a longer route than I intended. Today I ran in the opposite direction to see if I could work it out and found there is a path from the road down to the creek. I still need to find out what distance this new route is, but the change is not only a further distance - this new route also has a couple of hills (my original 2km route was totally flat).

My main motivation at the moment is to lose a bit more of my baby weight so I can fit into my long pants for winter - if I don't I only have 2 pairs of pants that fit me and I don't want to have to go out and buy a whole new collection!