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Sarah passed her restricted test. Now she can drive off to work at 6:40am and we don't need to be involved. The end of another era. No more driving her to the bus station and back. Well, apart from this week when she went into university, began to feel really terrible and I then drove Bronwyn to the bus station in order to drive her back!
Rachael and Taumata have moved south to Rotorua. Taumata found a new job down there after struggling with a bit of a toxic culture at his previous job. Meanwhile, Rach has been struggling to get a job in geotechnics without experience. Taumata's new boss knows an engineer who's willing to give her some voluntary experience down there. Drilling holes in Rotorua is going to be far more interesting than digging through the clay up here. For her birthday Bronwyn managed to find a geological book and map of the Rotorua area. Plenty of large volcanic blobs everywhere.
Sarah turned 21, so we had a bit of a celebration. Went out to the buffet restaurant by the Sky Tower where you can eat all sorts of food. I decided to try the Korean section, and in particular, two sauces. One tasted like tomato mixed with fire. The other was cheesy. Also mixed with fire. But rather tasty. We bought (amongst other things) her some car seat covers.
She's put them on her car seats. Rach has given her the metallic purple carpets from her car. Rach's car is on its last legs, and will likely cost more to fix than it's worth. She's left it on the farm with us; she didn't want to risk driving all the way to Rotorua. We've also got Taumata's little sports car. He gave me a ride in it; it's got racing suspension and wide tyres, and grips the road extremely well. Scarily well, especially with him driving. It's not warranted or rego'd, so he didn't want to drive it down to Rotorua either. We seem to be collecting vehicles. It's the Kiwi way.
We've also got the motorhome of course. We had someone hire it for a week in April, but with the current price of fuel, bookings have gone a bit quiet. Once Trump stops trying to rearrange the planet, hopefully things will return to normal. We're planning to take it down to Roturua for our wedding anniversary at the end of the month and to meet up with Rach and T.
Plus the caravan. A family was asking for somewhere to stay over winter. They've got two young children, and the wife has a job in Kumeu. I did attempt to take them around the farm this week, but it's been rather wet so we only made it to the shearing shed. They're out in the front paddock. We got Allan to scrape out a driveway and a patch to put the vehicles on, which he's filled in with most of the crushed concrete that we've had sitting on the farm for years. I've set up a gate and rewired the fence.
I did attempt to remove the old gate myself, but it was in rather solidly. Allan pulled it out with the tractor. It was a surprisingly long pole, and went down about 150 cm underground. Not sure why you need something capable of stopping an elephant in order to hang a little garden gate! I have observed that some things on this farm show quite exquisite craftsmanship. Built to last. Other things seem to be a case of "Bash Bash Oops"!
Having built a driveway into the paddock, we needed a gate. Bronwyn pointed me to an ancient, bent and half buried metal frame. I've set it up, added another post to latch it to and (due to the fact that it was just a frame) wired on some mesh fencing that also happened to be lying around on the paddock. It still looks ancient and somewhat bent, but it should stop the cows. We also had a few large branches break on a nearby oak tree, so I've been up there with a hand saw trimming bits off. Some things you definitely need a tractor for. Most bits can be done by hand!
May was busy; apart from Rach and Sarah's birthdays we had four playouts in May in various libraries. I'm still not sure when brass bands were allowed into libraries. And we had the national contest in April for once. But June is looking a lot quieter. Apart from the trombones. We've now got four - someone's turned up on bass trombone and we've had a Japanese exchange student with us for the year. She arrived on the night before the first library playout. Fortunately she was keen to play!
That'll do for now. I need to keep this updated more often!
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( 3.4 / 14 )Apparently we'll be getting some sunshine this week. We did get a few weeks in early January, but it's been rather variable since then!
Ross's funeral went well, and we were able to share it with more overseas. His funeral was in the catholic church and his burial plot was in the Anglican cemetery. Before he died, we asked him what songs he wanted. He was quite insistent on one particular song. So as they lowered him into the grave, we played him Another One Bites The Dust, while we all tried to keep a straight face. He certainly kept up his sense of humour. At the reception, we brought over his Fordson Dexta that he'd used for most of his life, and had quite a reunion of many of the longstanding personalities of the district
Since then, we've been trying to tidy up the running of the farm. I put in several fence posts after locating the old post hole borer, and Bronwyn has been changing over the accounts. Janet has been coping remarkably well; we just need to check up on her to make sure the bins get emptied and the payments made. Christmas was a bit more subdued, but we had the chance to see most of the family as they popped in. Bronwyn has retrieved Ross's old jumper and polo shirts in order to make memory bears once she gets the chance.
We had some good sunshine after Christmas. Allan dug a trench and built a water slide. The trench digger turned the earth into dust and spread it over a huge distance, so everything got covered with dirt. Didn't stop the fun.
The sunshine lasted up until the Festival One week. I'm told we had record rainfall for the site, and for a couple of days, all vehicle movements were banned unless directly authorised by the senior management. We then had a couple of days of sun, after which the ground was looking much better. Then after the hordes arrived on Friday, it rained for most of Saturday and the happy campers turned it into a mud bath. But that didn't seem to dampen anything. In terms of numbers and pre-sales for next year, it's been the most successful one yet. It was also great fun helping out in the kitchen during the build week, and doing the ticketing on the gates. The kitchen tent was at a slight angle (2.5 degrees; we measured it). We had to raise one side of the sinks, and I had to take care when walking through in case I found myself veering to one side. Plus all the people slicing vegetables with recently sharpened knives!
For our favourite band, the Pineapple Hedz, I had obtained four inflatable pineapples which I'd intended to fix to our hats. Didn't get time, so we just waved them around instead. We got called to the front, and had a whale of a time copying each other's moves, and handing the pineapples out to nearby teenagers to wave them too. Turned out that many were children of the band members, and at least one walked home with a pineapple, so we shall definitely be remembered.
We hired a motor home to take down to the festival. We were planning to buy it, and the festival gave us a good chance to test it out, particularly with all the mud. We found several faults, which have now all been fixed. So yesterday we drove down and collected it. It's going to be quite a responsibility, but we've got many plans for it.
It's been a busy few weeks. I've been trying to get some new people signed up and ready to authorise transactions for the brass band after our main man was taken ill before Christmas. I've also taken my trombone in for a service and various repairs. And Sarah is getting ready for a driving test. Her cousin Paige came over a couple of weeks ago, also for a driving test. We arrived in good time. Alas, she'd left her license at home, so she's rebooked. It'll be her fifth attempt. Sarah has her test this week, and she's nervous. But she's a perfectly good driver, so hopefully she'll nail it. Paige, well, we'll be seeing her again next month!
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( 3.1 / 526 )Sadly, Bronwyn's father Ross passed away last Sunday. He went to sleep in his favourite chair after lunch, and at 4pm we got the call that he wasn't responding. We nearly lost him a week or two ago, when he was taken into hospital and went down with an infection, but then started talking, and moving, and then attempted to get up and go home. He finally got that wish on the Friday, and we were due to get a home help on Monday. The funeral will be on this Friday at 11am our time, and let us know if you want the Zoom link.
Him and his father were born farmers, working the same land that was bought by his great grandfather, and now full of history. Many of the techniques that he's passed on to us have been around since the 1930s, and many of the implements and tools are still around, somewhere. He (and his father) made this place very much a part of them, and it's fitting that his last hours were on the farm, with his family all nearby.
One thing that I've been learning this year is the art of mending fences. I've got a few tools and bits and pieces, but I do need a bit of practice. The Aussie youtube videos show them tying a high tensile fence wire like it's a shoelace. I need to use a bit of ingenuity to achieve anything remotely like it! But now we have 8kV around much of the farm, and the cows no longer roam free. Well, not until they smash the gate again.
After all these years, it still seems odd having Christmas trees up in the blazing sunshine. We had our first supermarket playout on Thursday, two rehearsals for the Waitakere junior band (plus my regular Saturday lesson), the Kumeu Parade and a quick rehearsal to go over the music I'd written for a carol session later in the month. The next couple of weeks will be action packed, and then it will all go quiet. And just as it's starting to get busy again, it's our turn to pack up and spend a week in an isolated paddock with every excuse to turn off the phone!
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( 3.1 / 1092 )Sarah has a car! We've been looking for one for months, and finally settled on one that's the same model as Rachael's, and the same age as Sarah. It's a Hyundai Getz, and a rather nice cornflower blue. Sarah has been driving it as often as possible, and has been looking up decals in order to decorate it to the same level as Rachael's.
Only 12 lambs this year. We've been winding down the herd in order to move over to cows. It's not really economic; the wool costs more to shear than we get from selling it. And sheep need a bit more looking after than cows. Although the fences definitely need more looking after when the cows have been in!
There's 9 ducklings on our pond now, and they're getting big. They're also quite tame, and will get within two metres of me when I'm feeding them. Plus a few others that wait until I'm gone, and the two big muscovy ducks that come so close they've nearly ended up in the chicken coop.
Alas, we've just had to say goodbye to an old horse. We're left with just the one now. They were retired racehorses, running in the trotting races, and for several decades they've had the run of the farm, generally making their own decisions when someone foolishly opens a gate. It's the end of an era.
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( 3.1 / 1848 )So Allan put up the electric tape across the paddock and let the cows in. It took them about a day to get past the tape. So we just let them stay. Now we have a paddock of much less grass, covered in mud and holes.
I found a tennis ball! It happened to be sitting in one of the holes, covered in mud but still circular. There's about three more out there somewhere; I guess some distant archaeologist may marvel at the ancient artifact, and ponder its ceremonial burial.
We've acquired some geese. They probably came from a neighbour up on the hill, and five of them flew over and landed in our paddock. OK, three in the paddock, one in the driveway and one in a paddock on the other side. The one in the driveway eventually worked out how to cross the fence, but the fifth goose must have got fed up honking, and presumably flew back home. So we now have four geese in the paddock, and the sheep are attempting to make friends with them.
Sarah somehow passed the maths! So chemistry is back on. So are the trips fighting through the traffic to get her to the bus stop. Got held up last week by a festival of traffic cones; each one placed by hand by someone clinging to the side of a truck. Took 25 minutes to crawl along behind. In the end, we gave up on the bus stop and I decided it was faster to take her to the university direct!
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