Summer continues unofficially

1st of March is the official start of autumn.  The early mornings certainly have an autumnal look and feel about them, but by 8.30am, normal service has resumed and summer continues. The day temps are still in the mid 20s and it has been declared the sunniest summer on record for the whole country. We have had about 2 days of rain in 3 months, and today we ordered a delivery of water. This became inevitable when Lisa’s mum and dad arrived and the washing machine got a lot more use then it normally does. We have one of the newest washing machines on the market, with a 5 star rating for water economy, but even the shortest wash, uses over 60 litres of water.

The good weather is great for our business as the sunny days encourage people to go for a bike ride.

I have parted company with job number 11 (tutor in Alt Ed) and gone back to full-time wheelie work. This has proved to be a good move so far. I have also been booked by the geography department of Garin College to go on a fieldtrip to Wellington in early April. I hope to pick up more relief work in the winter, when our bike business goes quiet. We have a few groups doing cycling holidays in March, so I hope the good weather continues.

Lisa and I decided we needed something to make us focus and do some structured bike training. We have had a summer of snatching an hour or so here or there, to do some exercise. We have entered a local event called the Graperide. It starts and finishes at a winery near Blenheim and follows a 101km route,  taking in Queen Charlotte drive (scenic but very hilly). It has done the trick, as each ride now has a purpose. We only have 4 weeks before the event so we won’t be setting any speed records; just completing the course will be an achievement.

At home, the chooks and llamas seem happy enough. Our supply of grass in the padocks had come to an end due to the dry and hot weather, so our neighbours kindly opened the fence between their paddocks and ours, so the llamas now graze their paddocks also. This also helps them as they don’t have animals to graze their fields, since one of their alpacas tragically died and they decided not to keep any more livestock.

Bonnie continues to enjoy life, roaming around in her little piece of heaven………….just the same as her owners!

November & December

November in NZ means longer days, warmer sunshine and rapidly growing grass. Shorts and t-shirts are workwear! As the weather settles a bit more I am cycling to work more often. A great way to start the day and beautiful still mornings are replaced by afternoon sea breezes which generally give me a tailwind on the way home. It’s also a nice feeling to know you have done a couple of hours exercise by the time you have returned home.

 Wheelie Fantastic work and gardening keep us busy and now Lisa has added to her workload by getting chickens. The chooks arrived yesterday. Lisa got a call to go to go to a drop off point to collect them. They seem a bit traumatised at the minute and are slowly being introduced to their surroundings. When we eventually get some eggs, they will work out as the most costly known to man. Chook house, feeder, feed, water holder, fence and chooks (6) all add up to a four figure sum. Their names are not yet finalised, but they are going to follow a theme (scrambled, poached, mayonnaise, Florentine….2 more needed). I was given the job of locking them in to their house on the first night. Lisa was at work, so Bonnie and I waited to dusk and went to the pen to lock them in. Unfortunately they haven’t got the hang of going in to perch, so they wouldn’t co-operate and go ‘upstairs’. As I am not so keen on flapping birds, they were left ‘downstairs’ until Lisa got home. Chook training could take a while to complete!

On the lifestyle block it is also time for the Llamas to get sheared. It was due to happen yesterday but due to circumstances beyond the shearer’s control, it has been postponed. They now look ridiculous but due to problems with trying to get photos loaded onto the blog, I can’t let you see them. I will try again and post some photos on the next blog.

December means end of term/school year for schools, with their long summer holiday starting. That means I finish my tutors job and go full-time with Wheelie Fantastic. As cycling trails are opening up and cycling is getting more popular, we are starting to see new businesses start up. Not least at Mapua wharf(which is getting more popular in general). We now have the new ferry owner hiring bikes at the wharf (approx. 20 metres from us). Another business is close by also, scooter hire! 4 bright yellow scooters (moped) are waiting for their first customers. As Christmas is fast approaching, the shops have lots of sales on and Christmas music plays while we all walk around in glorious sunshine. My brain gets a bit scrambled with Christmas messages in summer. We don’t plan to do anything Christmassy, except enjoy a day off together and perhaps eat some nicer food than we normally would on a Tuesday. Then after the calm of that day, we will be full-on busy with casual day hires of bikes. We already have bookings and we are doing a promotion on a national internet bargain website, called Grab One. It is really big over here, with special offers which you buy online.

We have just found that we can use the swimming pool at the local primary school, which is approx. 1km from our house. Nearly all schools have pools and for a small fee, they give you a key so that you can go and use it anytime during the school holidays. They take the reasonable view that if you use the pool and you drown, it’s your own fault! Looking forward to some swims on  hot, sunny summer evenings.

We haven’t seen much rain for a while and some people are starting to buy water to fill up their water tanks. We are OK so far as we have 2 large tanks which hold 50000 litres between them. The grass on the lawns and fields are turning brown. Hotter days are now mid 20’s in the shade. It gets dark at approx. 9pm and is light by 5.30am. You can tell the temperatures are creeing up, as Bonnie spends more time sleeping in shady places during the day and then starts to function again at 7pm.

On the 12/12/2012 (yesterday), we went to a friend’s wedding.  They held it at their own house, with the ceremony in their garden/orchard. In true kiwi style (although they are both Irish), it was very casual. It was a lovely day and all the relatives who had come over, seemed to enjoy the informality of it all. Hopefully a few photos will follow soon.

Season's Greetings to all readers and best wishes for 2013.

Springing Forward

Spring is underway and the garden is getting more colourful. Trees have fresh green leaves and the lawn is growing at quite a fast pace. Rafa  is also growing at a fast pace. We have just changed our clocks so it is getting dark after 7.30pm.

Rafa and the garden, springing into action

 

I have completed my first term at work, which was 11 weeks long. I went to a conference in Wellington on the last 2 days of term. Lisa came too and did the touristy stuff, while I sat in a conference room. I did manage to get to see a bit of the city and we enjoyed the change of scenery as well as some nice food. We flew from Nelson to Wellington with a local company called Sounds Air. It was the most relaxed way to fly. We entered Nelson airport through a side door and walked over to the Sounds air ‘check-in’ desk/customer services desk / any other enquiry desk, where a sign read ‘if we are not here, please wait as we are out loading baggage’.  A person did arrive at the desk in a few seconds and asked if we were Lisa and Nicky(before we could say anything). We were told to wait in the general area and we would be told when to go to the plane. I went to get coffee, and as our coffee was being made the other (9) passengers were rounded up and led to the gate. I was told by the barista not to worry as they would wait at the gate for me. They did and we strolled out to the plane. At no point was ID etc ever asked for. We put our bags in the hold as we boarded the flight. The flight was full, so all 11 of us got on board and the pilot welcomed us and told us our flight would only be 30 mins long and not to worry about turning off our phones (which was just as well as ours were in the bags, in the hold) I sat behind the pilot and got a great view of all that was going on as well as the magnificent scenery below. Air travel is easy in NZ, but this is the most relaxed way to fly, even by NZ standards.

Lisa has taken a week off work from the restaurant, which means the chook house may get built! The veggie plots are getting planted out and our newly acquired wine barrel (from the winery across the road), which was cut in half and delivered to us the other day, will get planted out with lettuces. Our herb garden has taken off, due to Llama poo in the compost. We may have overdone the poo, as some plants are growing too fast and too tall!! Speaking of llama poo, demand has increased dramatically, so we have had to purchase a garden vacum/blower. The poo now gets vacumed up in a fraction of the time and it gets mulched into a compost/powder texture. This new ‘product’ is proving popular, so we have to collect and bag even more. A couple of weekends ago we hired a log splitter and split large pieces of chopped gum trees into fire sized pieces. We then had to stack them all into the wood shed. It was a big effort, but now our wood is just waiting for next winter!!

Lisa taking the lawnmower for a walk (most of the grass is cut with the ride on mower)

I have two weeks off from work. Unfortunately I don’t get paid over the holidays. I am in Wheelie Fantastic mode, going to the wharf and hiring bikes as well selling some winery tours. If the weather stays sunny and dry we hope to get a few customers. We have purchased some kids bikes so we can cover all ages. We now claim “small to tall….we’ve bikes for all”. The mapua ferry has just been bought over. The new owner has got some bikes to hire, so he put out a sign to that effect. The first day of trading was Saturday and we had a good number of locals coming up to us offering their support for our business. Without us saying anything, he later removed his posters. He may have found out that we are the only ones licenced to advertise or hire bikes at the wharf!!! It is great to know that the locals view us as ‘locals’ and our business is very much part of the community.

Thinking of local businesses, I saw a haulage business advertise in the local paper. As businesses do they state how long they been around for, eg since 1920. This one stated “been here for ages”. Wheelie Fantastic has been in operation for 1 year now. Our first hire happened at 11am on the 11^th month in 2011. Let’s hope we continue to grow and someday claim that we have been around “for ages”.

August and new arrivals

August has flown by, with more rainy days but the temperatures are on the up and the sunny days definately has a feel of spring about them. We cut our grass yesterday,for the first time in a few months. Gardening hasn't really stopped during the winter, there are just different jobs to be done.

We have had a couple of new arrivals. The first one was the purchase (out of necessity) of a landrover. It was bought to use in the paddocks and the garden - a motorised wheelbarrow! We saw it on Trade Me (NZs version of ebay) and as it was loca lwe were able to see it before we bought it. It was easy to see, in fact impossible to miss as it is yellow! It used to be owned by the AA! It acts like a ray of sunshine on these uncharacteristic grey days. Lisa drove it home at 40mph and caused a backlog on the highway. It was first registered in 1973; it wasn't the oldest one we looked at!


 

Our other new arrival was much more cute and completely unexpected.... a cria was born last thursday. We have called him Rafa and he has made Snowy look grown up. They now play together and he is curious about everything. He is full of fun and energy and a great playmate for Snowy. This is him on day 1.

 

 

 

 







 

 

 

So Snowy and Lisa both have something to play with in the paddocks!

 

The local area is developing cycle trails. I went to the opening of a new section which included the openiong of a new bridge. The network of trails is good for our business as well as the cyclists who don't want to cycle on roads.

Lots of cyclists of all shapes and sizes, on all types of bikes turned up for the official opening. This section goes to a little village, where a new cafe has opened and is now well used by cyclists.

 

 

I have also managed to do something I often wanted to but couldn't. For the first time ever, I cycled to work last week. Lisa was off that day so she came to meet me and we cycled home together. It was a friday so I had a half day. The only down side was that the shower at work didn't heat up so it was a bracing cold shower to start the day. This week I will get the gas bottle changed to get hot water and hopefully, if the weather stays good, I will cycle a couple of days a week during the summer term and the last few weeks of this term.

 

 

Spring is on its way!

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

July - winter progresses

The routine that comes with having a Monday to Friday job means that our lives have changed. Many of the jobs around the house, garden or land have to get done in the daylight that remains when we get home or the weekend. I now have a Friday feeling at the end of the week as well as a Monday morning feeling. The job has started well. I am having to get to know the workings of the centre quickly, before the lead tutor goes off on maternity leave in Sept. The work is fairly intensive, with little or no time to get admin done until the students go home.  We have meetings in the afternoon, but at least I get paid the extra time. The mornings are still too cold and dark to cycle to work, but in another couple of weeks that should change.

We have been in the sea for our July dip. It was cold and as we aren’t wearing wetsuits for our monthly challenge, we only stayed in for a minute or less. We have also done a couple of bike races. Today we raced in warm sunshine and it almost felt like spring was just around the corner. Our garden continues to produce colour every month. We have done a lot of pruning bushes and shrubs and then we are putting the cuttings through a mulcher we borrowed from a friend. We spent 2 days mulching and we will put the mulch on the flower beds to keep down the weeds. We also had some gum trees topped and mulched. There was an article in the local paper about the benefits of using Alpaca poo in your garden and it has caused an increase in Llama poo sales at the end of our drive.

As well as these ‘jobs’, we also have Wheelie stuff to do, as this is the time of the year when adverts etc are set up for the season ahead.  Our second car is now marked up with our logo etc.

Now the Olympics have started, we may have to be awake at various times of the night to see the action live. We have bought a myfreeview box so that we can record some events. The kiwis are all very supportive of the team and very optimistic that they could bring home a good few medals.  I am sure if the excitement of the Olympics has made it here, it must be mega in the UK.

Winter ( mid-winter)

June - brrrrr. It has been a very cold start to the winter. We have been lighting the fire in the mornings and it warms the living area really well. the good part of a cold winter are the views; we have great views of the mountains on the horizon and the highest ones have quite a reasonable covering of snow. The shortest day has now passed so hopefully the mornings will start to get a bit lighter sooner. We have also had quite a bit of rain; when I have a look at the weather for Portrush I realise it almost the same as the temps forecast for here in winter. the school mid winter holidays have just started and unfortunately for bike hire, the weather forecast for next week is rain.
The next school term starts on the 16th July, when I start job number10. This time it is permanent. I am strating as a tutor at a local education centre which caters for students who have been expelled from school, as well as offering courses for long-term unemployed etc. It is run bt an education trust and it tries to cater for the needs of the local community. It will be a bit strange, after a year of temporary jobs of various sorts, going into a job that is permanent. I will still get school holidays and I will be able to cycle to and from work (approx an hour by bike each way). I will also no longer wear teacher clothes. I will also get to do outdoor activities with the kids as well as doing some academic work. The maximum number of kids is 8 on the Alternative Education course. I am looking forward to a new challenge and being part of a very different side of education.
Next week we are going out for 'mid-winter' dinner with 6 others. The restaurant is putting on a christmas menu, with turkey etc and we are doing secret santa.
We have started racing again in the winter league of our bike club. Today the route took us through valleys with snow on the high ground in the distance and clear skies with lovely sunshine. Hopefully winter will progress with lots of sunshine and some warmth during the day when the frosts melt away.

May 2012

 A year has been completed and this blog has been read over 1200 times....who are you all?

Autumn is nearing an end and we are now back to where we started, i.e. this is what the countryside looked like when we arrived a year ago. The autumn colours are beautiful in the vineyard across the road. The grapes are all harvested and unfortunately I was teaching on the last day of the harvest and so missed the end of harvest party.

We have marked our first year in NZ in the same way we celebrated things in NI. We opened a bottle of bubbly (made across the road and called Mahana) and had a few friends round for a meal.  As I look back at the blog I see that I thought Judith would be a good friend. As it turned out we hardly ever see her and she has less interest in us as she can’t sell us a house! However Roger and Adele have proved to be good friends and we shared a meal with them on Friday night. Then on Sunday afternoon we invited the Thursday cycle group over for a meal and house warming/ 1^st year celebration. There were about 20 of us, but at least it was kiwi ‘pot luck’ catering. That means everyone brings something to eat, in a vaguely organised way. We ended up with plenty to eat and drink and the house was well ‘warmed’. In celebrating we feel very fortunate to have met such nice people and yet we miss sharing with our good friends still in NI.  When they visit we will have a lot of celebrating to do again.

We have had approx. 6 weeks of sunny and warm autumn weather, but for the last week things have got a bit changeable and it has rained for some or all of the day, almost every day. The llamas are enjoying the autumn sunshine and Snowy is doing well.

Snowy, getting bigger by the day

 The temps are slowly dropping and we light a fire every day. We still wear shorts, but perhaps not every day. We started wearing shorts in October and I would be surprised if we don’t wear them throughout the year.   Last week we took delivery of our winter firewood. It all got tipped out of the lorry in a pile, and I spent the rest of the day stacking it into the shed…who needs a gym. We also have lots of gardening to do, so never a dull moment

The wood shed, ready for winter

Lisa was involved the ‘Great ice cream challenge’. It involved Lisa on her race bike racing Roger on an electric bike from Corrugate to the wharf, eating an ice cream and then cycling back to Corrugate (uphill all the way home). A total distance of about 7miles. Most people backed Lisa and as the race unfolded it became too close to call. They both arrived at the wharf together and ate their selected flavours of ice cream. Off they went, mostly uphill, passing a group of cyclists who were stunned as the two racers sped past. As the finish line got closer, Roger put in a final burst up the last hill to get a gap, which he held onto and collapsed over the line, as ‘the crowd’ clapped in a stunned kind of way. Lisa finished about 10 seconds later. It was all over in 17 mins.

We are making some improvements to the house and our solar water heating is working. We are getting a grant to help with some of the cost and I had to fill in some paperwork. I had to return the documents to the person in charge, called Grant Fidler …..true

We are getting a solatube installed (a tube that will light up the hallway by directing daylight down a tube from the roof). I wonder who I will send the paperwork to for that. 

This week we flew down to Christchurch and collected a ‘new’ car and drove it home.  The flight was amazing as there were clear skies so we could see the stunning scenery. The flight was 50 mins and our return journey took us through equally stunning scenery and took approx. 5 hours. We have got a Toyota landcruiser Prado, which can seat 8 people and will be used for business. It is 12 years old, not old by NZ standards !

It is my turn to host the Faculty (Garin College, Social Sciences) dinner today. We are going off for a cycle around the vineyards, then back to the house for a meal. Partners are included, so there will be a total of 9. Better go and prepare.