The month started with the national holiday of Waitangi Day. This is the day when the signing of the treaty between Maori and the English settlers was signed in 1840.
The Beer club that Peter goes to is gaining more and more supporters. We have three of our friends attending as well and Ann now runs a taxi service dropping drunkards off!
Ann is back at school – boo hoo. It’s a very intense term too as, of the 12 base school classes, there are only three experienced teachers – the other nine are either new to the school, new to teaching special needs or newly qualified teachers. That should keep her out of trouble for a while!
Maxie was a great help to Peter when he fixed Ann’s fan.
After a very dry January we finally got some rain. It has been so dry here that the Waikato has officially been declared a drought area. Several of our friends and neighbours have had to buy in water. A tanker of water costs anywhere between $150 and $500, depending on how desperate you are.
Pat and John stayed for a night on their way round New Zealand. Those of you who worked at The Firs School may remember them. Pat would do our music sessions and John was our IT consultant. They are now in Australia touring wherever the moment takes them!
Selling houses over here still fascinates us, the following is the ad which appeared in our local paper.
Extremely tidy ‘farmlet’ located minutes to town. Well fenced into 6 paddocks with good garaging, chook house and pig sty! A very tidy three bedroom home complements this property. If you’ve missed exceptional buys before, call this minute.
This was accompanied by a picture of a lamb.
Other pictures on the website include these.
Lovely house to view don’t you think?
Peter has been working late for a couple of evenings and also at the weekends. Both dogs are so excited when he comes home!
When we do our evening walk around the village we have 3 little competitions going. We guess the number of cars outside the pub and in the driveway of a house near the garage (there have been up to 12 cars in the driveway in one evening). We also give each dog 10 points at the start of the walk and points are deducted for standing up before being told when crossing the road, jumping and barking at other dogs / cars / bikes / utes etc. Sadly Jaz usually loses as she cannot seem to sit still for more than 10 seconds. She only has a chance when there are a large number of utes driving along the road because Maxie goes berserk when she sees these – jumping, barking and growling at them! (don’t ask – we don’t know why).
News from Home
JD is going to university in Sept. He’s going to take sound engineering and production and he’s extremely lucky because he’s going to do it in the centre of Birmingham at a state of the art facility.
Nick’s IT business is slowly getting off the ground and he’s been consulting Peter for advice on his website. He’s now got a couple of business contacts and this is the area he wants to get into.
Helen is in Bristol on placement at the Children’s hospital and loving it. She has a pink stethoscope and now everyone wants one (including Ann).
Jean and John have bought a new car – a Corsa. John enjoys driving it but as it is a sports model there are all sorts of extra buttons and switches so it’s taking him a little while to find out what they all do.
Ann’s dad had a great time at the Lake District with David, Carole, Bryn, Hannah and friends.
Michael celebrated his birthday in style at Traildust, a steak house which has a fun slide for everyone to enjoy whilst they wait for their meal.
One beautiful Colorado day it got to 63° so they all visited one of the State parks. As the water was frozen on the lake with the ice about 11 inches thick walking on it was no problem at all. There were even people ice-fishing!
