December 
I can tell. Whenever Rachael spends ages cleaning her car, and then having a shower. Oh yes.

No. He's not Sean. He's Taumata. Or Taku. Or generally just T. And Rachael spends quite a while in the city with him. As well as cleaning her car. Thoroughly. She's added decals on the sides, and she's had the headlight glass polished at a detailing shop. Allan has given her some lights to stick under the car, and she's got an animated display on the back window. But mostly, she cleans it.

We're into the silly season. Lots of Christmas lunches and dinners, carolling, reviews and concerts. I've tried to gather everything onto one calendar. It looks a bit untidy.

But everyone's now finished university for the year. Rach has another year for her masters degree. The funding for the job she was hoping to get has been cut, so she's looking at what courses might be more preactically useful. There's one on geotechnics, which would allow her to spend her life drilling holes on building sites and studying mud. But regardless of the current government budget, we're still sitting on a major faultline, and it's not necessarily going to wait for Labour to get back in.

Sarah passed Maths 102. She was so pleased. She's quite good at the coursework; it's making sense. But the final exam questions can be hard because they sometimes put things backwards. "Here's the result the student got, what did she start with?" which means you have to not only understand it but be able to do the steps backwards too. She got enough to pass. It's Maths 108 next year, but Rachael says that it's just Maths 102 in more depth, so not so bad.

Bronwyn has just passed her Batchelors in Applied Theology. This has taken about 7 years, and involved a lot of assignments as well as case studies and quite a bit of Maori panel weaving.

With all three of them currently Advanced First Aiders, they'll all end up more qualified than me. Although I still have my three star canoeing certificate. They haven't beaten my Eskimo rolls just yet.

Meanwhile, Dmitri and DeLorean are out in the paddock and learning how to be sheep. I'm still feeding the ducks, and I now have a core group that are semi tame. There's a family of ten Paradise ducks, and three mallards. The Paradise ducks are larger and louder, but tend to feed out in the open. So I've been giving them a couple of handfuls out on the jetty in the dam, and putting the rest up on the bank behind the long grass. I know there's a few others around, because I sometimes see other ones on our driveway.

We've got through quite a bit of chicken feed this year. Both for the ducks and also for the extra four chickens that we've acquired this year. We've just lost one of the older ones, so we're currently at seven, and about 2 or three eggs a day. More than we can eat, so we've occasionally had to give them away.

It's getting warm for once, and plenty of rain. Great weather for ducks and sheep, but not the ones with hay fever. I need to get the garden under control. May need the baler.

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