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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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