Kia ora,
At the start of the month, we spent several days helping one of our bonsai friends downsize from a rural property to a retirement village. This meant setting up an open day to sell bonsai trees, then moving all of her staging / trees / pots to the new house, setting them up and moving all the spare stuff to our house to sell at the club. Peter also set up the computer / TV and internet connection.
Peter also spent time (and money) at the dentist on resetting a crown.
Work has started at Hamilton Gardens on removing hedging and plants prior to the big refurbishment. After several false starts we are due to move into the new portacabin on 10th July whilst the building renovations are completed.
We had a spell of cold evenings with sunny days with the temperature dropping to minus 1.7 degrees one night. Later on in the month we had wetter days with the East coast suffering from massive flooding again (that’s the third time this year).
The mower decided it had had enough and would not start. One new starter motor later (and $500) and it’s all working again.
The Rotorua Bonsai club came to Hamilton to visit three local collections. We were the final stop in the afternoon, and fortunately it had stopped raining early enough to allow everyone to have a good wander around our collection and ask a lot of questions. We were also able to sell more of Marshall’s trees, pots and tools for her.
Peter was looking for something in the cupboard and found a bag of out of date liquorice – the use by date was 2005! So it was out of date before we moved from Rototuna to Pirongia and had been missed several more times when we cleared out the cupboards.
Usually our ‘help Marshall’ days are busy and long with 75mins of travel either way. So our lovely neighbour, Bev, pops around about lunch time, gives the girls their lunch – a doggie chew each – and lets them out into the garden for a toilet visit.
On the day that we helped Marshall move into her new home Ann received a photo and message from Bev. She’d let the girls out for a wee and given them their lunch, then they must have convinced her that they were still hungry so she gave them a second chew each. She said “they were very appreciative, and then went to sleep on the deck”!
The following day after the girls finished their lunch – back they came – ready for second lunches.
We found a new location which holds a quarterly book fair. Eureka is a small village on the way to Morrinsville and a lady puts on a book fair there every 3 months. We managed a fair haul with 19 books for Ann and 4 for Peter.
A lot of Ann’s books were by NZ born author Anne Perry.