Ally & Suzy's Blog

Not only are Suzy and I now feeling tons better, we have the Internets in our new pad so finally I can get back on to Skype-ing and blogging to you good people!

This week, the weather has been mainly very good for mid-winter. Temperatures have been a solid 14-15 degrees most days and the sun has been fantastic. Just yesterday I took a walk back home from my interview with a company called OSS (more on that later). I walked through the Auckland Domain which is a beautiful park just to the left of the city centre. It contains the Auckland Museum (which we already visited a few weeks ago with Symon), but it also contains lovely paths such as the Lovers Lane and a nice duck pond. The air is lovely and fresh, making you forget you are in a massive big city and there are some nice bird calls that I have never heard before in my life.

As I was saying, I went for an interview yesterday. This will be my first proper interview since my arrival, as the others were mainly just getting to meet with recruitment firms. This was a proper interview for a company called OSS. They need a Support Services Manager to manage a team of staff who provide managed IT services to enterprise-level customers. The services they provide are on the Data Centre end of things, so right up my street, and it’s all Open Source stuff, OSS stands for ‘Open Systems Specialists’. The company is fairly small compared to even Picsel, but the salary is in the right ball-park and the job sounds like it’s custom designed for me. I’m excited about it, and I think I did pretty well at the first interview, but there is quite a lot of competition I believe so I won’t be getting my hopes up at this early stage. Please keep your fingers (and toes) crossed for me though, I think I would really enjoy that job!

Me outside a church in Parnell

To celebrate the fact that we were both feeling a bit better, and that my first interview went well, Suzy and I went out to have dinner in Parnell last night. We went to of all things, an Irish pub & restaurant, called the Bog. Had a nice dinner in there and cozied by the fire in the pub until it was time to go home. Just to give you an idea of Parnell, if you imagine the distance of Morningside Road from say, Newington Road, that’s the sort of distance we are from Parnell. I think Beach Road (our road) still falls under the Parnell district, however, I wouldn’t quite call us ‘Parnellians’!. Parnell is a very exclusive little part of Auckland. It’s quite old, has some lovely architecture and lots of lovely shops and boutiques. There are lots of little vennels and secret but pretty alleyways revealing more coffee shops and boutiques. Suzy was quite delighted at the shops, not so delighted that we couldn’t spend any money in them!

So, the big question I am sure you are all wondering, is are we still enjoying ourselves here and do we miss home? I am speaking for Suzy here as well, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that we are both extremely happy with our decision, we’re not missing home too much and we are definitely not coming back any time soon. The first purchase I will make when I get a job is a car, as there are so many wonderful places we keep eyeing up in the guides we have. I also fancy doing a 2 week train ride across the north island, you get to stop at some great locations, you just hop off the train, take as much or as little time in the place as you like, and then get back on the next train down the track. It’s fairly cheap as well, it’s around £60 per person in the winter season.

Today saw the first of the bad weather return in quite some time. Plenty of rain today, however we ventured out to have Suzy’s 13 week ultrasound. Everything is normal again and baby looks like it’s getting to be quite some size already. On the way back we bought an ADSL modem and wifi router, so that’s why I’m on the net today and we also stopped in near the town hall for a bit of lunch. Suzy’s off for a wee nap right now as all this baby-carrying is making her sleepy. I’m just glad to have my Internet back. I’m going out tonight tomorrow to watch the All-Blacks take on the Springbocks for the second test. I hope the All-Blacks give them as much of a thrashing as last time because they were phenomenal – might even get into this Rugby lark!

‘Till next time!