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.