GOLM

Got One Leg Missing.....Cute Kitten grows up to be a Wild Boy.

Bob visits Piha

Beautiful Bob comes to NZ in June. We had a day trip to spectacular Piha Beach.

Winter Wedding

Our friends Scott and Siobhan get married and we rug up for a winter wedding in chilly Waipukarau, near Napier (North Island NZ). We had a ball!

MnM in NZ

It was just lovely to have Mark and Marie visit Auckland in May on their way home from the USA. Hope they come back again another day.

Our new Business -Wilflex Printers Supplies

Thought you might like to see our new business - well not really that new now- we've had it for over a year now.

Here's a photo of the outside with our new ute parked in front.
The Portugese Madeira club nextdoor (to the right as you look at the photo) are our landlords.

The next photo shows about half the factory looking from the office area and the front door. You can see our forklift parked in the middle.

On the left are the bulk containers of ink bases that we use to make screen printing inks from.

This photo shows the storage racks for our ink system. Some premixed colours and lots of pigments that get added to the print past bases to create the full range of colours needed by screen printers.

This photo shows the colour mixing area.

Ray's dad works with him mixing colours and making deliveries all over Sydney.

He opens the factory up early around 7.00am and goes home early to beat the afternoon traffic. Ray starts later and stays later in the day often until 6.00pm.

When I go in I usually just do paper work, creating invoices, printing labels for the buckets, doign the banking stuff like receiving and making payments, doing the reconciliation on Quickbooks which is the accounting software we use. I haven't shown the office area because its just a few desks with a computer, printers and fax machine. if we can be guaranteed a long lease we plan to partition off the office are so we can keep in less dusty and warmer in winter. The factory is like an ice box in winter and you can heat it -it would just be waste since the roller door is always open. Nevertheless its too big to heat anyway so I just sit with a bar heater at my feet when I ahve to do computer work.

Manly View from dad's window

Thought I'd add a familar view. Dad was telling me that the Council has a proposal to build on top of the Surf club. They are going to extend the first floor over that end section you can see there above the toilets as well as build another floor so our wonderful view is going to be really badly obscured if it goes ahead.
There is a chance we can oppose it because they have to ask for community comments and reactions to the proposal. It would really affect the value of the unit as well.

I took some other photos as well to show how much view would be lost if they go ahead. If you see the height of the flagpoles on the club- the next floor would be at least that high so most of our view would be gone. We'd only see a tiny sliver of ocean left of the large palm tree next to the club building. I'm hoping we can oppose it but it would need more than just our objections probably.
They claim they want to build a museum of some kind there but Manly already has one at Manly Gallery.

back on board

Let's get this blog happening. I've set this blog up so all of you who have been invited to join can contribute to the blog as well a read it. Let's start adding news and photos.

This is a recent photo of me with my new phone that takes quite good photos. It's 3.2 mexapixels and has a Carl Zeiss lens- not bad for a phone. The only problem is I don't really like the phone. I am itching to get my hands on one of those new iphones from Apple but my service provider is 3 and they aren't part of the deal with Apple. I would have to switch back to Telstra.

I used a mirror here so I could see what I was taking a photo of.

I've had another haircut since then -just yesterday so its not quite up to date.

This one is of me at my computer in my office at home. As you can see I have a large monitor so I can work on films or photographs easily. It can fit two A4 pages side by side on the one screen.

Next to it is my tablet laptop that the school provides. I chose to trial a tablet so I could explore adding hand written or drawn elements to files. We are supposed to be trialling how we can use it in the classroom as a learning and teaching tool but since I don't have a network point in my classroom and the nearest wireless access point stops at the door of my room it's a bit pointless unless I use it for things other than online activities. I have another monitor for when I use the tablet at school at my desk. Time to get back to work.