Nau mai, haere mai,
Winter has finally arrived. It’s been a cold and wet start to the month. We had several days of rain which resulted in flooding which reached even higher than last month.
Honey lost a fight with a cat on one of our morning walks around Pirongia. She’s always had an obsession with cats and mostly Ann can control her when they see a cat on their walks. But this particular morning the sneaky feline was hiding behind the gate post. Of course Honey spotted it immediately and lunged at it, spinning Ann around and face planting her on the cold, wet grass. Ann lost hold of the lead so Honey was able to get up close and personal with said moggy – which was a big mistake on Honey’s part!
One person walked past on the other side of the road and seemed to think it was perfectly normal for Ann to be kneeling crouched down on the soaking wet, cold grass so they smiled and carried on walking. The evil cat sat on the other side of the fence and just watched Honey – silently and menacingly. Ann couldn’t stand up because Honey wouldn’t sit still, was constantly pulling to get back to the cat. In the end she had to phone Peter to come and help her stand up !
Sox sometimes waits by the back door waiting to go into the garage to be fed. How she knows the time is beyond us!
Azaria came for her fix of Ann’s chocolate brownies.
Peter celebrated his birthday (once again he’s caught up to Ann). We had our first meal out in 12 months and it was delicious.
Tony Bebb arrived from Australia and stopped with us for a couple of nights whilst doing a critique for the bonsai club before moving on for a few days. He was back with us on the Friday night before doing two days of workshops for the club and two days working on our trees.
Peter has been building models for his railway. He is using both card and plastic kits to add buildings and features to the layout. For the buildings he is modifying them to have small LED lights inside in different rooms. He started with a crane for the goods yard and then four pairs of the terraced houses and a forge for the village. The terraced houses come as separate fronts and backs as the backs can be used with shop fronts as well as house fronts.
Peter sold his big redwood bonsai to a collector in Auckland and took it up on the trailer. It just fitted.
The whole of NZ had a wet month. Most of the country recorded its wettest July on record with flooding in both the north and south. Parts of Te Waipounamu (South Island) recorded over 5 times their monthly rainfall whilst most of Te Ika-a-Māui (North Island) recorded over double their monthly rainfall.
The girls have been enjoying their new ‘toys’. Ann got these snuffle mats from K-Mart. We hide treats amongst the fabric frills for them to sniff out.
