Hayley's parents came to Wellington this year for Christmas, but Ian, in a desparate bid to avoid the in-laws found himself in Wellington Hospital's A&E department for a good portion of Boxing Day. We are still not sure what the cause of the problem was, but it seems to have settled for the meantime. They have returned home to Hamilton now, but it was lovely to have the chance for a brief catch up over the festivities.
I've just scanned back through our blog and I see that we haven't mentioned that our trip is now fully paid for and confirmed. Flights, accommodation the whole nine yards. Needless to say we are very excited about this progression.
We got the chance to do a little shopping yesterday and because of Christmas money we were able to purchase a lovely big suitcase for the trip. Thanks to Mum & Dad (both sets) and Gran & Grandad Robertson for making this possible. I now look forward too/dread seeing how much/little we will/will not be able to take with us/leave behind. (Delete as appropriate.)
Dobós Torte - A Hungarian layer cake made up of six layers of sponge interspersed with layers of chocolate butter cream with a caramel glaze topping. I made one. It was delicious. If I do say so myself :)
We'll be relaxing and enjoying our Dobós Torte (more on that later)
Have a great day everyone :)
After we had rested we went round to Scorching Bay. I got to drive Julie's car as preparation for my driving test. I will be borrowing her car as it is a manual and I would rather be licensed to drive all cars, rather than just an automatic.
We found a lovely deserted mini-beach just round from Scorching Bay. The water was cold initially, but after my extremities went numb it started feel nice and warm. We finished the beach trip in the appropriate way - with an ice-cream cone on Oriental Parade.
Julie and Adrian came round for dinner and we had mussels and fries and salad. There's nothing like a trip to the sea to make you feel like eating it's inhabitants :)
Geek News: Like Duncan I have now signed up with Re_Invigorate a web site traffic monitoring system. I'm proud to announce that we have so far received no less than three (3) unique visitors. There's nothing like the adoration and wide acceptance of your work to make it all seem worthwhile.
I've redone a number of the graphics on the site, as I wasn't entirely happy with how they were looking on their first outing. There's still room for improvement, but I'm a lot happier with them now. I've also been re-writing a lot of the underlying code (tidying up mistakes mainly).
The links section has been updated to hopefully be slightly more informative. Go check it out.
It's unbelievable all the things that need to be sorted out. The first thing that springs to mind is where exactly are we going to store all the 'stuff' that currently lives in our TARDIS closet.
Cleaning aside, we are now thoroughly focused on the preparation needed for the coming months. Today has definitely been a landmark day and has made 'real' for us the journey about to be undertaken.
It's getting late and I suspect I'm rambling, so I'll call it a night.
I have now opted for a she'll be right approach to website maintenance. So, if you find that something isn't working the way you expected, I'm not at all surprised.
There isn't much in the way of real content yet, but I promise it is coming, any day now. When we get our digital camera there will more photos than you care to look at. In the meantime I've uploaded some of our wedding photos.