Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Family Time

We are still Geocaching and are now onto about our 15th find.
In fact all the family are enjoying it.

Stealth movement is required at some sites as you do not want 'muggles' (none geocaching people) to know what you are doing.
This is important as you do not want people tampering with caches and stealing or destroying them!

Sometimes you need to just act normal, well as best as is humanly possible......

just chillaxing in the sun and wind
Just watching the planes come in!
Waiting for people to pay more attention to the planes than what we are doing!

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Work Reunion

10 years, oh my, is it really 10 years?
Must be we have a 10 year old!

10 years ago Auckland Hospital moved to a new building and we were there, well I was on maternity leave but I knew it was happening!
So much has happened since then.

A reunion was called for and we gladly attended this past weekend.
Lovely to catch up with people you knew and find out what everyone is doing.
Amusing to hear people comment on how big the boys have got! Like they still expected them to be babes in arms!

Quick tour of the operating theatres was called for even though we have been there many times and I did actually work there for a few weeks at one stage!
But the boys enjoyed dressing up in protective clothing so we could go inside the theatres.

well maybe not everyone was impressed with getting dressed up!
but others made up for it with their enthusiasm!
They enjoyed seeing inside a theatre, talking non stop about what took place in there etc.
Although think we may have sparked some career ideas for them....?

budding surgeons in the making?
Better start that college fund really soon!

Friday, October 18, 2013

Hide and Seek

I thought this would be a great game to play with the boys.
However as you all know the boys are now 8 & 10 years old so even though they play this game well I thought they might like it if I upp'd the anti a little?
Maybe in the form of us trying to seek something that was already hidden?
Of course in this day and age of technology then there has to be some techno part to it and so that is why I decided it was time for us to get into Geocaching.


What is that I hear you cry....?
It is in simple terms a game of hide and seek that you use a GPS to find an item hidden by someone else in the town/country/world using coordinates.
There is a whole website dedicated to Geocaching and once you get started it is addictive!!

You can download an app onto your mobile phone and Bob's your uncle you are off!
You look at the map of where you are, locate a cache (item) to find and using the coordinates go off and try to find it.
It is usually a canister of some description that can range in size from a small pill box up to a 10 litre bucket!



However the whole purpose is to do it as discretely as possible so no one knows what you are doing as the cache needs to be found and then left as discovered ready for the next person to find.
You do however log on the paper inside the canister that you were there and also log it on the website so you can keep track of ones you have discovered already.

When you first look at the map on the website, it is enough to make you fall off your seat, there are hidden caches everywhere and I literally mean everywhere, all over the world to be more precise!
There are 12 that I can find that are within 2 miles walking distance of our house!
Stuck in a bush, up a tree, under a board walk even magnitised to a chair in a public place.

But it is just a fence?
Wrong! There's a geocache
The boys have already been checking out if there are any near Grandma's House, near the beach where we spend a lot of our summer time and near their school, although I have told them that they can not search for them without me as they need the coordinates and the GPS on my phone to assist them, however give it a few years and I can probably send them off for the afternoon with a phone and a list and they would happily entertain themselves around the city!

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Tournament Time

There have been quite a few judo tournaments lately and Ben has been attending them all.
Sadly he has not been getting medals so he realised he had to work a little harder.

At the last one he did just that.....and walked away with a gold medal.


Well done Ben very proud of you.