How to spend a holiday

I'm on holiday for a week - which is going to be interrupted by a course in Auckland (at the other end of the country for those who don't know our geography) which will take four hours, but will cost me an entire day tomorrow. I'm going to take next Monday off in lieu.
The course was an afterthought: I'd been due to go on holiday for a few weeks, but the course notice arrived in my email last week - about Thursday, I think - and foolishly, instead of ignoring it, I showed it to my colleague (my de facto boss) and within a zippity doo of an hour I was booked to go to Auckland and had someone available to pick me up at the airport, transport me to the course site, and bring me back again. (A free early evening meal is now being thrown in as well, so I can't complain.)
As to the holiday, I've now had two days of it, and yesterday wasn't too bad weather-wise, although it got very cold in the afternoon. My wife and I got up early and loaded up the van with accumulated rubbish (accumulated and smelly) and headed out to the tip. The dog came too and was not impressed at being kept in the vehicle while I unloaded it. Frantic was the attitude he assumed.
Then we went and picked up a trailerload of soil/compost from 'Designer Trees' and rejoiced in the fact that the trailer was thrown in for free...for an hour. Back home, and over the next hour we slaved away at emptying the trailer's contents into a couple of our raised gardens. That's hard work when you haven't done it for a while.
While it was still fine we went down to the nearly new Bunning's Warehouse (my first trip - it looks almost identical to Mitre 10 to my jaded mind) and bought some items for the garden. But by the time we got home the weather was turning off rapidly, and none of the plants have made it into the garden yet.
Today's plan was to replace some of the glass in the glasshouse. We measured up, and my wife had some thoughts about perhaps it would be more economical to replace some of the glass with a firm plastic, so that required another trip to Bunning's where we found the sort of thing we needed. We also got some glass for the missing panes out of the roof - the glasshouse had suffered quite a bit of damage in the terrific wind that we had a few days after Christchurch had its awful earthquake.
But today the weather wasn't going to give us any clemency whatsoever, and most of the glass replacement was done in the freezing cold, or with snowflakes drifting down onto us. We got the roof sorted but nothing else at this stage. I spent the other part of the day inside, getting warm again, and avoiding wasting my time looking at sites like those called acne treatments reviewed or how to gain a six-pack in three minutes a day, and worked hard at getting notes typed up for the Varsity course I'm doing. I had to tell myself severely that I wasn't allowed to do any music writing today; the course has been suffering a bit of late because of that.
So I guess you could call it successful, in spite of the weather. I had been hoping for lovely sunny days over this week, but it doesn't look as though my hope is going to be met. Pooh.