Nga mihi o te Tau Hou (Happy New Year)! to all our friends and whanau,
We started the New Year with Sandra coming over for lunch.
……. and Sox having a ‘bath’ although it was more of a cooling rinse in the shower! She wasn’t impressed and Ann had to keep her foot on the shower door to prevent any escape.
Our friends, Bev, Tom and Rob came round for a steak lunch (Ann had mushroom kebabs).
January’s weather has often been very hot and muggy, the deck managed to get up to 39.8 degrees one day whilst the middle of the garden managed to get over 30 on several occasions. Ann and the girls chilled in the family room with the aircon running in the afternoons whilst Peter worked on his model railway.
We had a couple of very busy days at the Hamilton Gardens but once people started back at work and the new school year began things relaxed. Ann finally finished doing her extra shift, filling in on a Wednesday with Peter as his normal co-worker has returned from holiday and injury.
Ann managed to find a second hand book fair in Tirau so off we went, with the girls having a drive out too! Sox loves her car rides!
When it was too hot to work in the garden we had a good sort out of some of the kitchen cupboards and the pantry. We last did this during one of our lockdowns so thought that it wouldn’t be a big job. Ha! We threw away dozens of out of date jars and bottles, and collected three large boxes of stuff which Ann dropped off at a local op-shop.
On the 12th of January we also celebrated 19 years since arriving in New Zealand. It doesn’t seem that long at all. It also doesn’t feel like four years since we both retired from work.
Honey had a biopsy on the lump on her front paw that has been troubling her for almost a year now. She looked a very sorry sight with the bandage on her paw. She wasn’t allowed to go for walks so she and Ann would drive into the village and just sit on the bench by the bakery, and watch the world go by each morning.
On one of her visits back to the vet to check on the stitches Honey sat on the chair in the consult room whilst Ann had to stand! Well – she was the patient after all. At the end of the month we finally got the biopsy results – good news – the lump isn’t cancer so just more antibiotics!
On the 17th we heard a loud jet engine and went outside to see the village being buzzed by BAC Strikemaster Mk.88 number 72 doing a circuit of the village on its way south. Normally we would expect Honey to head to her ‘safe’ place in the study but she was not bothered by it one bit. We didn’t get any photos but the jet does displays at NZ airshows like the one below from earlier this month.
Azaria (one of Ann’s former students) invited us to her 18th birthday party. We had a lovely evening!
Growing our own fruit and vege this year has been more successful than last summer but still a bit hit and miss. However we’ve picked 9.5 kg of Black Doris plums from our tree, our best crop yet and Ann turned it all into jam and paste. The tomatoes are producing slowly, the cucumber is going well and Ann’s already made lots of pesto from her basil but things like carrots, spring onions, radishes and pea are a no-show.
The hot and humid weather means the girls have been moving around the garden through the day looking for the shady areas.
The 65mm of rain over two days at the end of the month refilled our water tanks to overflowing so we shouldn’t need to order a tanker of water this year. It’s impossible to see how hard and noisy the rain was in this photo of Sox watching the rain from the safety of the deck.
