Archive for August, 2012

Blessed beyond measure

Thursday, August 30th, 2012

While they hardly do justice to the majesty of the skies and the beauty of the landscape in which we live, I hope that the pictures (just a few of many I have taken recently) will give you some sense of why we feel blessed beyond measure, from sunrise to sunset.

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Even my evening commute provides me with an opportunity to once again to appreciate why many Kiwis claim this land as God’s Own.
 
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Two shakes of a lamb’s tail

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

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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.

(A) Moving house

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

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.

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Happy 21st Birthday Ariella

Monday, August 27th, 2012

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Ariella turned 21 today.  My thoughts are a mess – I’m trying to comprehend where those years have gone but also celebrating Ariella’s life journey so far, from tiny infant to independent young woman.  I’ll share no more – except in the form of a few pictures from a meal Wendy and I just shared with Ariella and her best friend Ariel.

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The less exciting present

The more exciting present

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The present she really wanted

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The medal-winning bestie and the 21 year old

Update Four: Life on the smallholding

Friday, August 24th, 2012

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.

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2. Joining the dog on the couch in the garage with a cup of tea, knowing the chaos can wait.

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3. Worrying that I’ll never mow the steep back garden without injuring myself.

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4. Spending a chilly early evening zeroing my new pest neutraliser.

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5. Collecting firewood, stacking firewood, chopping kindling and bagging kindling.

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6. Popping over to the neighbours for a few hours messing around in Jeeps.

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7. Fixing windows for the tenants.

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8. Buying SWMBO the nice shiny red sports car she’s always wanted.

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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.

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10. Learning from my mate Johnny how to dig post holes, widen a gateway and string No.8 wire.

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11. Chuckling at doing a little light gardening Kiwi-style i.e. with a big blue tractor.

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12. Wondering (repeatedly in this very rainy winter) if our access road will flood.

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13. Taking a family time out to help our eldest move out to a house with new friends.

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14. Collecting  and stacking more firewood, chopping and bagging more kindling.

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15. Working with my youngest to build a new, wider gate for the new, wider gateway.

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16. Sharing the satisfaction of a job well done – and a gate that fits!

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17. Remembering to go to the day job that (mostly) pays the bills.

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18. Admiring the decorating prowess of SWMBO (and assembling some furniture).

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19. Rescuing a sadly fatally traumatised birds from the woodburner flue. 

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20. Sampling a taste of the old country.

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21. Relishing a homemade egg and bacon muffin containing our first home laid egg.

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22. Assisting Johnny move his flood-bound flock to greener, drier pastures.

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23. Knocking myself out in the basement and bleeding a lot.

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24.  Making time with SWMBO to continue running our youth group – like when dissecting pigs’ eyes!

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25. Prepping the rentals for letting.

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26. Re-enacting ‘Fahrenheit 451′ with the kids’  old school work.

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27. Researching local history and finding that valley floods (No. 12) are par for the course.

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28. Retiring old power tools and buying their replacements.

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29. Buying a car – and then selling it again (long story).

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30. And revelling in the daily beauty of views, skies and rainbows (more of which soon).

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Update Three: The House

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2012

We have flicked through the property papers and attended a good many realtor open homes over the last year or two and I was pretty much over the idea of ever finding a house and smallholding that would suit us as a family and that we could afford.

We looked at a place in a nearby township and I asked my friend Kevin, who is an architect, to give me his opinion. While he didn’t actually say ‘don’t buy’, it was clear he had reservations as he outlined the stuff he saw and the potential expenses we might incur.  He also gave me a piece of advice that he always bore in mind when buying a place; namely, you’re buying the vendor’s reason to sell and, if you don’t establish what that is, it can be an expensive mistake.

As we chatted outside the place, he told me we were setting our sights too low. By only looking at places we could afford and not considering other more expensive places we could haggle over and bargain down, we were unlikely to get anywhere close to the kind of place we were looking for.  This turned out to be sage and timely advice.

For a laugh, the next day we went and looked at a millionaire’s mansion with 10 acres and had a hoot imagining ourselves living there with the galleried bedrooms and the kidney shaped swimming pool; the power bill and pool maintenance costs would have seen us bankrupt within a few months.  Even so, I was tired of the whole house-hunting thing and, driving home, I had decided I’d had enough of looking.

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Two days later, SWMBO asked me to go view another property after work. It was the last thing I wanted to do but I begrudgingly agreed.  However, it turned out that the property was close by my friend Johnny’s farm and as we passed his place, turned onto an unmade road, through the gate and up a drive, I has a sense that this place might just be different.

And I was right, it was away from suburbia but close to the school bus route, was one bedroom short but had space to create another, had good land but not too much, was more rural but the commute was still realistic. Over the following weeks and months, we jumped through the usual and some not-so-usual hoops as we slowly but steadily worked our way towards making an offer we could afford and the vendor would accept. 

Built on the side of a hill at the end of a koru-shaped drive, the house overlooks a valley which leads to a small estuary on what is one of the largest harbours in the world.  We found the custom-built house cleverly thought out, well-designed and built with an eye for detail and a quality finish. You can imagine the goosebumps we got when the owner told us that the architect he had commissioned to design the place was our friend Kevin!

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The house is North facing with the rooms and decks laid out to make the best of the day’s sun.  The large roof catches the currently-plentiful rain and routes it into two 5,000 gallon tanks buried beneath the back garden for our water supply.  The windows give us amazing views of the surrounding farmland, fantastic skies and spectacular sunsets.   

Fanning away from the house are three paddocks: a narrow scrub-filled gulley dropping away to a small wetland area, a larger sloping grass paddock and a home paddock just below the house, where we keep our chickens and lamb. Across the drive, we have an acre of wetland reserve, a mini-ecosystem of native trees, plants and fauna bisected by a little brook. 

Halfway up the drive and opposite the wetland area, there is a small one bedroom rental cottage. Imagine our surprise when, on one of our visits, we discovered that we knew the folk renting it!  Sadly, they have moved to housesit for friends so we’re currently in the process of showing the place to a slow trickle of prospective tenants.

Adjacent to the main house is a self-contained one bedroom flat, which will provide space for visiting family and friends.  In between such visits, we will offer it as a home stay for international students or something similar to bring in a little extra income.  

Between the flat and the house is a large double garage or, should I say was, as we had a local builder convert part of the space into a bedsit for our first year uni student daughter, leaving the rest for a workshop and storage space. In fact, storage is one thing we’re not short of, as we’re blessed with two lofts, a wet room, a large basement, an under-deck store/animal shelter and a feed store in the back paddock.

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Update Two: The Animals

Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A couple of weekends back, we climbed aboard a stock trailer behind Johnny’s farm bike (quad) and headed up to the top of his farm to watch him work with his two dogs.  Each day, he and the dogs split off the ewes with newborn lambs from the flock and move them to fresher pasture so as to provide richer feed for the lactating ewes.
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Therefore, it was perhaps inevitable that I return home one evening to find, rather than the usual dog greeting me at the door, an orphaned lamb being fed in the kitchen. Poppy, as she has been named, was abandoned by her Mum (possibly as she was lame in one of her rear legs) and Johnny brought her over for us to bottle-feed and wean.
 
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Three weeks on, Poppy is doing great.  The lameness seems to have been caused by septic arthritis.  After refreshing my subcutaneous injection skills (acquired through legitimate purposes, I assure you), I gave her a shot of antibiotics and the leg has now improved to the point where the lamb is now skipping and gambolling about quite happily.  Johnny also helped me ring her tail to dock it and I got another chance to practice my hypodermic technique with a tetanus shot.
 
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Our existing pets (two cats who came with us from the UK seven years ago, a deaf white cat we were gifted and our Jack Russell/Maltese cross, Abbie) had little trouble adjusting to the smallholding.  For Abbie, the acres of space to explore, the masses of cow pasture mud to roll in and the new livestock to befriend are heaven-sent.  Like Abbie, Olive the deaf cat has become chums with the lamb, sees the smallholding as her very own safari park and has spent hours honing her skink-hunting prowess, dragging many a carcass into the house for proud inspection. As for the other two cats, if there’s a patch of sun on a couch or a recently vacated warm bed, that’s where you’ll find them.
 

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Update One: The Move

Monday, August 20th, 2012

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.

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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…

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…and more packing…

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..until it seemed like we’d never be finished with the never-ending boxes and brown tape.

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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.

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