Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

This week has been more like winter than spring, with a strong southerly wind, and some heavy rain. Some welcome sun appeared towards the end of the week, along with the return of the shorts, and with having changed the clocks this weekend and had an extra hour of daylight in the early evening, there is a feeling of winter slowly receding into history. For now. I think Tuesday is going to be very wet! Along with Nicky’s M/W/F church routine, she has had another enjoyable trip to the cinema to see Downton Abbey again (with Stella and Ros), and a ukulele and sing along concert (in town). This was followed by having way too much fun in Smith & Caughey’s, and coming home with lots of free makeup samples. The beginning of the week involved more house design discussions, and the end of the week was focused on cooking for Saturday night. We had invited a number of my fellow Deep and Meaningful attendees for a winter dinner, and eventually 13 of us sat round the table (well, three...

Our focus at the beginning of the week was on house design and Nicky’s dental treatment. She already had a regular checkup appointment at the dentist for mid-day on Monday, which she was very pleased about when she started experiencing pain on Saturday. It turned out she had an abscess under a dying tooth. The dentist did some temporary work on her root canal, and prescribed antibiotics and pain killers, and she is due back in a couple of weeks for further attention. Regular consumption of pain killers helped, but she didn’t start to feel more comfortable until Thursday. The wires have been buzzing between us and Bert the Builder with house design considerations. When we were last in Wanganui we asked Bert if there was any way the design could be changed to give us access to the view down to the river from the main living area, without going beyond our budget. He sent us a plan that gave us a view, but was a bit more than we could afford, so some changes were made. Decking and win...

I was going to say that this should be last week where I have to post early in order to keep on the right side of Mrs. Trellis (Endeavour finishes tonight), but having just looked at next week’s TV schedule, a new series of “Making New Zealand” starts next Sunday so I might still be posting early. The things I do for you, Dear Reader. This week has marked another step in our new home project. There were two clauses in our Sales and Purchase agreement that we had to satisfy, and we have done both of them now. The next step is for the vendors to have the services installed, and then get title issued on the section, so for us in that respect it is now just a case of waiting, possibly until mid-December. We expect to use the time to design and plan with our builder, so that the consents paperwork is all ready for when we are allowed to submit it. The weather has been quite spring-like, which I suppose is reassuring, with some welcome sunshine and showers to keep us checking if the...

There has been lots of “going off”, to somewhere, this week. The first departure was Nicky and I taking Stella and Tim to the airport on Tuesday afternoon for a short holiday in Rarotonga. I was booked to collect them from the airport at 4.50am this morning, but due to a change in flight plans didn’t need to, and enjoyed my unexpected lie-in. Our second departure was another trip to Wanganui, our fifth if you are counting. In order to satisfy one of the clauses of our Sales and Purchase Agreement for the section we are hoping to buy, we need building costs from Bert, so arranged to meet him at the section on Thursday afternoon. We drove down on Wednesday after Nicky had made us some lovely platted orange and sultana brioche rolls. The journey was uneventful and not as wet as we expected. We enjoyed listening to “A Presumption of Death” by Jill Paton Walsh and Dorothy L. Sayers, and arrived in Wanganui around 5.30pm. After checking into the motel and getting organised, we bought so...

Spring is in the air, not only because it’s September 1st, but we have also had some spring-like weather in the later part of the week. Even though we started with rain, we were feeling of a sunnier disposition as our contract to buy the section in Wanganui went conditional. The two conditions are our finance and our due diligence clause. The finance one is to make sure we can actually get hold of our money, so forms were requested, completed and submitted so hopefully that will prove to be OK. The due diligence is so that we can get a more accurate costing for doing the build, thus enabling us to determine whether or not we can afford to build what we want to build on the section. This is still a work in progress. The rest of the week has been been much more routine. Nicky has had her three sessions at church with Seniors and Holy Communion, and has done her volunteer hours at the WARC. On Wednesday after church she had a very long “morning tea” with Jan, Valda, Anne and Helen do...