Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

 Monday was the Wellington Anniversary Day public holiday, which we also observe here. It was also hot, sunny, and the annual day of the Arthritis Amble. You may remember, Dear Reader, that this time last year our garden was one of those visited by the Amblers whose ticket money raises funds for the Arthritis Society. Nicky had volunteered to help with refreshments at the nominated garden, and I was sailing on the paddle steamer. Today, in increasingly persistent rain, the volunteers and garden owners have done the Amble together. Again we saw great variety and some lovely gardens, from intimate to vast, and a wonderful range of garden styles. The most unusual one was at the former Gonville Outdoor Swimming Pools. These are no longer operated as swimming pools and the Council sold the facility. The new owners and their daughter have built their home in the changing rooms, and turned two of the three pools into gardens: The anniversary of the event also encouraged me to have a look ...

 It has been another hot week, with temperatures regularly into the low 30’s. We have a had some rain and humidity, but we have still got much done in the garden. Nicky has made significant progress at the front, by weeding and planting. I have done some weeding and strimming the grass. Sailing has been interesting for me. We are not running six days a week as we should for this time of the year, due to the continuing lack of a permanent skipper. On Wednesday we had a stop-over planned at Upokongaro. As we approached the wharf we saw that the gangway was in the river again. Our manager organised a local chap to move it enough so that we could park the boat, and the the crew manhandled it out of the water and onto the wharf with ropes. This enabled the passengers to disembark, but it was heavy cumbersome work. It took us about 45 minutes. We had to reduce our stop-over time and ended up being about half an hour late returning to the Waimarie wharf. We had two jazz cruises to coincid...

 It has been a hot and sunny week. This was the MetService forecast for Wednesday: It has even been hot in Dunedin. The weather has dragged us into the garden for weeding, watering, planting, replanting and grass cutting. We have moved bench #3 from the bottom of the garden to beside the shed with bench #4. Bench #1 may soon join it. The benches are much lighter to handle now that they have had a year or so to dry out. The weather has also encouraged us to go inside to cool down, and the lilies to flower: Some of Nicky’s regular commitments are coming out of holiday mode, so she has been cleaning at church with Dale, and staffing the Aramoho Community Library.   My working week has been interesting. On Monday we had a staff meeting to discuss the current situation and how the manager intends to proceed. We are still having to use stand-in skippers and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I was asked if I would train for a skipper’s ticket. I explained that I didn...

 Welcome to 2024. We wish all our lovely readers a Happy and Prosperous New Year. Our first week of the New Year has been quite eventful, by our standards. Monday dawned following heavy overnight rain. The river was running high, fast and with large pieces of debris, so sailing was cancelled. I did some shopping and some pottering outside as the weather improved. Some friends from Auckland (Paul, Jason and Lee) were in town so I invited them over for the afternoon. We had a good natter and dinner at the Rutland Arms which was very good. Tuesday was a lovely clear day sunny day for driving up to Ohakune to collect Nicky. I arrived late morning and after a cuppa and a bit of time helping Shani with a jigsaw, Nicky and I walked into Ohakune to find somewhere for lunch. This proved to be more of a challenge than I expected as most places were closed, probably because of it being a public holiday. We eventually found an Asian restaurant which also did pizza, which turned out to be good....