Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

Happy Christmas Dear Reader, where ever you are in the world. You may recall that we spent Christmas Day on the road last year, driving from Auckland to Whanganui and arriving at our new home to discover that things were not as we expected. One year on, the house is finished and we are starting to feel that we are making progress in the garden. We decided some time ago that we wanted to have Christmas 2021 in Whanganui, but were looking forward to the family gathering in Ohakune for the last few days of the year. With the arrival of the Covid Delta variant in Aotearoa in August, the Ohakune gathering was cancelled. On Christmas Eve the family lunch at Paul and Jenny’s was re-arranged after Jenny woke in the morning with swollen glands. It would appear that most family members celebrated with their children/parent bubbles. We had been invited to lunch with Frances and her family and some other local friends. Much of our week has, unsurprisingly, been taken up with Christmas related p

 The river has been looking very full this weekend following some very wet weather earlier in the week. The rain started on Monday evening and got very heavy on Wednesday and Thursday. In the breaks we got some laundry done and I finished the run-off drainage by the drive. We have made good use of our time indoors with Christmas preparations. Nicky has been wrapping presents, I made our Christmas pudding and mince meat, and we have both been adding to the decorations (indoors and out). The house is starting to look quite festive. I have had some work (first time I have set up a new machine remotely, I think), Nicky went to the last Seniors Lunch of the year, and we both went to an early evening drinks event which was good. As the rain started to abate we visited local landscape suppliers. Nicky used birthday money sent by Stella for some bark which was delivered on Saturday and we started distributing: We also found a timber supplier who has the things we need for retaining wall

 I have discovered that I am married the the Phantom Strimmer of Old Aramoho Town. Nicky has really got to grips with the strimmer, or line trimmer as they are called here, this week. I have had a couple of goes as well, to help clear the area where we plan to have the paths and see what it looks like: While gardening has been the focus of Nicky’s week, I have had some MacOnSite work. One of my customers lives in Palmerston North which is only an hour’s drive away, and her Mac needed a major software upgrade. I drove over on Tuesday to collect it, worked on it on Tuesday afternoon, on Wednesday, and returned her Mac on Thursday. It made quite a nice change from working remotely. Nicky had her life group Christmas social on Tuesday afternoon and then in the evening went to a Nativity play with Frances (baking required for both events). This was presented by adults with special needs and included much sheep and magi humour. A good evening was had by all. We popped over to see Dorot

We have moved into the last month of the year and metrological summer, and there have been changes at Tiramaroa. Our trusty IKEA dinning room storage furniture was collected by the Salvation Army on Wednesday. It has served us well and will hopefully be just as useful to somebody else. Its absence has enabled us to do some reorganisation in the sewing room, so that we can now put the iron and ironing board away and have a bit more floor space. In the living area the wall where we want to hang a large charcoal drawing is now accessible for the first time. Getting the drawing framed is a project in itself, but we are enjoying having the additional space and experimenting with repositioning the gate leg table. While we were doing some furniture moving, I put a couple of wee shelving units into the map room (downstairs loo). One is very useful for holding the Penguin 60 Year collection which we bought many years ago, and I have used the rest of the space for some of our Harry Potter memo