Exploring the Land of the Long White Cloud

Out of necessity this week I had to take my "work from home" on the road. And what a great idea it was! Notice the photo above and add the sounds of a spring morning chock full of very excitable birds chirping away. And it's warm enough to wear shorts even at the early hour of 8am! So I think I'm going to do more of this. So many cafes and pubs here have little "garden" seating areas like this and it's a treat and it does wonders for focus when I'm not trying to clean up dishes, write an ebook, hang out the washing, set up a new email marketing account, vacuum AND manage my clients' social media posts. I also can test how a pint of beer in a garden affects productivity haha. This last week was a blur to describe it best. We managed to take out another quiz night win (we're batting 75%) and I even stepped onto the rugby pitch for the first time. Not technically because I cut across the rugby pitch all the time when I'm walking...

Our mighty Mt Taranaki in the sunset glow. Apparently it's a bad idea to start your immigration application at about 8pm on a Saturday night. That's what we learned last weekend. It's only bad because of the fact that you're already tired and now here you are filling in 3 hours' worth of details of your lives. Then, even though you've already spent an additional 6 hours researching and planning and mapping out - you hit a snag! So, being tired and completing tedious paperwork = easy frustration! We've adjusted our attitudes already but yep we've found there's a step that we thought we didn't need but it turns out we do - despite going over it with immigration beforehand and feeling sure that they confirmed it wasn't necessary. Oh well that's what happens with this type of thing. So as of today it will be at least 20 more working days before we can hit the submit button on the first step. I do think it would have been useful (albe...