Queen's birthday Weekend

Kia ora folks!
We are into another Friday night. Cold last night and the car was reading 4 degrees C this morning as we went to work. It doesn't get much colder than that which is a blessing. Got pretty warm by the afternoon, up to about 18 I think.
Listening to: http://www.georgefm.co.nz/index.html good music to chill out to at the end of the week. I have just finished listening to a comedy on the BBC called Double Science http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/doublescience.shtml It wasn't the best episode but raised a smile.

Chantelle is in Wellington for the weekend. She flew out last night for the second time in a month! Quite the jetsetter. So it is a boys weekend. A long one as well as Monday is Queen's Birthday and the last Bank holiday before Spring.

We had a good ish week. Good weekend last week. Did the usual trip into town on Saturday, or at least Chantelle did with the boys. I made some progress with the sheep race that I am slowly building. We went off to Lee and Irene's for tea and a shoot. Good food and we had a walk round their block in the pitch black looking for possums. In keeping with our recent luck we did not even shoot the gun. Conditions were good. We saw one animal which melted away into the thick bush. More and more I am realsing that shooting possums is not an effective control method.
Some of my pupils have been doing an assessment on the use of a poison called 1080 to control possums. We had a couple of speakers come in to talk to the classes. I have come to the conclusion that 1080 is probably one of the better ways of keeping them controlled.
Anyway it made a change to get out on a Saturday night and stay up late! Sunday morning was church or work. I got out of school at 1pm and it was such a lovely day that I couldn't bear the idea of mooching round at home. Fortunately eric was game for a fish at Aurere so we went off with the hound. It is sucha lovely walk there that I don't reckon I could get sick of it. A reminder of the amazing place we live. The fishing was good too. Eric landed 5 kahawai to my 1, but I lost a few good ones, so I was not complaining. We took them home and put 3 of them on the smoker - very nice. That set me up for the week.
The seniors at school have been doing their practice exams this week so life has been a bit different. Lots of papers to mark this weekend and then lots of reports to write.

Boy news: Eric is off on cadet camp tomorrow apparently having a 40km march? or have I been misinformed. I am hoping that he stays warm enough as he is camping on the beach. On the plus front, he tends to not feel the cold the way I do.
Stuart is goofing through his week. He came to the second meeting of the Kaitaia Chess club on Wednesday and had a few games. He seemed to enjoy it and says he will make it a regular thing.
Paddy doesn't tell us much about what he is doing at school "stuff" is how he normally answers "What have you been doing at school today?". Ask him about neopets and its a different story. He was emailing a girl from his class the other night.

Other news: Everyone is in a tizz because petrol now costs $2.00 a litre. It cost 88cents a litre when we came here 3 1/2 years ago so that is quite a hike. Thursday is world environment day and Nandor Tanczos(?) is going to talk here in Kaitaia about transition towns - the idea that as oil becomes more scarce, we need to plan for a future that will look different but potentially no worse than the one we live in now. If we are peak oil, then the price will climb and climb and transport will change massively - Chantelle will not be nipping down to Wellington on a plane. I won't be driving Eric on a 150km round trip tomorrow etc etc. A lot of it has been on the cards, but economically made sense up until now. I could never get my head around apples going from NZ to the UK to supply the desire for out of season apples. It seems like the UK is ahead of people here on food miles, but we will be catching up. Already food prices are climbing steeply for a number of reasons. Chantelle helps administer the local food bank which provides food parcels for people who cannot afford to eat. The demand is going up and up.
If we can plan for change, put in local food production systems I can see it working. It might be trickier in the UK, in big cities, but as an optimist it could happen. Read Callenbach's Ecotopia for a vision of how the future could look.

Time to go. Ka kite.

Holiday pictures

Its raining here on Friday night and all is quiet. Mostly because Stuart is doing a 40 hour famine and he has committed to not talk for 40 hours. You may not be surprised to hear that sponsorship has been brisk!

I have posted up a few pics from the last holiday. Eric is busy getting the smoker ready to do some eels and you can also see the finished result. Shame you can't taste them as they were delish.

There is another pic of Paddy half way up a climbing wall at ActionWorld.

We have had another action packed week, busy at work. Eric is studying the second world war and is the class expert apparently. Stuart went to the school disco and wowed the audience by doing the robot dance on stage. Paddy has been selling Lego on Trademe to pay for his new bike.

bak 2 skool

Holidays are over and we have been back at school all week.
Illness has been the keyword - we have all been laid low with various ailments, involving headaches, sore shoulders and noise sensitivity.
So the holiday was a quiet affair, with lots of sleeping and reading and recovering. Eric did his ATC parade on Anzac day and we (C and I) went to the town service at 11am rather than the dawn parade. It was a sobering event.

Calamity put a spoke in the wheels of our family day out as well. Eric managed to drop a large log on his foot when we were out being lumberjacks. He and Chan spent the day getting it sorted at hospital - he had an Xray and then had to wait until Friday (from Monday) for the result! Good job it was only a sprain.

So Paddy, Stuart and I went down to Paihia without them. We had lunch at a cafe they had been to with Gma and Gdad Cambridge called Freddy's. Then we went to a circus activity themepark called Action world. You could have a go at tight rope walking, trapeze and there was a massive water slide. They loved it and used up lots of energy.

We had a couple of shooting nights, did some gardening and then started getting ready for school.

Pictures will follow at some point.

Lest We Forget - by Cadet Eric Bryan

25th of April 1915 thousands of Anzacs (Australia new Zealand army core) landed at Gallipolli. That day on the very beach they landed on, they were ambushed by the Turks. Many thousands were killed in action, many died of wounds and some died of diseases in the hot sun. Some men were just over 15 years old. I am in the air-training corps and every 25th of April we do a dawn service and one in the late morning. This is my account of what happened.



We went to HQ the day before at 1 o’clock.We cleaned the hall and set up the beds. At 4 o’clock we went in groups around town for a navigation exercise. That lasted 2 hours and when we returned we were tired and were ready for some easy shoe polishing before a kfc. My shoes were so clean I didn’t need to, so I ironed my shirt. After dinner the president of the RSA (returned services association). She read us a story about the Anzacs. After watching Epic Movie it was finally time for bed at ten past eleven. We woke up at half four in the morning. We had shower and Milos then got into our uniforms. At half five on the 25th of April we marched to the Remembrance Park and paid our respects to those who gave their lives for our freedom.

We were there for an hour, not moving our eyes or body only when commanded to. We stopped for the bugle call "The Last Post” and then went to the RSA for an invited breakfast. We were supposed to go after the RSA members but they were in the bar - as you may have guessed - having whisky at 7 in the morning! So we got to have breakfast first.

After the big breakfast we went back to HQ. Soon it was time for the second service in the Community Centre. There was a clip of all the brave soldiers who died at Gallipolli. After the final service it was time to go home.

And that’s my story of how I, cadet Bryan in Squadron 64, remembered the brave Anzacs 93 years after they fell for their country.