> So...how was everyone else's Easter?

The Friday and Monday are public holidays here, and a lot of employers give you the Thursday too. I was expecting I'd have to work right through, but I was pleasantly surprised to get Friday, Saturday and Sunday off.

I spent Friday catching up on sleep, watching Disney videos and walking along the beach. On Saturday I went to the zoo, went to the mall, went to a movie, and did boring stuff like housework.

On Sunday I drove up to the northwest coast and went to a thermal pool complex which I hadn't been to for a long time. It's kind of scummy (way out in the sticks, surrounded by cows) and I wouldn't take visitors there, but it redeems itself by having a *terrific* waterslide with lots of high speed twists and turns, about five storeys high, which is a really great ride.

After a couple of hours at the pools, I went on a small-boat cruise of the rivers all around there and out to the Kaipara Harbour on the west coast, where I had never been before. This harbour has over 3000 km of coastline. It rained the whole time, which gave the mangrove and rainforest-fringed muddy swampy rivers quite a ... er ... muddy, swampy atmosphere. It looked like there should have been alligators. The commentary was quite funny, because there isn't a lot of *very* interesting stuff to mention. We would go past a sand dredging area with huge hills of sand on the riverbanks and some sand dredgers moored alongside, and the guy would be saying "And over on our left, you can see some ... sand dredgers ... which take part in ... sand dredging ... which is, as many people don't realise, one of the, uh, ... things they do here. Those hills you can see are hills of sand, dredged up by the sand dredgers." It was great. I loved it. I also learned many fascinating facts about eels during this trip, none of which I wanted to know.

After seeing a new bit of the country, I went out to an Indian restaurant for dinner. The waiter was about eleven years old (really). He was very good.

Today (Monday) I dropped in to Coastguard to talk to somebody about some things. My current job has required me to put my Coastguard involvement on hold temporarily, and I miss it a lot. When I got there, there was a huge thing going on involving multiple helicopters and boats. I overheard radioed instructions to a boat that they were to proceed to a particular area and look for, quote, "the rest of" the body, which temporarily cured me of nostalgia and made me quite look forward to my current mind-numbingly boring job.

After that, I went to my current mind-numbingly boring job and stayed there until 11.30 pm, when I got home and wrote this.

Brunnen-"likes the idea of three day weekends"G