Creepy crawlies

Urgggghhhhhhh!

Warning!!!
This post is not for the squeamish!
We went to Kiwanis bush yesterday afternoon for a walk. patrick had been wanting to take us there for ages to show us some of the bugs he found with the one day school. We did find several interesting bugs. Also live and dead Kauri snails (one is pictured being held by Eric).
Tonight we have had heavy rain after daytime mugginess and temps of 29C.
Tonight I cannot sleep and was having a post-midnight surf when a white-tailed spider came hunting over the computer table. For those not familiar with these beasts, they are one of the few dangerous animals that NZ possesses, and believe it or not are not native to this country. Their bite can become inflamed in some people and cause severe swelling. There is some debate in medical circles about just how toxic they are. There was no debate in my mind tonight, we have uncovered quite a few of these guys during our recent changes and they get hunted down and killed on sight. I took a few pictures before squashing this guy, i am a biologist after all!
If you ask really nicely, I will post up a picture of the meaty centipede that I have pickled in gin.
Oh the suspense ... Blogger is being awkward and won't let me load up the pictures, you will have to wait until tomorrow.

Summer Daze

There was going to be a long post here all about what we have been doing, Mrs Chicken's new brood (see picture), eel fishing and star-gazing at night, plus the answer to last posts competition (=30) .....

.... the post was written taking about 1/2 an hour. I had added the pictures an went to wash-up while they loaded up. At which point, Stuart told Patrick to turn off the lap-top. Patrick did this by simply removing the plug from the wall socket, thereby removing power from the 8 appliances connected to that socket which ... you've guessed it ... included the main computer with my blog entry on.

Anyway here are the pictures again:

Zepher.

Here he is with Eric.

The latest addition to the menagerie

Just an update on the ark situation. We are now settling in Zepyhr who is an 18 month old german shepherd/ cattledog cross. He arrived last Tuesday from the Whangarei SPCA and has settled in very well. He is pretty calm around most of the other inmates. He gave Mosetse a cautious kiss as they sniffed each other through the wire. Shanya was not going for that and ran off like a hare - a bit surprising as she has been hobbling around the last few weeks making out she has dodgy feet and going for the sympathy vote!

We are training Zephyr to follow all the commands, he does "sit" and "lie" and is working on "heel". "Stay" needs lots of work. I am not really a doggy person, but Zephyr is quite a pleasant hound really. The kiwis keep their dogs outside and we are doing the same which cuts down on some of my major objections, like smelly fur, farting, bad breath and bouncing around in confined spaces.

This is going to be a short entry. One final thing a little pop quiz to see if you have been paying attention. How many domesticated vertebrates are we currently hosting? Answers on an email or in the comments to me. There will be a personalised mention for the winner in the next post.

More views of Wellington

Hope our readers are not getting too sick of the Wellington pictures, because there is another day after this one. For those of you who are following the plot we have been to Te Papa on Thursday and are into Thursday evening when we went to a seafood restaurant in Oriental Parade. Check out the litter free streets and clean beaches. People still drop litter here, but the clean-up is more efficient than in the UK. There are perhaps fewer dogs hanging around in citties and towns, and we hardly ever see dog dirt on the pavement. Now that we have our own hound (who is settling in well and geting to know all the other inmates) we will be scooping ourselves!

Other pictures are from the cable-car going up to the Carter Observatory and Botanic gardens. Eric found a shop selling Dr Pepper and his reverence towards the can, which got pride of place in his shrine, once drunk, was about as religious as I have seen him recently.

Meanwhile Stuart and Patrick discover that no matter how fancy a solar clock is, it does not work when the sun is behind a cloud.

The cable car picture is taken inside the excellent cable-car museum, the seats are placed at quite a steep angle so that they are level as the cable car sits on the steep track.

The final picture is a view towards Oriental Parade from the top of the cable car.

Smile please

Various piccies of us all enjoying ourselves in our own ways from a wet and windy day in Wellington.

Matiu-Soames Island

On the second day we went on a boat trip out to Matiu Soames Island. It was very windy out there and the boat mooring was quite tricky. We saw some of the natives of the island, skinks and wetas do well in the absence of the predators that kill them off on the mainland. The building is the Beehive, NZ's Parliament. Picture taken from our backpacker room. I couldn't get over how the Parliament was fringed by forested hills. Just another reminder that NZ has a very small population and is a very rural place.
The sea view is from Matiu-Soames looking back towards Wellington.

Train to Wellington

Most of these pics are self explanatory. The mountain is Ruapehu, an active volcano in the Tongariro National Park. Seeing it was special for me, because I taught lessons about its last eruption in 1995 to my Year 10's this year, all based on what I had read. It makes it easier to talk about something when you have more experience of it. Now I have my own pictures to add to next year's lesson.
After we passed Ruapehu we followed a river that had cut its way deeply through the rock and made a gorge. Stuart fell asleep at this point!
The train was older and more rattly than I had expected. The views were exceptional, but for a long way the train could only travel at 40km/h which added an extra hour to the 12 hour journey. On the upside, the buffet car was selling decent food and at quite a reasonable price (e.g. chicken curry for $6, a hot drink for $2) we spent a small fortune on refreshments but would have needed a second mortgage to buy the same stuff on a UK train. We could also get off and stretch our legs about 4 times on the journey.

Flight to Auckland

Waiting to take off at Kaitaia Airport. Thumbs up to the people who run this place. It is very small, with 2 commercial flights to Auckland a day, but despite that it was friendly, efficient and saved us a 5 hour plus trip in the car.

The plane seats 19 passengers and almost everyone gets a window seat.

The aerial view is of Kaitaia town. In the foreground is our house. At the back is the bottom part of 90 mile beach and the sand-dunes of Ahhipara.

Summer holiday

We are back from our summer holiday in Wellington and readjusting to the rural life once more. Anyone would think we had been away for weeks. In fact we flew from Kaitaia Airport on Monday afternoon and arrived back on Saturday lunch-time.

That is not to say that we did not pack in a lot of stuff. For starters we went on loads of different btypes of transport: plane to Auckland, train to Wellington, boat out to Matiu-Soames Island, bus to the airport, taxi back from a restaurant, cable-car up to the Botanic Gardens, Ute back from the airport, on foot around the place. We spent quite a lot of time discussing Kayaks, but did not actualy venture out into the harbour in one.

We can see why they call it windy wellington - 2 out of 3 full days, it was very windy. It was also cloudy and not really warm enough to be going round in T-shirt and shorts. It certainly felt good to get back to the hot sun of Kaitaia yesterday.

Our accommodation was the Backpackers next to the railway station. Very convenient location for a family obsessed with modes of transport. We could not actually see the trains because our room was facing the front of the station. We could hear them though. We did get good views of the big container boats in the harbour and also of the inter-island ferries that go to South Island.

The room was a dormitory with 3 double bunks in it. En-suite bathroom with shower and toilet. Chantelle cunningly converted the shower into a bath by making a plug out of a drink bottle top, so we had an indoor bath. What luxury! It was a little bit awkward as we had a stranger in the room one night. He was a pleasant enough guy on a farming exchange from Canada and he was no trouble, the boys liked him. After that we asked that the bed be blocked, because the next person could be dodgy for all we knew. Socially it was an odd place. All these young back-packers doing their world tours but all so intense and insular. I had expected that people would be more open to talking. Perhaps that happens more in smaller places than the one we stayed in.

Highlights for me were seeing red-crowned parakeet on Matiu Soames Island, seeing the snow-capped peak of Ruapehu from the train, seeing genuine toe-toe in National park and seeing how different it was from pampas grass. I also enjoyed the genetics exhibition at Te Papa and the talk on the stars in the Carter observatory.

Stuart and Patrick seemed to particularly like going on a climbing wall at the quay. I will have to post again for Chantelle and Eric's favourite bits.

I will stick up some pics now and then add some more later as it takes quite a while to do each batch.

Summer Days

We have been having a lazyish time, getting up late and pottering around for the day.
Not a lot of news really, we all went to Whangarei for the sales on Tuesday. The sales bit was the huge retail park with the largest Warehouse in New Zealand and a whole load of other great big sheds. We picked up various bits and bobs.
We also visited the Whangarei Fernery which was a haven of peace and tranquility by comparison. It has been built by various local groups and was totally free to visit. Lots of different fern species, plus another couple of houses for lilies and even a very arid cactus room.
Chantelle and Eric and Stuart went again today to visit the SPCA with a view to getting a dog. We have reserved a German Shepherd cross called Zephyr. He looks really big in this photo, but actually he isn't .

New Year's Day Pictures

New Year's Day

It is now 2006. New Year's Day passed off without major event. We did very little today, pottering about. In the afternoon, the boys were insisting on going out somehere and it was proving very difficult to agree on where we should go. That is becoming more common now as all 5 of us have very different and strong opinions on where we should go! I would be interested to know how other families resolve this one. We ended up deciding not to go anywhere apart from our own dam, where we had a swim for the first time.

Access to the dam is a bid muddy and yucky so we first knocked up a little jetty. It is a bit of a bodge job, but I reckon that the ducks will like it. The water in the dam is deep and dirty, so although the swim was refreshing, you needed a shower afterwards because you came out covered with weed.

For tea we had 2 of the ducklings that we have been rearing for the last 8 weeks. They were very tasty, but it did feel very different to be eating something that we had had around the house for so long. It brought out some strong emotions amongst the diners. Either some of us will become vegetarians or we will become less sensitised.

We would like to wish all our international readers a happy new year. Now that we have clustrmaps at the bottom of the page, we can see who is logging on to read our page, or rather from where they are logging on. We have a regular reader in Eastern Australia and people in the US who have logged on. Leave messages folks!

Christmas Day photos

Christmas Day

With all the leisure time available now that we are on holiday, I could attempt to update the blog more than my customary once per week.

We have experienced our first Kiwi Christmas and had a pleasant day. It was very different to last years. Far less sociable, steak and swimming would sum up the main differences. Church was a lot quieter than usual, which was a surprise as many catholics make a special effort to turn up only on Christmas Day and at Easter in the UK. Perhaps they all went to the midnight mass. Father Pat gave a good sermon on the differences that the birth of Jesus has made in the world.

We had made the boys wait until after church before they opened their presents, much to their dismay. Lots of talk about "delayed gratification" was met with protests, all to no avail. The presents went down well and the surprise trip to Wellington was well received. Chantelle had made booklets giving a detailed itinerary. The boys have been studying times of arrival and departure and discussing them.

After that we went for a swim in the Mangamuka Gorge. We found a flat field with access to a cooling swimming hole and we all had a dip. Even Mum! We were disappointed at the amount of discarded food lying about which made it feel more like England than NZ, but apparently there is an element here that thinks nothing of chucking their bottles and cans out in a pile after their feed.

Back home to lounge out in the garden, eat steak for tea, have a bush bath etc. The TV did not look too promising, but I found 2 good films "Lucky Break" with James Nesbitt and a real cracker called The Stationmaster - American, minimal dialogue, very lttle plot, but very well observed.

Chantelle had spent the day making and receiving phone calls from the UK. I tried making mine on Boxing Day but only made contact with Dominic. Mum and Dad rang up at midnight on Christmas Day. I'll try and catch the rest of you guys at Clare's party.

Pictures

Bush walks and baths

We are all on holiday now and the anticipation for Christmas is steadily rising. The boys are worried that They are not going to get any christmas presents and keep on urging us to go into town to get it "sorted out". As if we wouldn't give them anything!

We spent last Saturday finishing off our bath. Over here many people living with unusual (by European standards) water supplies, do not have a bath in the house. we have missed having a long hot soak. After some days it is just what you need. So we researched the possibilities and the picture shows the result. A cast iron bath surplus to Paula and Grant's requirements has beeen sunk into the lawn in a secluded corner. The drain goes down the hill. It is currently filled from the hose with cold water and by filling with buckets from the hot water tap. Authentic bush baths are raised off the ground and a fire is lit underneath them, wooden slatting along the base prevents a burnt botty!

Talking of which .... suffice it to say for those of you in the know, that the area is healing nicely but sitting down is a bit painful.

Moving swiftly on, Patrick lost his first tooth and the other fron one is leaning over like a pissed gravstone. The NZ Tooth Fairy took 2 nights to pay up, which we tried to explain was due to its small population and geographical isolation.

I took time off from my parental and patriarchal(?) duties to go for a highly enjoyable bush-walk at Diggers Valley on Sunday. Mein host and guide was Stephan who is the fellow wielding the machete looking like Crocodile Dundee. A small select group of us walked from the farm into the hills above. We followed his water supply line first and then carried on to find the source of the stream. The bush was steep in places and there were several waterfalls to negotiate. Our progress was hindered by a tough vine called supple-jack that is like a triffid, very easy to trip over it. Also the aptly named "bush lawyer" which is a creeper with leaves that have sharp hooks, once entangled by the lawyer, it is difficult to get free! Despite all these obstacles we found the point where the stream started and returned aching all over and wet through.

Christmas greetings to all our readers!!

The week before Christmas

I have enjoyed this week, boys at school and plenty of time for sorting things out. I have actually been into school every day along with many other dedicated teachers who carry on working up until Christmas.

Life on the "farm" carries on, the grass grows and we have been experimenting with using the mower as a brushcutter. If you are careful you can cut down 2 foot high grass. The area round the veggie garden has been done, along with a wide strip going down to the chucks. On the poutry front, I rescued one of the youngest shaver chicks from certain death. It was squawking loudly at dusk from the long grass in the middle field. One of the cats was sat over it, either guarding it or having just injured it. There were no superficial injuries but the bird was unable to perch or even walk much. Eric has taken it under his wing so to speak and it is recovering well.

The ducklings should have gone down to the dam by now because the volume of their liquid faeces is becoming more notieceable by the day on the path around the house. We have taken them down twice, but they have made their way back to the house. They did this the second time because the 2 larger pairs of ducks already living there did not take kindly to the newcomers - even though they were all close rellies! The solution to this dilemma will probably involve a combination of an axe and Xmas presents to duckless folk.

On a more civilised note, some of us went to see the latest Harry Potter at The Swamp Palace last weekend. It was the best one yet, actually better than the book which dragged on for far too long (IMHO).

Pictures included this week are of Eric and his rescue chick, a Tui feeding on the flax in front of the house, and the pea seedlings that Patrick sowed that have popped up this week.

Skools out!

At least it is for Dad, the boys have another 10 days. We had senior prizegiving last night and junior prizegiving today. Then a typical Northland feed that went on for several hours, with farewells for colleagues who are leaving. And although there is still work to do over the holiday, I am not tied to the bells that have ruled my life for the last 9 weeks. Looking forward to having the odd lie-in, to getting my evenings back, spending more quality time with the family, animals and garden.

We had a housewarming bbq last weekend, to thank the many people who have made us so welcome here. We cleaned the house up and got a hot plate from the market. It all went very well, no-one got food poisoning and the weather was kind.

Managed to get the veggie garden by the chickens fenced off at the start of the week. That allowed paddy and me to plant out the pumpkins and beans etc that we had grown in the top garden. Paddy enjoyed sowing peas and watering the veggies.

The other picture is of Eric doing his taiaha practice.