Having ringed her tail a few weeks back, we drove through our gate to find a tail-less Poppy skipping about the home paddock. As we got closer to the paddock, we were greeted by the surreal sight of Poppy staring through a gate from which her now-detached tail was drooping.
The headquarters for a well-known house moving company is in area where we live. By that I mean a company that moves house rather than the stuff inside houses. Occasionally, as happened this morning, my dawn commute is temporarily halted by a late finishing house move (as they tend to do such things at night when the roads are quiet). This is what it looks like when two halves of a house pass within feet of your car at about 40kph.
I haven’t written much here lately so what follows is a rough visual timeline (one picture for every 2½ days) of some of the things we have been up to.
1. Standing outside the garage wondering about which little patch of chaos to tackle next.
2. Joining the dog on the couch in the garage with a cup of tea, knowing the chaos can wait.
3. Worrying that I’ll never mow the steep back garden without injuring myself.
4. Spending a chilly early evening zeroing my new pest neutraliser.
5. Collecting firewood, stacking firewood, chopping kindling and bagging kindling.
6. Popping over to the neighbours for a few hours messing around in Jeeps.
7. Fixing windows for the tenants.
8. Buying SWMBO the nice shiny red sports car she’s always wanted.
9. Flying to Sydney and back in 24hrs for 1 sleep, 2 meals, 3 meetings, 6 taxi rides & an interrogation at Customs at 3 a.m.
10. Learning from my mate Johnny how to dig post holes, widen a gateway and string No.8 wire.
11. Chuckling at doing a little light gardening Kiwi-style i.e. with a big blue tractor.
12. Wondering (repeatedly in this very rainy winter) if our access road will flood.
13. Taking a family time out to help our eldest move out to a house with new friends.
14. Collecting and stacking more firewood, chopping and bagging more kindling.
15. Working with my youngest to build a new, wider gate for the new, wider gateway.
16. Sharing the satisfaction of a job well done – and a gate that fits!
17. Remembering to go to the day job that (mostly) pays the bills.
18. Admiring the decorating prowess of SWMBO (and assembling some furniture).
19. Rescuing a sadly fatally traumatised birds from the woodburner flue.
20. Sampling a taste of the old country.
21. Relishing a homemade egg and bacon muffin containing our first home laid egg.
22. Assisting Johnny move his flood-bound flock to greener, drier pastures.
23. Knocking myself out in the basement and bleeding a lot.
24. Making time with SWMBO to continue running our youth group – like when dissecting pigs’ eyes!
25. Prepping the rentals for letting.
26. Re-enacting ‘Fahrenheit 451′ with the kids’ old school work.
27. Researching local history and finding that valley floods (No. 12) are par for the course.
28. Retiring old power tools and buying their replacements.
29. Buying a car – and then selling it again (long story).
30. And revelling in the daily beauty of views, skies and rainbows (more of which soon).
One of the attractions of moving to a smallholding is being able to keep animals. While we have no desire – and are far too lazy – to be self-sufficient, we are keen to build up our husbandry skills, get involved in the local farming community and know a bit more about the provenance of our meat & eggs.
Oddly enough, it was ‘Harriet’ the hedgehog who greeted us on our first morning on the smallholding. When she wasn’t bustling her way around the back garden, she’d retire to the large, over-grown rosemary bush where, I suspect, she continues to live.
Meanwhile, we prepared to bring our first livestock home and, as SWMBO has wanted to keep chickens since forever, this entailed building up a chicken coop we bought online. After Maisie and I had completed that job, I fenced off a portion of the home paddock to provide an enclosed run for the much-mooted chickens.
A week or so later, the local A&P (agricultural and pastoral) society’s showgrounds hosted the annual Auckland Poultry Show and we went along to have a look-see. I have to say that I wasn’t aware that so many people were so passionate about breeding, raising and showing poultry and game birds and we were staggered by the variety of fowl on show.
Beyond the showing cages, we found a sale room full of poultry for purchase and spent an hour or so wandering up and down the aisles, nodding sagely and trying to look like we knew what we were looking for.
Though we had already made tentative arrangements to start with some chicks later in the spring, we were keen to do all we could to build up our bird husbandry skills and we left the show with three mature laying birds and a scrawny-looking Silkie rooster packed into the back of the car.
Since then, the chooks have settled in well and starting to lay the occasional egg, with yesterday seeing the height of production thus far when Wendy returned from chook duties with three clutched in her hand.
We are blessed to have our good friend Johnny and his family as neighbours. Johnny has lived on his farm all his life and his willingness to share his knowledge and help us in a 101 way has blown us away. Whether it has been a cooked meal on the day we moved in, the ‘permanent loan’ of a chainsaw or hours of hard labour to get a job done, Johnny and his family have never once been anything other than a blessing.
After a five and a half month hiatus, here’s the first in a number of update posts that will hopefully go someway to explaining why blogging took a back seat for a while.
The short story is this: we moved.
The longer story is that, after 6 years, we have shifted from our first Kiwi home, a timber house on a quarter acre section on the edge of a township to our new place, a brick home with granny flat and separate cottage on 4 acres set in rural farmland.
First came the dreaded packing…
…and more packing…
..until it seemed like we’d never be finished with the never-ending boxes and brown tape.
The big day arrived and with it heaps of friends to help us and the movers get our stuff shifted to the new place. After a day of hard labour and laughs – not to mention a frustrating and expensive wait for keys – we managed to get everything from the old house to the new place, just in time for me to snap the last of the day disappearing over the coastal forest and into the Tasman.
With SWMBO out at a school meeting, the eldest out with friends and the middle two at dance rehearsals, it was just me and the youngest at home tonight. Eschewing the usual drivel on the TV, we settled down to watch Radar’s Patch which we have on loan from the great ‘free to borrow’ selection at our local library.
The show, which won Best Information/Lifestyle Programme at the 2010 Qantas Film and Television Awards, follows Te Radar‘s humourous but informative attempt to live sustainably on a typical Kiwi quarter-acre section using methods he picks up from those he visits during the show. As the house and section is just a few kilometres from our house, we enjoyed some quality couch time watching a few episodes and spotting local landmarks.
Halfway through episode five, as Radar is filmed enjoying the local Santa Parade that rumbles down our High Road every December, we each did an open-mouthed double-take. We reversed the DVD and played it again and, sure enough, there with her friends yelling ‘Merry Christmas’ from the church float, is the same girl sitting next to me!
A great way to end a lovely ‘dad and daughter’ evening.
Through the love and generosity of good friends, we have been blessed to be able to spend the last few days in their family bach on the Hibiscus Coast. In the spirit of many a Kiwi holiday home, it is only 45 minutes away from where we live but just 100m from a great beach, so the delightfully quirky (no two doors the same width) and slightly confusing (three levels in two and a half storeys) 1960s bach made a lovely place for a long weekend of relaxation and fun before I headed back to the office this morning.
The bach was a testament to decades of a loving family life lived well together and was full of charming period artefacts like the bakelite Philco valve radio and the 1970s vacuum cleaner, not to mention the carefully labelled family albums and wonderful EktaChrome slides, complete with viewer.
For the family, it has meant long sunny days at the beach with a bag full of books and sunblock, Sunday morning devotions together before a long walk on the beach to enjoy cappuccinos and juice at a cafe and leisurely stroll home through the tide pools and sand.
It also provided a great opportunity for us to catch up with friends like the Smiffs and funkypancake & family, recently returned from Blighty and bearing large quantities of watermelon and cookies, which were consumed with lashings of tea and soft drinks.
For all that, most of all, it was a great time for the younger members of the family to enjoy the very best of what the Kiwi way of life has to offer – fun in the sun, friends over for sleepovers, lazy days, takeaway dinners, kite flying, card games, jigsaws and crosswords, warm nights in creaky wooden baches – and the chance to simply smile and be happy!
On Wednesday, I spent an enjoyable few hours cycling the North West Cycle Route end-to-end and back again shadowing, as I did, part of the route I commute along to my office. Along the way, I met and chatted to a few folks and I enjoyed getting new perspectives on the journey.
Graffiti in Point Chevalier
Newton signage…with my office building in the distance.
Landscaping between Bond Street and St Lukes Road.
Heading north from Traherne Island to Rosebank Road.
Recycled hoarding in Kingsland garden nr. St Lukes Road.
Heading south across Henderson Creek behind a companionable Doctor. As I rode with her and her family, we discussed sustainability, her doctoral research exploring healthy transport policy and legal aspects of liability in commissioning local infrastructure. Always interesting to talk to others on their travels – something I can’t do commuting in my car along the same route.
Rider’s eye view.
Having booked a couple of weeks off, we had hoped for a relatively relaxed Christmas. We had a great Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, spending them with my friend John, Sean and John and their families respectively, however a few family dramas both here and in the UK took some of the shine off. That said, I’m trying to take an even more positive stance this year, so I’m sure it’s onwards and upwards from here.
Last Thursday, feeling a little bloated from all the festive food, I joined my friend John and his two lads for a day-long tramp in the Coromandel. Due to my admitted lack of fitness, we took a few hours climbing up the track to the Pinnacles (above) and then dropped down to where the hydro line crosses the Kauaeranga River. From here, we left the track and went bush or, to be more accurate, we went gorge.
We spent the next five hours working our way down the Kauaeranga Gorge and in doing so, we got a workout that I needed three days to recover from. We climbed down old kauri dams, walked over the endless riverstone-strewn riverbed, clambered and slithered down rapids, leapt off rocks into cold dark pools and swam the river between towering stone walls hundreds of feet high, using our ruscacs as floatation aids. It was a fantastic guys’ day out with John and I working with the lads to keep safe whilst experiencing the wonders of creation, testing our nerve, pushing our physical limits and beating the occasional voice in our heads.
After eight hours of continuous and sustained effort in rain, working to keep the contents of our rucsacs dry, make progress down river and keep warm despite repeated swims, it is fair to say that each of us was tired as we walked back into the Kauaeranga Road End Car Park. Thirty minutes later, dried off and in clean clothes, we tucked into fried chicken and fizzy drinks in Thames to refuel and warm up before the drive home.
After a great New Year’s Eve evening with friends on their block and an equally lazy New Year’s Day, I decided that I really needed to get myself motivated and do a few things around the house. So far, this week’s labours have centred around tidying up and creating more storage in our workshop/laundry. Measurements in hand, we took a trip to the local big box DIY store and grabbed a set of bolt-less shelves that have more than doubled the effective storage space in the workshop, leaving the workbench and the space under it clear and useable.
Our Jack Russell cross Abbie and her stone deaf best mate white cat Olive sleep together in the workshop. This being the case, I bough an extra sheet of 10mm MDF and used a bit of jigsaw-pokery to create new sleeping quarters for them.
Rooting amongst some of my old bike stuff in the shed, I was pleased to find my long lost Gerber multi-tool, lurking at the bottom of a box of bits. I bought this great little tool on a wet and horrible day in Tenby (Wales) whilst competing in an off-roading competition years back. I spent a good 40 minutes cleaning and oiling it and rewarded myself with a nice, deep cut to my finger with the serrated knife, which Robyn helped me apply three surface-stitches to in an effort to staunch the bleeding.
In that funny way things link up, during the tramp I mentioned to John that I was enjoying reading Bear Gryll’s autobiography, Mud, Sweat and Tears (a Christmas gift from my ladies) and John said that he had a great Bear Grylls-branded bush knife that he got from the US. It turns out that these are also made by Gerber!
Having been stored next to the old pet bed, my Brompton was covered in dust, fluff and accumulated animal hair. This afternoon’s job was to clean the bike, check the tyre pressures and check the gears and brakes, ready for some summer rides in order to try and get a little fitter and trimmer.
That done, SWMBO and I tackled a bit of upkeep around the section, mowing and weed-eating until things looked tidier and now, with the smell of curry drifting from the kitchen, I’m off to investigate!
