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I know you’re waiting for Bec to add her house entries (and to be honest there’s probably some I should add as well), but that all seems like it might take a while to happen, so have a couple of pics of some cute little animals. In this case piglets! (Clicky images for bigness to make the most of the distracting cuteness!)

And no, we haven’t gone into the pig farming business! They belong to friends of ours that live “near by”. Ish. Their 2 pigs had 19 piglets between them! We’re currently donating our food scraps to them. But I’m not sure we have enough to help all that much!

I’ll try to exert some pressure on Bec for at least a short entry, but don’t hold your breath!

It might seem to some of you that we are constantly on the go, every moment filled with excitement and action, but believe me, there are quite a few hours of relative down time here and there. And with four of us in the same boat here (even sometimes five or even the full six, I suspect) some desperate measures have been taken occasionally to fill in a few minutes. You really would not like to live through all the many games of charades that have been played, or listened to the “spicy noodle” song as many times as I have!

But in the last few days we’ve found a new pastime to fill in a bit of time. Yes, we’ve discovered Carcassonne (Wikipedia link)
(or see Amazon.co.uk link) in the toys and games cupboard, got all us kids around the table, and started to play. It’s just a pity it’s turned out to be so horribly addictive!

So far it’s been a great game. Not too complex, not too long for a game, not too competitive. A good balance of strategy and luck. And it’s helped to have great play-mates too!

We’ve not yet included all the expansion packs that are in the cupboard (and there are quite a few available), so we’ve still got a few twists and turns to add at some stage. I think it’s best we get the basics well and truly sussed out first before we get too carried away.

We’ve liked it so much that we’ve already bought it for our own toy and game cupboard! So if you come visit, look out or you’ll be roped into a game. (But if you’ve got any sense you’ll ask to play!)

Hopefully we can now say goodbye to charades for good! (But Bec tells me that is very unlikely to happen).

Our container has been offloaded at Lyttleton! Apparently. At 15:29 this afternoon.

Yippee!

Still a few weeks to go until we get our grubby mitts on stuff though. But at least it’s now nearby!

You’ll be please to know that our goods appear to be on NZ soil once again. Arrived in Auckland last night.

Now I guess we just wait for the last trip down this way somehow, and the inevitable delays though MAF and Customs. Which is actually in our favour at the moment, as long as they don’t take too long!

I didn’t quite realise how much the traversal of our goods around the world had gripped the country! We keep getting questioned about it wherever we go. In fact, questions about the container might have even outweighed the questions about the house this week.

So I’m happy to report that that container appears to have left Singapore on schedule at 4:58am on the 4th March, destined for Auckland. Arrival date there is estimated as 14 March.

We’re still pretty relaxed about its chances now. This surely has to be the second easiest/safest leg of the journey. The only safer one must be the Auckland to Lyttleton one that’s to come soon. Surely? Surely? Assuming there are no more natural disasters, of course…

And stop calling me Shirley!

You may as well do a puzzle!

Kept us busy for a bit, and brought back a few memories.

Now what?!

(And no, I’m not talking about the state of our backyard hole!)

Looks like our stuff has made it to Singapore. Through all the chaos in Egypt and through the canal, crept past all the pirates off Somalia, and into harbour and offloaded on the dock there.

So the ADRIAN MAERSK is longer the most important ship in the world to us, the MAERSK DUNBAR now holds that honour, but it’s not due to collect the container until the first week of March and move it on to Auckland.

An earthquake update? Nah. Bored of it all now. The only thing you really need to know is that we’re no longer restricted to the back yard…

Although whether there’s a port in action for it to arrive into at some point in the future, and whether the house is ready on time to receive everything we’ll just have to wait and see.

We’re all ok here. Shaken and tired, and still having to sit through the long series of aftershocks to the aftershock…

This is the current reality of life:

But as this is currently all we’ve got to worry about, we’re doing ok.

I’m not even thinking about the house at the moment. Or how or where our stuff will arrive!

Well, it is to us, anyway! The ADRIAN MAERSK.

Why so important? It’s got all our stuff on it, of course!

Looking at the picture, I really hope our stuff is buried somewhere in the middle, and not in one of the containers dangling on the top edge.

The current vessel track is where I check most, but with over 600 ships around Antwerp it’s a bit slow. I’m guessing it will speed up a bit when it finally starts heading somewhere that’s useful to us, like the Pacific. Enough pootling around the Channel, OK?!

The tracking link the shipping guys sent us was so crap that I had to find an alternative site, and I’m now kinda addicted to that one. Although I am slightly worried that when I did a search before it didn’t come up with Lyttelton as a port. But when I zoomed in on New Zealand I did locate ships heading there, so I guess it does exist. I really hope so!

So here we were, all out in the backyard having a nice evening around the BBQ, wondering where the wind had gone and wasn’t it a lovely evening, and then, above our heads…

Three ducks decided that having a birds-eye view of our proceedings was necessary, and parked themselves on the roof for a bit, hanging their heads over the edge to say hello. And they didn’t even have an invitation!