On the beach

Middle of winter so we went for a walk on the beach nearest to our house at Waipapakauri. It was a sunny day with astron onshore wind. Paddy is coming down with a cold so he was well wrapped up. Unusually for him he did not go in the water!

We like walking along the beach for you never know what is going to show up. This time we found several washed up logs covered in strange shell fish. Turns out they are goose barnacles. They have a long foot that atttaches to the log and a shelled part that the mouth parts come out of the filter the water. The whole colony on this log will probably die because they are right on the high water mark and the log was too big to carry down to the water. Sad really, must have been washed up by the storm.

The last pic shows Chantelle and I scrubbed up and in our finest for the Kaitaia college 2011 Cabaret. This is the social night of the year for our senior students. A NZ version of an American prom. The girls spend weeks choosing ball gowns and the boys make an effort too. They all look lovely and have a very civilised evening. The senior council of Year 13 students do all the organisation and turn the school hall into a very different space from what it is normally. This year they suspended satin fabric from the ceiling to completely cover it. Very glamorous.
There was a 3 course sit down meal with a pretty good band from Whangarei playing. Folllowed by a bit of a dance. Prom king and queen. photos in various studios. All very lovely. Chantelle and I went along to be an adult presence, but I saw nothing unpleasant all evening.
Most school cabarets pass like this. The trouble normally happens at the after-cab - a private ticket only party put on by a brave parent. Everyone - well most of the youngsters - get changed into something more relaxed and then go to the after-cab. The cab itself is strictly alcohol and drug-free. The after-cab operates by whatever rules the organisers decide on. An Auckland after cab resulted in the death of a pupil earlier this year. By all accounts our after-cab passed off without major incident.

 

 

 

 

Longlining 1

 

 

 

 

Long lining 2

 

 

 

 

Eric's Sixteenth

 

 

 

 

Eric was 16 on Wednesday. It was a school day and he went to ATC in the evening.
He really liked the cake that Chantelle made him. It took her quite a while to make the 64 squares of the chess board.
Eric also enjoyed a rather large steak for his tea. It was so large that he had to finish it off for breakfast. Happy birthday Eric!

Winter

It has been a while!
Life has gotten pretty busy with one thing and another. Plus the weather has turned all wet and wintry so not getting out to take piccies as much.
This is the season for planting trees. Paddy is pictured below next to a newly planted kauri. These are a totemic tree of this area. They used to form huge forests of long-lived massive trees. The Europeans cut most of them for timber in the last couple of hundred years and now there are only small ones or a few that were left alone in inaccessible places. So we are doing our small bit to add a few Kauri back to the land.
The veggies are a selection of what we are getting over the winter. carrots did well. We have even got a few mutant white coloured ones! They have been grown from seed collected on our own land. The carrots flower in their second year of growth (they are biennial) I suspect that some of the flowers pick up some wild carrot pollen as they are flowering at the same time. The white carrots are thinner than the orange ones and are a bit woody like an old parsnip, so not a particularly useful cross.
The capsicum are off our perennial plants! I did not know that peppers could carry on growing through the winter, but these plants survived and have fruited again this summer. they are showing no signs of dying out over the winter so I shall leave them again. It is one of the pleasures of having less pressure of space in that I can leave veggies for longer than I would have done on an allotment where the peer pressure was to be "tidy".

The other picture shows the veggy plot in winter mode. it looks pretty sodden and dormant right now. The heavy clay soil is saturated. i am resisting the urge to constantly weed because a cover of weed helps to dry the soil and preserves its structure better than having nothing. It will be a small job to turn it in the spring ( he says optimistically!).

Family are all doing well here.
Best wishes to UK family and Dad over the weekend.

 

 

 

Shooting and fishing

 

 

 

Citizenship ceremony

Two weeks ago we became New Zealand Citizens. This is a measure of our attachment to this new country that we have come to live in.
The ceremony was held in the Council Offices at Kaikohe.
We had to read an oath of allegiance to the Queen and to promise to obey the laws.
The Mayor, Wayne Brown, officiated in his characteristic laid back fashion. We had waiata (songs) from a little group that included the vocalist from a reknowned local reggae band called 1814!
One of the nicest parts of the whole thing, was listening to peoples' stories about how they came to be in NZ.
Finally there was light refreshments and a chance to mingle. Patrick got to wear Wayne's bling and to have a cheeky picture taken!

 

 

 

Random photos

 

 

 

 

Abseiling photos

At last - I have managed to get some photos back up on Blogger.
The computer is a bit confused still about whether it is running Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Mozilla, but I got these pictures up by using trusty old IE!
More to follow.

 

 

 

 

Trouble with posting

Hi folks
Just a quick note to say that I have been having major problems putting pictures onto the blog over the last few weeks. The problem seems to be that everything changes so constantly that things that used to be compatible no longer are!

We have been trying out different ISPs having been told that Internet Explorer was majorly flawed and that we could have all our worldly savings stolen without us knowing by some computer Phisher. So we tried Mozilla. Then found that sites would not load properly and cookies were disabled. So tried Google Chrome and found that the pictures would not load onto blogger from Picasa. So went back to Mozilla and could not even get into Blogger!

Imagine oneself to be a 19th Century gentleman sitting at his desk writing a letter to his parents back in Mother England. He would have no idea what the writer was talking about in the paragraph above. It is a wonder that anything is compatible with anything else on the net.

Anyway I hae tried to load pictures of Stuart in front of his shed. I have tried several times to load pictures taken last weekend when we all escaped our routine and went to stay at a remote DOC hut down the east coast. We allhad ago at abseiling. Eric and Chantelle did a 100m abseil down a cliff called the Dukes nose. Just looking at the pictures gives me vertigo.

I will try again in the holiday. That kicks off at th end of this week, than goodness. We have two terms of 11 weeks this year to accommodate the world cup finals in Auckland in October. It has been a long slog this term and we are all looking forward to a break.

New car

Here is the car that we bought in Auckland the other week. It is a Nissan Pressage, it seats 7 and drives very comfortably and quietly.
Its fuel economy is better than the Toyota Estima that we traded in for it.
It has a flash dashboard, a weird key that has chip in it so you just have to have the card on you for it to start. The "hand" brake is operated by a foot pedal.
It has pretty low clearance, so we have to be careful on some of the more rustic roads, but apart from that we are pretty happy with it.

 

 

The Shed

Stuart built a shed with his Granddad over the summer. He has well and truly moved in now and so here are some pictures of the finished product. He has called his enterprise "Sinalfx" and has even made a website to show some of his creations.
You can view it here:http://sinalfx.webs.com/
As you can see, Stuart's shed looks a little chaotic, but that is just an illusion. I borrowed tools from it last night and put them back later on. Apparently I had returned them to the wrong places!