Five more sleeps till Santa comes.....

So it’s less than a week to go until our first Kiwi Christmas. For a very pleasant change the weather does seem to be improving and apart from a short downpour whilst the girls swam at a friend’s house today, it has been a dry weekend.

Quick lawn-mowing update – Saturday’s attempt was over 19 minutes and as I did it quite late in the evening I had to finish off with the headlights on. Even though it can get around most of the garden it struggles up very close to fences so I have resorted to the standard kiwi response to anything that the machine can’t reach – I’ve sprayed it with Round-Up which (like domestos) will kill 99.9% of any living thing it touches. I even invested in a backpack sprayer so I can carry 20litres of the stuff around with me as I wander along the fencelines and also deal with the rapidly growing weeds that are cheekily taking root in between the pebbles on the ‘flowerbeds’. I'll give you an update next week to see if one dose has done the business.

Also in the garden is our old rain gauge and our Zimbabwean metal guinea fowl and warthog have finally been given a free run outside – I think that they are enjoying being back in the southern hemisphere.

Chris and Kirsty are spending most evenings out singing with Woven – a small youth choir (which allows oldies in for Christmas) – tonight is about their 8th concert I think. they're had a lot of fun and have even learned to sing Silent Night in Maori. It has given me a chance to clear away my toolbox and a few unpacked boxes from our lounge so at least we can have one room that is relatively ‘normal’. Few a few weeks I been thinking this house is a bit small (it's similar to The Pines), then I remembered that we have a whole huge lounge at the far end of the house that we haven’t used yet for two reasons. Firstly is that it still has 20 odd boxes of packed stuff in it and secondly because we don’t really have any furniture to put into it. Apparently the Boxing Day sales are the place to get all that type of stuff so I can see us slowly moving into the extra room in January.

The hectic round of office parties is upon us at work and as I have to be scrupulously impartial about accepting ‘hospitality’ from our suppliers I think that if I go to all their events I can’t be accused of being biased! I keep having to remember the rules that I am allowed to attend such events but I must not enjoy them! We’ve started a small quiz team that takes part in a regular pub quiz at The Cook – an old and surprisingly popular bar in Hamilton East. On our first foray we came a very creditable second and won $25 of free drinks. Last week we were midfield – probably because we drank the $25 of free drinks – Tomorrow is the Christmas quiz – I’ll keep you posted.

Chris touted her CV around several local schools and has been besieged (almost) with offers to do music related teaching. It looks like Chris will be part time in two primary schools from February – which is a great result and may well lead onto more work. **** UPDATE **** Make that three and a half job offers - just been asked to run singing workshops in Hamilton and Cambridge, and someone else suggested Chris start her own choir!

Christmas isn't Christmas without a tree so off we went to the Tamahere Christmas Tree Farm and sought out a suitable festive addition to our lounge…. It isn’t really a pine tree and the braches are a bit weedy to hold many decorations but it is mounted in a suitably stable tree holder which has been imported from the US – this thing will probably withstand a fully grown tree falling it without breaking so our 5’ tree shouldn’t fall over.

Kirsty’s foot is much better but the horse threw Lana (or Lana fell off) last week and so it was another trip to the medical centre to check that her lethargy was more due to the fact that she is 14 rather than any other injury.

A few weeks ago we were delighted to see a cute little rabbit in the garden. Kirsty even left out her apple core for it. Last week Lana was convinced that there were in face two rabbits and she was right, because yesterday there were definitely 4 babies playing by the shed. Oh dear, looks like they're multiplying! Tonight Chris and Kirsty spotted a hedgehog on the driveway - let's hope it hasn't got any friends and relations!

We’ve been following the blizzards that have hit the UK this weekend and I confess we are a bit jealous that the first chance we had of the girls seeing of a White Christmas will be limited to looking out of the window via a Web-cam at my brother’s house in Kent.

So that about it for another week – we’ll stick on some more about our mundane lives over the festive period.

I've also added a wonderful picture that my Uncle (Geoff) sent us - it is one of a series that I'll be adding in the weeks to come. In case you didn't know we had to leave behind Gerald out 8' wooden giraffe .....

Down to the beach..

Lawn cut in 18:20 on Friday - record to date,,,,

Off to the beach in Saturday to Whangamata (Fangamatar) to stay the night at a friend's beach side house. Lots of narrow, windy and steep roads to get there – its on the east coast at the bottom of the Coromandel peninsula. The beach was superb and we boogie boarded in the Pacific surf. Apparently the population of the town goes up by x20 next week when the rest of the schools finish for Christmas – it was good to enjoy the sunshine and surf without competing against the remainder of New Zealand! Also good to put our Welsh wetsuits and boards to use again. Our visit coincidend with a big surf-rescue competition with 25+ inflatables racing to pick up 'drowning' swimmers....

December already...

It must be getting towards Christmas – the girls have broken up from school already and now have the best part of two months off.

For a few weeks Lana especially has been complaining that there shower here is really weak, so at the weekend I looked into the problem……. All of our water here is collected from our roof gutters and stored in a 25,000 litre tank that sits in the garden. It is then pumped through a very fine filter (1/1000 of 1 mm) and fed to the household taps. I found two problems, firstly the water filter desperately needed changing – instead of being off-white it was dark brown and really badly clogged – this explained the low water pressure and low flow. Fortunately the water filter man lives in Cambridge and dropped me off a couple of new filters on Sunday. Worse still were the gutters which were oozing with grime and dirt………. I spent a very satisfying Saturday afternoon up my new ladder with my pressure washer blasting these gutters clean. I’ve left them disconnected from the water tank for a couple of days to let the inevitable rain flush out all the bits the pressure washer loosened and tonight we’ve had an almighty downpour which is great news (for a change). I also installed out trusty Zimbabwean rain gauge so that probably means it won't rain again until April - fat chance.

Lana came home with another collection of rosettes – despite falling off Holly whilst practising on Saturday. Kirsty as finally been persuaded to forego her crutches and start using her four week old ‘horse-kicked’ foot. I admit this miraculous recovery may have been hastened by me offering to let her drive the tractor to ferry empty boxes to the storage container. From this we turned to clearing the vegetable patch and Kirsty ferried and the triffid sized celery, spinach, parsley, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and most bizarrely looking brocoflower (luminous green cauliflower) plants to the compost heap.

Whilst I was distracted up the ladder Chris put in a record beating 19 mins 25 second lap time on the 'reasonable priced lawn tractor' and has snuck to the top of the leader board - having said that she has missed some bits.

Another blitz on boxes today with a further 10 emptied. It is now definite that we have 'lost' part of Kirsty's Ikea desk - it may well be that by now some Somali pirate is trying to assemble his newly acquired ikea desk and realises that whilst he has the brackets he is missing the legs and table........

More in a bit .....

Local customs

Kirsty has just come home from her end of year social (disco I think). She's just called out that tomorrow school is in mufti and she needs to take some togs and scroggin. I think we're assimilating into the local culture!

Lawn update - I cut the the set lap in 19m 45s - with the mulching plug in. This has shaved 1 minute 40 seconds off last week's record. On the subject of records I clocked up 32 minutes home last week (wind assisted) - some 9 minutes faster than my old bike and 2 minutes faster than average.

Our work team came 2nd in a pub quiz last night - quite respectable for our first outing.

Hope you are following all of this! I'll put a translation up tomorrow.

More later
Richard