Happy New Year

DEAR FAMILY & FRIENDS..... a long overdue message!

Phoebe & Zoe in the garden
September 2010

Well upon checking back, apart from our baby arrival news in early 2009 and last year's Christmas greeting (saying we'd send some news in the New Year – ooops!) we've been even more slack on keeping you all informed on what we've been up to lately. So here we go with an overview of the last couple of years!

Job catch-up...

Graham is still working for the Met Service in Wellington, more on the IT/forecast computer model side of things. Near the end of 2009, he had a change back to his old Research & Development department which was a relief for him as he had not been particularly happy in the role he was doing after a massive restructure of the Service earlier on in 2009.


Vida continues with variations on the theme of pregnancy, labour, birth and babies: running a birth pool sales and hire business from home, facilitating calmbirth courses (www.nurturenz.com) and volunteering for the NZ College of Midwives (NZCOM) and a local childbirth education course (www.birthwise.org.nz) facilitating home birth workshops and organising other birthy-type events.


Zoe insists that she has a job too and we must write about it here. She started school this year and she LOVES it and has settled in very well. She says (and this is a quote!) “I have turned over a new leaf and have learned to read, and write stories right down to the bottom of the page”.

Chickens, Beer, Plants … (& bees?) …. the semi-rural lifestyle – we love it!
We are loving the semi-rural lifestyle and have had a few chickens (ex-battery) roaming around for the last couple of years. For a long time the three of them have given us an egg each, pretty much every day so we've had a bountiful supply, but now things are easing up and David (Vida's Dad), even though he doesn't eat poultry/meat, reckons they must be ready for the pot! We really must get a bit more country-hardened about these kind of things, it is a little difficult, but we are gradually getting there!



Graham's home brew beer is really coming along a treat and he has a rather neat set up in the garage. We found him an old fridge that someone was chucking out, and David helped him to put a couple of beer taps on it so now he kegs his beer and loads it up ready for the odd pint or two, or more.... possibly with a game of pool as that is set up in the garage too.



Now that we no longer have sheep on most of the land (next door's sometimes graze here for part of the year), we are beginning to plant more... growing our own vegetables and herbs and we hope to have fruit trees eventually too. To further this aim Graham has taken up the challenge of part-time studying. He now has a certificate in Organic Horticulture after completing a year long course at Tech College.

Graham also completed a bee-keeping course – skills he is tucking away for future home projects!








Pets in the family...
We lost Vida's beloved guinea-pig Gus within a couple of months of having Phoebe in 2009. He got cancer and Vida thinks he was feeling neglected with the new arrival hogging all our attention! He'd had a good innings though as he'd been with us for over 7 years. Although we hear constant pleas from Zoe, Graham is not a huge fan of pets so for the timebeing we just have the chickens!

Zoe with the chickens – Lucy, Charlotte & Pipi

Dodgy dancing & even dodgier housing
We have had a couple of low lights in this last year or so. Not so much dodgy dancing, but in early September 2009 Vida managed to slip over down one of our many hills whilst tending to the chickens. It was a very unspectacular fall which caused a spectacular and bizarre saga of events. She dislocated and broke her left elbow in a couple of places. It was unfortunately misdiagnosed by one of the hospital ortho surgeons as relocated and not fractured and she was cast for a couple of weeks before a local physio realised there was still a problem. Unfortunately this then meant a couple of ops to try to correct and a pin was put in place. No driving for about 6 months and limited driving for a couple of months more – all a bit problematic with a 7 month old baby in a ruralish location. The arm will never straighten properly and so whilst Vida can now do most things ok, the strength is not great and she still experiences discomfort from time to time. However, the healing has been helped enormously by osteopathy and ortho-bionomy and the surgeon who did the ops has said that he is surprised by how much Vida can now do following these treatments (although he didn't really want to give them the credit :)). We have really been shown too what fantastic friends we have here in NZ who have supported us in amazing ways, looking after the girls and cooking for us etc...


Another blow this year has been that we were dragged into a tribunal case by the owners of the house that we sold in Wellington 3 years ago. You may have heard of weather tight home issues that NZ has experienced in the last 10 or so years and our previous house has now been classed in this category, and whilst we cannot really believe that we are involved, the issue is complex because of one repair the builder did for us on the roof in the 1st year we had it. It is sadly ongoing and very costly due to the legal fees involved, but we are trying to remain positive about it and hope that the adjudicator will realise our very limited/no fault in this (hopefully a decision will be made in March 2011).

Visiting there & visitors here....
We have no plans to come back to the UK any time soon, but we still have fond memories of our trip back to France in June/July 2009 staying at Graham's Mum's (Pam's) place. It was so lovely to catch up with all of the family and also see some friends too. We hope we may be able to do something like that again. It was great to have a base and not have to travel all over the place to see people as we know we would come back to NZ exhausted with two cranky children!


We still continue to have lots of visitors which is lovely, although it has slowed down. We hunker down for the windy, wet and usually cold winter and then the Summer arrives and the lovely visitors arrive. Obviously Ma & Pa Hargreaves always head back for the Summer with us as they own half of the house with us. Graham's Mum, Pam, always makes a visit and was with us for Zoe's 6th Birthday in November 2010.

We currently have Gareth and Bernice staying with us for this Christmas and New Year just in from travelling around the South Island. We make our visitors work while they are here as you can see from these photos – Bernice was so patient with the girls and Gareth had a stint on our mower! It has been wonderful catching up with them and we even managed to get away for a day or so to Martinborough, a wine region an hour or so's drive away from Wellington where we live. It was fantastic as Ma & Pa Hargreaves looked after Zoe and Phoebe back at our house on the first day and so we were completely child-free to potter around and do lots of wine tasting. David and Maureen and the girls were supposed to join us the next day for some camping, but sadly due to severe winds (160kph!!) making the route over the hills to the wine region too dangerous to drive (especially with their high-sided motorhome) they could not come over. There was also a power cut back home due to the winds and so the girls ended up camping in the motorhome on our drive :) and we got an extra night away child-free, drinking (lots of!) wine with Gareth and Bernice – yay!

Festive greetings...... & happy 2011
Again this year we did not send christmas cards, instead we're continuing our World Vision sponsorship of 6 year old Mathias Kabugo in the Buyamba community of Uganda.

Love to all . . .

Vida, Graham,
Zoe and Phoebe xxxx

How's it going?

Well, again, it has been over a month since we last sent you news from NZ. Suppose life is taking over finally, which in some ways is a good sign that we are settling in more, but in other ways you'll find, makes for possibly boring reading .......! :o)

Wellington is a great size, nice and compact after living in London, but still with plenty of things to do - good cinemas, theatres, restaurants and bars. We actually haven't checked out too many bars yet, as we're still getting acclimatised to the beer, although having said that, there was a BrewNZ festival last week which did have some very good local beers from micro-breweries around the country, comparable to real ale in the UK. We went to a couple of the gigs too at the recent comedy festival and we saw 2 great comedians - one was a Geordie called Ross Noble, if you ever get to see him live, he's hilarious. The other was a Kiwi called Benjamin Crellin who was good too, quite dry, but some of the humour was very Kiwi (so we didn't get it)!

We've not had a chance to travel around much yet but are looking forward to doing some skiing - 4 hours drive to Mt Ruapehu (and season passes for equivalent of GBP90 if you buy them early enough, which is excellent value). There's plenty to do in and around Wellington, though, and it doesn't take long to escape the city. Graham swapped his shifts around a couple of weeks ago so that he worked through 7 days rather than his usual shift pattern - it meant that he then had 4 days off, so we decided to go on a little adventure!! We went off to Wanganui and Palmerston North - that was fun.

Graham and I were very proud of ourselves that we got the house sorted quite quickly ...... until last week that is!! One job that we had put off was sorting the garage out and packing all the storage boxes, paint, roofrack, ladder etc... away properly (rather than them being dumped down there!) We did this and were considering what type of shelving we needed to put up, but we thought we'd wait a while until our cashflow was looking a bit more healthy. Then last week the heavens opened and we were DELUGED with rain for about 2 days and it turns out that we have flooding problems in the garages below us, so, being on the ground, quite a lot of our stored stuff got completely soaked/ruined, so in some ways we wish we hadn't been quite so organised then perhaps the boxes wouldn't have been down there in the first place!

There are a couple of things we haven't yet got used to. We still keep converting all the $ prices into GBPs. This means that things generally appear to be very cheap. We must stop doing it because now that Graham has been earning NZ$ for a few months we are quickly realising that converting back is not a good way of working out your spending power! Another thing is the NZ driving - not so much the NZ drivers (although some of them could rival London drivers) but a couple of really odd (to us at least) road rules. If you are turning left from a main road into another street you have to give way to anyone coming from the opposite direction wanting to turn right into that street. WHAT!!!!??? This causes no end of confusion and some of the NZ drivers don't seem to understand the rule either. We have heard talk of them changing it, so hopefully things will improve. Another rule that we can't really comprehend is that you must park facing the same direction as the flow of traffic. We assume that this is to stop people from pulling across a road to park. We got a ticket when we were parked outside our flat in Talavera Terrace (which is a quiet narrow cul-de-sac) because we were parked facing the wrong way - this seemed pretty excessive, especially as we hadn't been aware of the rule beforehand. When Graham told his work colleagues they couldn't believe it either, one said that he had thought that it was a myth that they booked people for that offence. We wrote to the council, explained that we were ignorant Brits and (we're sure the UK councils wouldn't have done this) they waived the fine!

We're very excited as Pam (Graham's Mum) and Derek are planning to come out and see us in August and hopefully Helen (Graham's sister) and Phil will also be coming over too around that time and we are really made up about that. My Mum & Dad plan to come out later in the year. It will be so lovely to see them all and we are pleased that our house will be used to its full potential!

Well we'll sign off now until next month. Would love to get news from some of you who we've not heard from in a while . . . . . .

Love to all - Vida & Graham

Things are looking up in Paradise . . .

. . . we've decided to give them another chance. It wasn't really our choice though, as they came as part of a package with the cable TV and phone that we've had installed in our house. So, vidagraham@paradise.net.nz is now our permanent email address, so please update your contacts list and send your emails to that address in future (not the UK Freeserve one nor the NZ Xtra one).

Sorry, we've not sent anything for some time, but we've been having far too much fun in our new house! Vida made her deadline of opening all our boxes by the end of Easter Monday (our time, not yours!) We've still got to sort out a few things that we don't need that much, putting them in the garage etc but the house is really taking shape. It's great to have all our stuff again (especially the CDs and Hi-fi). I've become an expert plug changer - it's amazing when you tot up how many plugs one household can have! With all my computer/electronic gadgets and all Vida's kitchen gadgets it's been a bit of a nightmare when you want to use anything.

Veed has just finished updating the website so that you can see how our stuff was manhandled into the house (and removing the endless pictures of our new car - which incidentally some nasty person did a "hit-and-run" on the other day!). There are also some other photos re: leaving the UK and our journey to NZ. There were many more photos that Veed put on there (she got a bit carried away!) but she ended up having to remove them because we only had 10MB of webspace available! We hope you enjoy having a look; http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/vidagrah.

As I said, we've spent most of our time sorting the house out but we have been out a few times. As we are so close to the water we've been wondering about learning to sail or windsurf or something. So, Vida found out about a company that does an introduction to sailing around the harbour. We booked a late afternoon session so that we could see the sunset over Wellington as we sailed back.

Don't believe anyone that tells you Wellington is windy, there was hardly a breath of wind as we motored out of the mooring! Once into the bay though, there was enough for us to put the sail up and turn off the motor. (I say "us", what I really mean is Terry, the skipper with 30 years experience, and his wife, Linda, who were doing all the work!) We headed for Somes Island, where we planned to moor for a bit and take in the views over Wellington. That was where things started to go wrong :-) Unfortunately, the fridge that Terry had put on to keep the milk cold for his cup of tea had drained the battery so we couldn't start the motor, necessary to guide us into the island. No major problem, though, we just sailed around the island instead (skilfully navigated by me at the helm!) Meanwhile, Terry was still trying to make his cup of tea, only to find out that he had run out of gas and there was a problem with the valve so he couldn't attach a new tank :-) By this time we had been on the water for nearly two hours so we started to head back to the marina. However, it was at this point that the wind completely died and we were just drifting along going nowhere, not particularly quickly! Being the macho sea dog that he is, Terry was convinced that despite the flat calm we were actually making progress towards the harbour. After about half an hour of gently rocking to and fro he finally admitted defeat (after a bit of nagging from his wife) and called up the coastguard. He sheepishly explained that we were in the middle of the harbour, becalmed and with a flat battery so we couldn't make it home. We couldn't even put on our navigation lights so he had to flash a torch on the sails to warn other vessels. Oh, I forgot to mention that it had turned dark by now (nice sunset over Wellington) and that we were sharing the harbour with huge container ships!! From Terry's demeanour we gathered that his pride was being greatly dented by this whole experience, so we just kept up the cheery "isn't the sunset beautiful" comments.

Eventually, the coastguard came out to meet us and towed us back to the marina (most exciting part of the trip Veed thought!) Certainly an experience, although a bit disconcerting when the coastguard kept shouting nautical terms at us that neither Vida or I understood (probably calling us bloody idiots for getting stuck in the first place!). All in all it was a fun evening, although not quite what we had expected. We're still toying with the idea of learning to sail, although not with Terry :-)

In case you haven't realised yet it is Graham writing this month's instalment, just to prove that I am still here and not working all the time.

Hope all is well with you,

Love Vida & Graham

It has been a moving experience......

Easter greetings to one and all :o)

Sorry to do this, but address books for us need to be updated yet again to;



That should be our last address change now for quite some time (a good few years anyway we hope!)

The house is fab - Gra and I just can't quite believe that, after all our umming, arhhing and frantic moments, it is actually ours and that we've got a proper base in NZ now. Obviously at the minute it is strewn with boxes, which is why this email won't be my usual epic as I must crack on - I'm determined that there will be no unopened boxes by the end of Easter Monday!! As soon as we are a bit more settled, we will update the website and send more detailed news. We've got some great photos of the ingenious methods that the removal men used to get our stuff up and into the house and also - Mmmmm something to look forward to ->>> a couple of the weird, widespread and wonderful creatures that grew inside our poor old fridge/freezer for 2 months (the teabags didn't work Mum - we should never have trusted that removal man's advice in the UK!)

Anyway - must get on with wiffy things.....

Love Vida and Graham

Paradise is not all it's cracked up to be.......

........meaning of course our internet service provider, not New Zealand!! Looks like we are gonna be changing from this email address in the near future because Paradise keeps kicking us off!!.......

Well it is a while since I wrote a note to everybody so I thought that I would tell you how our first couple of weeks in our rental flat have gone. Our weekend is over, it is now Monday morning and G is back at work. It was the first weekend in Autumn here and it was actually very sunny. On Saturday afternoon we wandered down to the harbour to watch the inter-school dragon boat racing which was great fun.

Things are pretty good - we are enjoying ourselves and we have settled into "no.5-21a" well. Talavera Terrace is one of the stops on the cable car which goes up through Wellington's Botanical Gardens so we are in a very good position for Graham's work and for town. This means that we have been able to wander into the city on a couple of nights to go out for a meal or go to the cinema. The Gardens are beautiful and we have the constant sound of cicadas day and night, which makes you feel like you are living somewhere really tropical.

We have still not really made any friends here yet. From what G has said, his work colleagues are friendly enough, but they don't seem to do much socially. In some ways though we don't mind because it makes things less complicated for us. We are happy in each other's company and feel that once we have our own place and we are established in the area, making friends will happen more naturally.

It was quite embarrassing the other day - we had just bought ourselves a cheap NZ video recorder so that when our UK TV arrives we will be able to watch it properly (don't ask me - something to do with the UK using PAL I and NZ using PAL B or something!) and so we decided to join up with "Ezyvideo", our local video store. We filled out the membership form and produced our ID etc... but there was one section that said that we must provide contact details of a friend or relative in New Zealand who could be contacted if we defaulted on our membership agreement with the store. We explained that we did not have any relatives in New Zealand and that we did not know anyone that we could put down. For some reason the guy behind the counter thought this was absolutely incredible. He said "well it can be anyone you know in NZ - just one of your friends", we replied that we didn't have any friends here and he then shouted out in the store "WHAT YOU DON'T HAVE ANY FRIENDS?????!!!!!" Graham and I at this point were laughing but trying desperately to remember a name and address that we could write down - Tim the friendly estate agent? Libby our landlady? ...... oh where are Susy and James Lai when you need them (just for those of you who don't know them - they are friends of ours that lived in Auckland, NZ for the last few years and when they found out that we were emigrating to NZ, James promptly found a job in Sydney and they moved out there the same week that we left the UK!! Mmmmm - we got the message alright :o) We eventually put down Graham's boss at the Met Service - so we'd better make sure we take those videos back on time eh?!

We bought a car too this weekend after much umming and arrhing! A couple of weeks ago we had got our eyes on a brand new freelander because it was a really good deal and much much cheaper than we could have ever bought it in the UK (for a change coz Landrovers are expensive in NZ). We test drove it and it was great all except for the fact that Graham has got such a big head that it touched the roof???? .... well as he's actually not that tall we asked whether other people had complained of lack of head room and apparently Landrover know that there is a problem for some people in freelanders and have still not corrected it! Landrover are obviously going downhill these days since their take over (mentioning no names!) So we couldn't buy it - I was really sad. We have ended up getting a 2nd hand Honda Civic (dark green) which we will be picking up this Thursday. Which is fine and we are pleased that we have finally sorted something out (and that we don't have to drive the Toyota anymore - sorry any Corolla fans out there!), but it will be weird for us as we have been so used to driving landys. Landrovers have their own character in a way whereas we will now be just driving a car that gets you from A to B if you get what I mean. It sounds very pathetic doesn't it?!! ("Yes it does Vida!") Also it seems a tad ironic that we are now in a country where the hills and valleys are crying out to be off-roaded on and we now won't have a vehicle capable of doing it, whereas in London we didn't really get the opportunity to off road apart from a couple of weekends away in the countryside and we had our good old Defender then.

The house hunt continues ..... we don't think we have seen "the one" yet ..... although, saying that, we are now going back to consider a house that we saw very early on (I think I mentioned it in one of my previous emails) - the house with the cable car to take you up to your front door! Actually I have got another viewing now so I'd better get going. A few of you have asked what the houses are like that we have been viewing, if anyone is interested in seeing them, email me and I can send you the weblinks. Our flat sale in London has finally exchanged last week (no thanks to our solicitor who sent the paperwork to our Crouch End address!!) we are now just waiting for completion so that we can get our dosh - then we are in a position to buy here - yeah!

Lots of love to all.....

Vida and Graham

Thunderbirds ARE GO!!

Hi everyone

Well the last 2 weeks have been pretty busy for us. Things have been shifting finally on the home moving front;

(1) Our flat in London eventually completed (after lots of early morning phone calls!)
(2) We put an offer in on the cable car house (up against 2 other offers) last Monday (11th March) - it was accepted
(3) For the last week we have been working through the "conditions" of sale with our solicitor and it went "unconditional" at 5pm yesterday and I've just got back from paying the deposit to the estate agents
(4) The settlement date is the 28th March (day before Good Friday).
(5) Our shipped over stuff has arrived and has got customs clearance although there will still be a MAF (Ministry of Agriculture & Fisheries) inspection
(6) Our removal company confirmed today that they can deliver our container to the new house on the 28th!

..... up to now things are tying in pretty well so here's hoping it continues that way. Gra's working over the Easter Weekend but he's off on the Thursday and Friday so we should be able to get fairly sorted.

Graham started this week on the proper forecasting roster at the MetService. Shifts are quite different to the Met Office in London when he always did 12 hours either a Day 8am - 8pm or a Night 8pm - 8am. His shifts at the moment are 4 on followed by 2 days off and they are only about 8 hours long but get this - they can start at 05:20 in the morning ! Tee Hee! Although I don't know why I'm laughing coz I always wake up too so that we can say goodbye to each other. So for the first time in our lives, the other night, we both went to sleep at 9:30pm! He said that it was rather strange on his first proper shift. For the last 6 weeks he had been practising drawing his isobar graphs etc... these were analysed on a 21 inch monitor and he had several attempts to get it right. Within the first hour on his first ever shift he had to do one - it was typically much harder than all the ones he had done in practice (because there were so many isobars on this particular day) and when he had finished he had to print it on A0 (A zero paper - which is mega huge) and it was then handed round to all his fellow forecasting colleagues - aarrgh! Scary or what?! Still Gra is enjoying the new challenge and is pleased to now be working in the forecast office. As he gets to know his colleagues, we're hoping that our social life may pick up!

Now that we don't have to devote our spare time to looking for houses (and cars) we have been doing a bit of gadding about sightseeing etc.... It is pretty cheap to do this as it only costs us about $30NZD to fill our petrol tank up (that's about GBP10 equivalent!) A couple of weekends ago we drove up Route 1 (there are only 2 main motorways in New Zealand :o) and visited places like Porirua (good for shopping as far as we could make out) Paraparaumu (very pretty, by the sea, reminded us a bit of Eastbourne though as there were lots of Saga type holiday makers - sorry Nan!) and on the drive we found a shop that we will definitely be visiting again - "The Chilli Patch" - this was our idea of heaven - you could pick your own chillis at only $5.95NZD (works out just under GBP2 per kilo - wow!) and you could buy pretty much every variety going or you could buy huge chilli plants - this is what we plan to do very soon.

I'm now concentrating more than ever on my infant massage stuff. I am doing my training with IAIM - International Association of Infant Massage. I have arranged to meet with the Head of the New Zealand Chapter (aka branch - Graham says that "Chapter" sounds like we're part of the Hells' Angels!) this weekend in Paremata. This lady lives in Auckland but is down (not far from Wellington) doing a training course so I am going to meet up with her for a chat so that hopefully I can gain a few more contacts in and around Wellington. I also contacted the local womens' prison near Wellington (Tawa) to ask if I could offer my services voluntarily (as I did with Holloway prison in London), so I am hoping that something will come of that too.

So things are gradually starting to pick up and that means that my "lady of leisure" time is nearly over! Oh dear! Still I will be busy for a while getting our house sorted and then I'll be finishing off my IAIM papers so I've perhaps got a month or so's grace!

You know how much I like to create silly websites, well Graham and I collaborated at the weekend and came up with this one if you fancy a peek - http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/vidagrah/ - it is very sad we know but we thought it would give you a good idea of where we have been and are!

I think we mentioned previously that we would possibly be changing ISPs (Internet Service Providers). So far we have tried Paradise and Xtra and we are not that happy with either of them. For this reason the website probably won't be around that long. Also it is best for people to only send us emails to our usual freeserve address (vandg@rye5.freeserve.co.uk) as we will continue to pick those emails up whatever service provider we use to do it.

Will write again when we have any more news.

Love

Vida and Graham

PS. Just for your info, we are now 12 hours ahead not 13 as the clocks went 1 hour back at the weekend. Once the clocks go forward in the UK though (Easter weekend?) we will then be only 11 hours ahead.

New Kiwi address........

Dear all

Just a quickie to let you know our new address for the next few months;



Moved in yesterday (Friday 15th) whilst G was at work (which was fun - not!!) Then realised that I had a flat tyre on our wonderful rental car so did the really girly thing and phoned Gra at work and asked him to come and help me sort it out!

It will take a while to get used to the new place. Very different from the hotel/apartment that we were in. Good to know too that utility companies are as unhelpful as ever the world over! (I've probably just offended someone else now generalising about another industry!) Spent most of yesterday afternoon hanging on a telephone (which is so antiquated that it will only pulse dial) trying to get our electricity, gas etc... connected (properly!) You can imagine how effective it was when all the companies have touch-tone options when you ring them up!

Friends of Helen and Phil (Graham's sis and other arf) are out here at the moment and we are going to meet up with them for a drink tonight so that should be fun.

We have just managed to have 2 fairly successful webcam sessions; one with Vida's sisters, bruv-in-law and nephews and one with Vida's Aunty Lorna and Uncle Terry. We are now off on a shopping expedition and here is roughly what's on our list;

Milk
Bread
Toilet rolls
Fresh coffee (we don't want Gra getting withdrawal symptoms)
Claratin max (my hayfever has really kicked off!)
Tissues (for aforementioned hayfever!)
Car
House
Printer

Mmmmm not your everyday type of shopping trip as you can imagine!

Will write again soon when we are more sorted.

Lots of love

Vida and Graham