For us (and possibly many others), our decision at this point in time probably hinges a lot on the Rebate. Neither of us have bought a new car before, so it feels like quite an investment to make that (along with a few other factors) we could only really justify with the lower price.

Also, how are you liking your new Leaf? I did do a bit of looking into it recently as a potential option.

If you don't mind me asking, did you go for the Long Range package?, and why or why not?

Hmm those are some great points. I really didn't factor in the whole RUC part of it. Hmmm... makes you think a bit. I recently saw the new Prius online and was wondering what they would cost in NZ because they look pretty good - unfortunately they're not bringing them here :(

Hmmm now that you mention it... an electric cat might be a bit less of a commitment (currently weighing up whether we are likely to explore working overseas in the coming years or not before deciding whether or not to get a cat).

The grindy days are the worst :( especially when they come earlier in the week.

Same here. Though for me it's been a bit of an unproductive week.

Had a couple of pieces of work that were tying up a lot of my time recently, and I've sort of been chugging along for the last week, slowly trying to clear my backlog.

Hmm, yeah makes you start thinking. We've been thinking that our next cat will be an electric car - but we've put it off for now as we don't really drive a lot at the moment, and we've had a lot of expenses recently with a house and all that.

Maybe we should bring it forward...maybe.

Fingers crossed you start feeling better soon :)

Seems you may have paid for those leads one way or the other :(

Yeah, I've had a pretty toxic manager before that used to constantly be onto you about what you were doing, what you had done etc, and its a really nice change to work with someone that trusts you to do what you do.

Took a bit of getting used to it - not hearing from your manager all day, and them being entirely fine with it.

Not really forced or anything, though my manager has said it would be nice to see me every once in a while :) Noones really fussed if we can't make it in though.

My partner recently started working for the same company (in a different department), and her Team comes together once a week, so I thought I'd just come in on the same day. Also, my cars a whole lot more fuel efficient than hers as well (but is a manual so she can't drive it), so in the end it seems to end up working out alright.

Made it into work for the weekly pilgrimage.

I wonder if the other banks will follow?

Ahh thats good to hear :) Thank you for that.

Sounds good :)

I do recall someone mentioning a hard prune back to me sometime ago. Hopefully the Auckland temps mean they won't have any problems :)

A little big of digging on the first setup then I assume? Don't really have any space left over to add any additional.

We're getting some heatpumps installed later this week, and planned to have a couple of the outdoor units mounted to the walls due to lack of space.

I suddenly came to the thought of "would they be too loud from inside the house with their humming", and was wondering if anyones had any experience?

We are getting the Mitsubishi AP series, and the house is 200mm Masonry block on the downstairs, and Brick Veneer on the upstairs (Not too sure which of the two they will be mounted to).

Oh really!? That's actually really good to hear haha. Might need to get started on getting the garden ready a bit faster then :)

Do you have a few peppers? What do you do to them during the winter? I heard they will stay dormant, but not too sure if that would be the case with no sun?

Huh thats quite interesting. Would it work for beds that already have soil upto the top?

Brrrrr just a bit of a Fibre Rant so that I don't blow lol.

Been playing phone tag with Chorus and the ISP this morning. Was getting nowhere with the ISP over the last few weeks, so called Chorus directly today, and they have me a whole bunch of nothing saying they are waiting on UCG to redo a design plan, and that they can't chase them up during this stage, and that contacting my ISP would be the best bet.

Called the ISP straight after, and of course, predictably they just go off the notes they get from Chorus, and say they can't do any chasing.

I can't prove it of course, but I really think the techs that came to scope the site didn't want to do the job, so they've made up some excuse.

The notes from Chorus apparantly state that the job was originally logged as an SDU - which doesn't make sense as why would they go through a consents process with our neighbors for a SDU installation (we had confirmation the process has begun and later on that it had ended)? (and we had raised it as an MDU installation). Tried calling them out on that, and no real answer for it.

So apparantly we're basically restarting the whole process, this time "correctly" as an MDU 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

In the peak winter months, the beds unfortunately get no direct sunlight throughout the day :(

But definitely promising what you say :) Hopefully we'll get a bit of a harvest going along this year through spring and summer :)