Friday 28th October

Happy birthday Dominic! If you don't read this I am intending to send you a letter (along with letters to many other folks in the UK!). You will have to be patient as my emails get sent a lot more quickly than my letters.

Well we have had a rollercoaster of a week. We said good bye to Shazza the goat on Saturday as she had been getting progressively worse and was finding it hard to get up. She started scouring and went blind in one eye. Her mate Shanya was upset and stood a few yards away bleating. Mike came along with a gun and put her down. We buried her after shanya had had a chance to sniff at her friend's corpse. I was amazed at how quickly the blowflies moved in! Her rump was swarming with maggots within an hour of death. The flies over here lay live maggots and not eggs, which obviously speeds up the decay process. Makes me a bit nervous about the idea of going to sleep outside! You might wake up with half your arm eaten off!

It being Labour weekend, which is traditionally the start of the outdoor swimming season, I took the boys to the Takahue water hole on Sunday afternoon. It was a lot colder and deeper than it was last year. Shortly after we got back to the car, the heavens opened and we had a downpour.

Monday dawned cloudy and unpromising, typical UK bank holiday weather! It did get better as the day progressed and we went off to Tokerau beach on the East Coast. The boys all went in the surf on their body boards and I had a fish, trying to get the bait out into the surf as far as I could. It was a different way to fish, being battered by the waves and with gannets and terns flying over. I had a couple of bites, but nothing big was on. Apparently the Kahawi were running up the west coast!

On Wednesday Eric performed in his Drama club plays. It was a good night of talent, lots of variety, ranging from Dr Seuss poems, to Orpheus and including some funny little sketches, like the family eating out at a restaurant. Eric's main part was as the huntsman in Snow white and the seven dwarves. He played his part well, especially when he showed the step-mum a real bleeding sheep's heart as proof that he had killed off snow-white. Thanks To Ruth and Stephan for the offal, we might write a book "101 uses for a sheep's heart". The play was a good twist on the traditional story, as Snow-white steals the magic mirror and the dwarves use it to get rich at the horse races.

Until next week then.