We had a great Christmas - had beef and yorkshire puddings for dinner (not very traditional, but we couldn't face a whole New Zealand ham between the two of us) - looking forward to spending New Yeat at Paihia in the Bay of Islands, about 4 hours drive north of Auckland. Hopefully I'll get some diving in as I haven't managed to do any since I arrived here.

Another weekend over, and another fantastic location just out of Auckland visisted - this time at Long Bay. So far we have visited Piha to the east, The Coromandel to the west, Rotarua, Lake Taupo to the south, and The bay of islands in the north. And we haven't got anywhere near the south island yet - It'd be easy to get used to this :-)

Mac has started blogging.... his posts are a bit more verbose than mine, and are a good read.... they are making me jealous already!

Been quiet for a while as 1) I've had work to do for a change - and 2) My laptop is being repaired after the modem stopped responding - and I didn't spill beer on it or anything! Job is going well, I've basically been working full-time since I got to Auckland with ASP.Net things, and about a week or so with InfoPath, which is part of Office 2003. InfoPath is awful, I'd advise anyone who wants to do anything remotely difficult to stay well away until they produce something which at least is CLR-enabled! For simple things it's OK, as long as you never envison changing your data source :) Helen has got a new job doing basically the same thing as she was doing in London, it's a 6 month jobbie so it looks like we'll be sticking around Auckland until at least May-ish. Not got anything sorted yet for Christmas or new year, the whole of New Zealand heads for the country by all accounts so it might be tricky getting anything. We are thinking of getting a "batch" (holiday home) and share it with some of the mates we met at the backpackers, hopefully there will be something left somewhere in the sticks!