Rick, Nicky and Claire in NZ

 Even though meteorological summer doesn’t start until tomorrow, the weather doesn’t seem to have received the memo. We have had mainly hot sunny days with the temperatures hitting the mid to high 20’s; 28º on Wednesday. The accompanying warm nights have not helped with sleep, but putting on the fan in the bedroom did. The flax are bursting with flowers on tall spears and the tui are enjoying them: Continuing digging the trench for the water feature power supply has been my main task of the week, but I have finished: Our sparky is going to come and do a site survey next week, so I’m hopeful the cable laying won’t be too far away. Having a 20+ metre trench running through the garden with various soil heaps would have a health and safety inspector shaking their heads. We bought some black paving bricks yesterday (amongst other things) to stand the Oamaru stone sculpture on and it looks really good in the half wine barrel. All we need now is power and water. The weather has also enabl...

 Most days this week have started cool with quite a bit of cloud, but fairly quickly turned to clear skies with hot sunshine. This has enabled us to spend a good amount of time in the garden. Nicky has continued with her seedling planting marathon. These are mainly edibles with some companion plants. I have started digging the trench for the power supply to the water feature: It needs to be a spade width wide and 600mm deep. It’s physically challenging for my back and knees, and I can only really work in the cooler parts of the day. Wednesday was our only day with some rain showers, so I dug in-between the showers as it was cooler. Nicky had another physio appointment this week, on Tuesday after hosting Home Group. Her thigh muscles are starting to improve with the exercises she is doing. On Wednesday evening we came equal third at the quiz having scored 86 points. We had the closest answer to the tie-breaker question so won the money! We are planning to use our winnings in the usu...

 It has been another scintillating and exciting week of retirement here in the throbbing metropolis of Whanganui. Laundry has been laundered, ironing has been ironed, weeds have been weeded, and grass has been cut. Food has been bought, cooked and eaten. A little rain has fallen from the sky, and sunshine has gladdened our hearts. The Portuguese Laurel (obviously known as Stan) has flowered: It has also been Nicky’s busy week of the month: Church cleaning (Mon), hosting Home Group (Tues), book club and hospital visiting (Wed), staffing the library (Thur), harvesting and delivering edibles to Unity Foods (Fri), Small Group Leaders Training (Sat). She has also squeezed in mopping and vacuuming the floors, a physio appointment and some gardening. When not ambling, weeding, shopping or cooking, I have been assisting with visitors. Shane the sparky called in and replaced the ailing front spotlight. We also discussed his quote for getting power to the water feature. He reduced it signifi...

 While we at one of the ceramics studios last Sunday, we were told about the Otaki Pottery Club “Festival of Pots and Garden Art”. This is held every January. After we had packed and cleaned the PSA unit in Raumati on Monday morning, and acquired mini quiches and raspberry and almond tarts from the patisserie for dinner, we started our journey home. On the way we decided we would take a short diversion into Otaki (population slightly under 4000) just to see what was there. Roadworks it turned out, but behind the roadworks a row of shops, one of which was a Bendon Outlet. Neither of the Bendon Outlets we had tried to get to in Auckland in September were operational, a little like the state of some of Nicky’s foundation garments. We parked the car so that Nicky could investigate some new unmentionables, but between us and the Outlet there was a bookshop… On the face of it you wouldn’t think a wee rural town would even have a bookshop, let alone lone a stunningly brilliant one. Along ...

 We have had the weekend in Raumati, our second visit of the year. This time it was for the Kapiti Coast Art Trail which is running this weekend and next weekend. We drove down to our usual PSA complex in Raumati on Friday, and have spent the weekend visiting 18 artists studios, and four collective exhibition spaces.   On both days we started off walking to nearby artists’s studios. After lunch back at our accommodation, we changed to using the car to get to those further afield. Instead of trawling through the guide and choosing which artists to visit, we organised our itinerary geographically and visited every location in the Raumati area. This leaves us with plenty of choice for another year for studios in Paraparaumu, Otaihanga, Waikanae and Otaki. This has meant we have experienced art which we might have otherwise missed. The general standard has been very good, and some of it exceptional. We could have spent the entirety of our KiwiSavers, but restricted ourselves to ju...

 Aotearoa has been having some weather this week. Again in Whanganui we only caught the edge of it, but we did have a little damage. The lemon wood tree was horizontal on Friday morning, and the akeake was at 45º, but neither was uprooted. Meanwhile, Claire was sent home from work as trees in Dunedin were being uprooted by the wind strength, and they were big ones. I spent my garden time on Friday putting in more and deeper stakes to support the two trees. The approaching weather system gave us a lovely sunset on Tuesday evening: Nicky has started physio treatment this week for the sprained muscle in her left thigh. She had two appointments which both went well, and has been given a range of exercises to do at home. It has already started to improve the situation but after distributing some leaflet to neighbours letterboxes yesterday she was in a lot of pain. Jacqui came over on Tuesday morning to do a hat fitting with Nicky (birthday gift) and stayed most of the morning having a c...

 We went to Bulls on Wednesday, and it was the highlight of the week. It’s only a wee place, population of a little over 2000, but famous in Aotearoa. I remember reading about it during one of our flights when we were coming to NZ in 2007. It was either in a book which Nicky had given me or an inflight magazine. The fact that we would end living near-by didn’t cross my mind. The fame isn’t because it is one of the main junctions between State Highways 1 and 3, but because of the way the locals use the name of the town to name things, as you can see from this sign: There were two reasons why Bulls was our destination. The first was that like many other people we discovered during Covid that not using the car was problematic, flat batteries being a common experience. Most of our driving round Whanagnui are short trips into town and back which probably average about 12kms each. Bulls is about a 45 km, 35 minute drive from home, so a “good run out”. The second reason was to go for lunc...