Summer in New Zealand

I hope you had a lovely festive season. We had a quiet one here. My sister flew down from Auckland and we went camping up the coast at Gore Bay for a couple of days. There was a fresh easterly blowing and the sea was a tad cold but we had to go in (swimming in cold water is sort of a badge of honour for our family).

Given the costs and chaos of moving half way around the world, we had mostly agreed to no presents this Christmas.

We made exceptions for the back section. I bought my other half a Jackson shovel (the only thing for digging holes according to the guys who hand dug all the posts for the massive timber retaining wall they put in to prevent further landslips).

Duncan bought me an Austrian scythe. Using it as a bit of an art that I'll probably never master, but it is a meditative thing being up on the back section, cutting the grass and weeds that are taking off now the sheep have been fenced out.

Summer is in full swing in New Zealand which means:

We have no plans to go away in January because

1. Everyone else goes away in January and

2. We have a ton of stuff to do here.

Our stuff from Europe arrived just after Christmas and I am still unpacking. I don't know why I have so many clothes - it's embarrassing. So one of my many New Year's Resolutions is to not buy ANY clothes this year.

The work in the garden is endless, but I’ve been really happy with most of the veggies I’ve planted (the butternut squash is sulking and I'm not sure the corn will get enough sun before harvest time). A surprising success has been Cecil the cucumber, who is shooting up his stick structure at a rate of knots.

I’ve still been chasing deadlines for Arctic Circle and my other work. The editor of the CSIRO's Double Helix magazine commissioned a pair of kids' constellation charts and I'm happy with the way they turned out but they took me waaay longer than I budgeted for!

Here are a couple of sections of the star charts. They are for the Southern Hemisphere.

I best get back to the drawing board.

Ta ta for now

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