Monthly Archives: September 2007

Cloudy, blustery and cold day, but no rain. A white duck from the Scott’s wandered into the Middle paddock with a clutch of brown and yellow ducklings in tow. One of my white bantams hatched some eggs yesterday; today I see 2 yellow chicks following their mother around.

In the morning we went to a breakfast on the Napier waterfront at Arahuri, near West Shore, and then on to a service at the Ormond Chapel on Hospital Hill. It was the aniversary of Alistair Ormond who died at the Somme in 1916, the chapel is a memorial to him. Many of Karola’s local Ormond relations were there. After a sandwich lunch on the lawn outside the chapel we went home and Karola got herself packed and off to Bridget’s in Wellngton for the week. I have (temporary) custody of the lamb and Bicka.

Mary’s rain gauge says 93mm of rain since last I measured. That’s I suppose o track for an annual rainfall of over 700mm.

Hawkes Bay Weather:9°C—21°C; no rain [83.4]

An absolutely stunning, beautiful day; not warm but sunny and clear deep blue sky. I went round takng photos of the wysteria, full of honey and bumble bees, and the fresh lime green foliage of the Lyriodendrum and oaks. A white bantam hatched some chicks; there are 5 bantams sitting in makeshift nests around the place.

Lunch with Marjory and Brian Cobbe and friends – their tenth aniversary of moving to Hawkes Bay. Then I ferried Karola and her old teacher Hiliary Jeffries to their Saturday meeting of the Graduate Women’s Association (average age, 75 if it’s a day).

Late afternoon, Karola did some work in the tree planting area and I continued with a bit of fencing. Clocks “spring forward” tonight.

Hawkes Bay Weather:5°C—17°C; no rain [83.3]

Overcast day ended up sunny and, in the sun porch, warm.

Chainsaw sharpened; 2 hand augers for making holes in strainer posts also sharpened – at the Saw Doctors in Omahu Rd.

Karola and I each signed up for the KiwiSaver programme, a government-sponsored way to get people in New Zealand saving for their retirement. A little late in our case, but we might as well take what’s on offer as it’s coming partially out of the taxpayers pocket anyway.

Sheep had a few hours snacking in the Island paddock, then back to their pre-lambing haunts in the Front and Triangle paddocks.

Hawkes Bay Weather:2°C—15°C; no rain [83.1]

Bitterly cold; computer work all day.

Hawkes Bay Weather:8°C—13°C; 1.2mm rain [83.0]

Cold and raining on and off all day so spent the day inside in the warm doing computer stuff.

Hawkes Bay Weather:6°C—13°C; 2.8mm rain [82.9]

Helped by Karola I chainsawed up quite a pile of oak logs left by the main entrance when HB Tree Surgeons did major cleanup of the oaks around the garage some months back – limbs were in danger of falling, broken and just hanging in the air, caught by other branches. More than a trailer load of firewood; we sold the trailer full to Janet Scott next door.

Mike Croucher came and mowed the lawns, at last. Big improvement.
Hawkes Bay Weather:4°C—13°C; no rain [82.7]

Today, after driving the Fergie to Hawkes Bay Tractor Dismantlers for a service, I did a bit more fencing while Karola spent much of the day mowing nettles for special compost. Mary’s 84th birthday, but that’s no record in our family.

Chased 3 ewe lambs off the lawn today; two just jumped down into the ha-ha but the other one did a stationary jump, more of a hop, straight over an 850mm netting fence. Energetic little blighters; maybe motherhood will slow them down.

Hawkes Bay Weather:11°C—19#176;C; 8.8mm rain [83.1]

Most of the day sunny and warm, turning to rain in the evening.

Karola and I cleaned out gutters on the east verandah using the Fergie front end loader as my aerial platform. Really we should hire a tall mobile platform and hose out all the gutters now that autumn and winter have gone.

We also tried out the newly shortened drive train for the new mulcher. To begin with I revved up the Fergie and stuffed in the largest branch I thought it might cope with, around 10cm as per the brochure. Twenty minutes later I had unbolted the chute plate and unjammed the knives and bolted it all back together again and we were ready with a sensible test. it worked well and Karola mulched one of her smaller piles just to celebrate; she says it “exceeds expectations” – where do they get the language from these days, sounds just like IBM. When I was putting the mulcher onto the tractor I got my mousing finger pinched quite badly and it bled a bit and has gone all blue, hope it recovers else I’ll have to train another finger to press the mouse buttons. As it’s Sunday we decided to limit our mulching to the quick test run.

Temporarily fastened three gates across the wide end of the northern entrance off the orchard drive so that the ewes can snack on the lush clover and grass in the entranceway. The entranceway is a V shape pointing towards the house with a gate across the narrow end, as you’d expect so usually the entranceway isn’t grazed, it’s part of the orchard drive. Hence the temporary gates as a fence across the wide end.

Moved water trough from near the big shed in the orchard into the newly sown wilderness paddock. Did the tug test on the new grass and it’s nearly strong enough to be grazed lightly. If the grass tears when you pull it, if it doesn’t come up by the roots, then it’s probably safe to graze.

Karola’s lamb has developed some small cold sores on its bottom lip and Karola, having taken her new sheep vet book to heart, belives its got orf or scabby mouth, a virulent, contagious virus which can be transmitted to humans. One just has to let it run its course, apparently. Now we find out. I have photos from 2002 of what must have been orf. In that case they were sheep not lambs and it was much worse than Karola’s lamb has. Kaz said at the time that it was caused by the sheep nibbling Bathurst Burr, a very prickly weed that we get in late summer, He was right, it’d be the places they got prickled that’d let the virus in. Oh well, at least we won’t blame Crystall for giving Karola an infected lamb, it probably picked it up from here.

Hawkes Bay Weather:11°C—22°C; 4.0mm rain [82.3]

Protracted wander around Karamu Homestead today, taking photos and noting some of the many things to be done; there’s no shortage of outside jobs for the next year or so.

Late afternoon we went, with Bicka, to Graham & Tracey’s place 40 mins up the Taihape Road (on the Tochwood Books property), first to take a look at Graham’s proposed route for cabling his house to the Touchwood Books office for broadband; secondly to have a relaxed, warm, convivial evening meal with Graham and Tracey. Bicka ate in the kitchen and then spent much of the evening lying on a bed next to a soft toy beagle. Bicka is at ease here socialising with the other dogs, so I suppose she remembers smells from her holiday camp stay in July/August.

Hawkes Bay Weather:9°C—17°C; 1.0mm rain [83.1]

Some light rain in the morning but we went into Hastings shopping anyway. Picked up Ben’s chainsaw and discussed lawn mowers and bought another optical mouse. In the afternoon we finished re-erecting the netting fence Karola wanted relocated, the segment by the lime tree. Late afternoon Karola went back into town and picked up her morning purchase of yet another 2nd hand mower. She now has 3 mowers, not including my flail mower and the paddock topper.

Karola’s ram lamb seems to think life’s a joy; it gambols quite unnecessarily and unexpectedly, that twisting leap where it lands facing sideways. It also gallops afer me or Karola down the hall and across the lawn. I try to console Bicka that we don’t really care for lambs at all; she’s not convinced. The ram lamb is called Ben, he’s one of twin rams and he’s the twin that travelled.

I recently ordered a tool for crimping ethernet plugs on the Internet, on TradeMe.co.nz, from an outfit called Carterton Ryan which turns out to be based in Palmerston North, not Carterton at all. Nothing arrived for a week so I contacted them yesterday and it arrived this morning.

Evening spent filling in a long questionaire from the Guardian Trust for our new financial advisor, Brien Mahoney.

Hawkes Bay Weather:7°C—16°C; no rain [83.1]

Karola got the tandem trailer a warrent of fitness (overdue by over a year it transpired) while I went into Hastings to the dentist and shopping.

Mail brought an account from Williams & Kettle for the ram lambs; 11 lambs netted $680 plus GST.

Brien Mahoney came in the afternoon and we had another round of family finances.

Weather is brightening.

Hawkes Bay Weather:12°C—17°C; 0.3mm rain [83.1]

Just a bit too wet for anything outside so the day was spent in the never-ending task of computer housekeeping.

Computer flat screens really do come clean with a 50:50 mixture of Isopropyl alcohol and distilled water.

I am now ready for hosting niece Tessa Wier should she take up our invitation for late October to come and here do some preliminary design for her dad’s website. I have relevant books galore, though not the patience to read them all myself.

This time the computer configuration on the Karamu Homestead network is as follows:

• Karola’s old Windows machine in her study is unchanged, in fact she’s regressed to having the elderly, small CRT screen she had last year. The middle-aged HP printer/scanner/copier remains attached to her machine
• The old IBM tower Windows system in the garage office remains there with attached elderly HP printer/scanner/copier
• My treasured Mac Mini now moves to the guest bedroom at the top of the stairs where it hooks directly into wires going across to the garage office and out onto the wilds of the Internet. It sports the svelt flat-panel screen that I’d earlier bought for Karola – needed so it fits on the small desk in the guest bedroom. This machine is my network server, it sits on an elegant 250GB LaCie disk unit made to the same dimensions and style as the Mac Mini itself
• The IBM loaner TP40 laptop has its own keyboard and 19″ flat screen on a table by the door in my study; this is the system that Tessa would borrow
• My new Macbook Pro now has pride of place on my desk, facing the door in my study
• Behind me, on my left, sits the newest HP printer/scanner/copier; it is a separate machine accessed by the wireless portion of the Karamu network

Hawkes Bay Weather:12°C—15°C; 3.3mm rain [83.0]

Went like clockwork. Lambs were fairly cooperative in allowing themselves to be penned up and then they actually hopped into the stock crate on the trailer out of curiosity and comradeship. An hour from start to finish with them being herded (shouldn’t that be “flocked”, only “herds” should be “herded”) into the sales yard pens.

Rest of day spent with Karola sweeping up leaves off the lawn and elsewhere – they stop the grass growing – and me inside getting ready for a visit from our new financial advisor tomorrow.

Hawkes Bay Weather:13°C—17°C; 0.5mm rain [82.9]

Some days you just get stuff done, and this was one of them.

First to bury the dead Romney ewe – passed away peacefully in a wheelbarrow in the green shed overnight.

Then to see Kerry of Hawkes Bay Tractor Dismantlers taking with me the two old and bald Fergie tyres (and their inner tubes) that had been languishing in the bamboo since I got new boots for Fergie many months ago. Kerry sold me these bald tyres and now he’s agreed to buy them back – they do still function and are a popular size and state of baldness for holiday beach-side or lake-side properties with a tractor for towing the family speedboat up the beach and across the lawn. Kerry had been wondering when I’d come by and retrieve my mulcher drive-shaft which he’d cut to the right size a couple of months ago, before we went to England. I booked the Fergie in for a “10 year service” next week; in fact I doubt the Fergie has had a service in the last 20 years.

Then another excursion with the landrover and trailer, this time to Gardenmaster in search of a stock crater for the Briford trailer (GardenMaster in Hastings is where we bought the Briford tandem “8×4” trailer a couple of years ago). To my surprise and delight they happened to have the exact make and size of crate I wanted just lying against a shed where it had obviously been for several years. They are only occasional stockists of Briford trailers and accessories, Briford is in Christchurch and GardenMaster just bring a couple of trailers back “on spec” when they have a delivery down that way. I arranged to come back in the afternoon to discuss the stock crate price and get it fitted to the trailer. From there we went to Hawkes Bay Lawnmower Services and dropped off Karola’s English Honda lawn mower for a service.

Then we went to a Hastings car sales yard to inspect a car that Karola’s brother Kaz wanted to consider buying for his daughter Amy Wier. Kaz just sent me a curt e-mail yesterday with a link to the Trade-Me website entry for the car and asked me to take a look. The address of the garage was wrong on the Trade-Me web page and of course when we finally found the right sales yard it turned out the car had been sold several days ago. However there was a slightly more expensive and much smarter VW Golf hatchback still for sale so we took photos and particulars and e-mailed them back to Kaz after lunch. Finally we called in at the local garage and filled up 2 x 10 litre cans with diesel and 2 x 5 litre cans with standard petrol for lawnmowers and for making the 2-stroke mixture for chainsaws.

Lunchtime, Barbara O’Sullivan, Karola’s ex-cleaning-lady came for lunch and a chat. After lunch I went back to get the stock crate and got it for under $400 even though it was unused (but a bit rusty); a new one is $440 in Christchurch and probably $550 or more when transported up to Hawkes Bay. In addition, because I got it before Wednesday we’ve saved the cost of hiring a trailer to take our lambs to market. Most satisfactory. I also dropped off brother-in-law Ben Bell’s chainsaw to have its 2 chains sharpened, to be cleaned, and to adjust the oil flow – so I can return it in good shape.

As the afternoon drew to a close I did a bit more on the fence – 3 post holes. All in all quite a satisfactory day.

Hawkes Bay Weather:8°C—21°C; no rain [83.3]

Quiet day; some progress on moving the piece of fence, 3 stays and a couple of wires installed.

Sick Romney ewe has not died yet; more Ketol but I think she’s just very old and is starving to death, she hasn’t eaten for a few days now.

Bouncy wether lamb #630 put in with the ram lambs to go to market on Wednesday. He’s not the only escape artist as today I found ewe lamb #616 on the lawn where she wasn’t supposed to be.

Hawkes Bay Weather:7°C—20°C; 0.5mm rain [82.4]

Final 90 apple logs sawn into manageable metre-long lengths and stacked as shelters for the sheep under the eucalypts.

Karola is a picture walking through the paddocks with little lamb gambolling behind.

One of the Romney ewes which has been very thin and sick looking for several weeks finally has had a turn for the worse. We administered Ketol booster and propped her up between two hay bales but I don’t hold out much hope.

Jenny Hendery came over for dinner bringing her little trailer for Karola to borrow for a while. We all watched a DVD film Karola is fond of, Caro Diaro (Dear Diary); I bought it for Karola last week. It’s mildly amusing.

No moon and a very starry night, something I never saw in England or America because of the “light polution” of nearby cities.

Hawkes Bay Weather:5°C—21°C; no rain [82.9]

Pukekos everywhere, several tuis high up in the eucalypts, but I haven’t seen the herons for a while. Tons of peach blossom in our orchard and next door, behind the hydroponics.

Karola took Bicka to the vet this morning concerning a red and slightly swollen area on her right back leg that she licks a great deal. Antibiotics but nothing to stop her licking although Graham & Tracey say that Swedish Bitters (from your local natural medecines store) works.

I switched the (working) front door chimes from the front to tthe back door; we installed the same bell-push and wireless chime (plugged into a wall power socket inside the house) but for some reason the back door chime stopped working last year. Recognising that very few people come to the front door first, it made sense to switch, especially as I was expecting a “signature required” courier delivery today. In the end the postie brought the item (some ethernet plugs, $22) and it didn’t need a signature after all.

Another 40 apple logs sawn up today. In addition the new large gatepost is now planted near the lime tree.

Karola’s fancy Honda lawn mower stopped working mid-morning, probably because it baulked at mowing large pine cones. I undid a cover and discovered a chain thrown from its sprocket and fixed that only to find we couldn’t start it despite adding petrol, checking oil, checking spark plug for a spark, cleaning air filter. Hmmm. I seem to recall that I read about it when we bought it in England many years ago that tipping it on its side while it had petrol in the tank was a “no no” but I can’t remember what, if any, the remedy was and we’ve mislaid the manual. It was the first mower we had which was genuinely easy to start (until now) even though it wasn’t an electric starter but one of those engines you pull a rope to start.

Karola is enjoying her orphan lamb though Bicka isn’t so sure she (Bicka) needs the competition.

Geese decided to fly out of their enclosure and land amongst the vehicles by the back door before stalking off onto the front lawn – they are just insatiably curious I think and I’m sure they only come and eat the maize I offer each day out of politeness, they have plenty of grass.

Ram lambs booked into next Wednesday’s sale – they need to be there before 10:00am. We’ve decided to include the lone wether lamb as we believe he is a ringleader in ignoring our electric fences and in jumping up and down the ha-ha.

Still looking for a stock crate for our Briford 8×4 tandem trailer. Inside tray measurements: 1230 x 2440 mm. Found one on TradeMe but in Omaru, “buyer collect” [sigh].

Hawkes Bay Weather:8°C—20°C; no rain [82.6]

Landrover went in for a service and warrent of fitness at 9:00am – we collected it at 5:00pm and they’d also cleaned the outside, it gleamed.

Paul arrived at 9:30am to view the ram lambs. As feared he isn’t interested but suggests we sell them in next Wednesday’s Stortford Lodge sale, which we intend to do. They have improved since he last saw them but really are far from the barrels of muscle and fat of our lambs of earlier years. Paul said it’s mainly due to the weather and lack of good grass.

And 40 more apple logs chainsawed before lunch, leading yet again to a rather long afternoon siesta on the sun porch.

Meanwhile Karola spent much of the day mowing nettles. Large patches of nettles have sprung up in shady or sheepworn areas. And of course the orphan lamb requires 4 – 5 good feeds a day.

The ewes have tidied up the lawns and had a good feed there so I’ve banished them back to their paddocks and taken down all the electric fencing.

Missing bantams have returned today, “and now there are 10” including the white one sitting on eggs in the green shed.

Hawkes Bay Weather:3°C—19°C; no rain [82.7]

Cold night with local orchards having their frost protection windmills going all night. I slept through most of it but Karola got not a wink of sleep.

Chainsawed another 40 apple logs.

Karola called up Progressive Meats and Paul is coming round tomorrow at 9:30am to size up the 11 remaining ram lambs. So, the late afternoon was clean-up time for the ram lambs; 5 of them had dags, 3 of a rather liquid consistency (too much information, I hear you cry – but this is a farm log). With much use of the kitchen sissors and scrubbing brush and warm water Karola tidied up our loose-bowelled ram lambs while I sat on their heads to keep them still. When I say “kitchen sissors” I of course mean the sissors once used in the kitchen but now reserved for outside farming activities.

I put a large wooden foot on the big (2.7m long, 200+mm diameter) gate post to go in near the sublime lime tree off to the right as you come in the original front gate. That involved chainsawing a slot to rest the foot in, comprising a 400mm long piece of quarter-round fence post, and then wiring the foot to the post using large numbers of big staples.

I can only count 8 bantams today, including a white one nesting in the green shed.

Karola’s lamb seems to be thriving; it’s spending the days in Bicka’s old pen and the goat house I made a couple of years ago.

Hawkes Bay Weather:1°C—17°C; no rain [83.3]

Cold but sunny day. I let the ewes onto the lawn and the ram lambs into the geese enclosure for a bit of variety.

Crystal Ladbrooke turned up as expected at 9:00am with an orphan lamb she’d got from a friend and found she couldn’t look after – so Karola has her first orphan lamb of the season to feed. It seems a well behaved, healthy ram lamb, so far.

I chainsawed up 40 apple trunks, out of 250. Ground is drying out quickly so I expect to get some fencing done this week.

Hawkes Bay Weather:1°C—15°C; 0.1mm rain [84.1]

Quiet, safe journey home. Meal in a Carterton cafe – very good venison pie made on the premeses.

Counted animals: 28 ewes/ewe lambs, 1 ram, 11 ram lambs. 10 bantams, 3 geese, 1 cat, all present and correct. Doesn’t seem very different from a week ago except that the avenue oak trees have begun to show their typical spring bright green leaves.

Hawkes Bay Weather:3°C—13°C; 2.2mm rain [?]

Started out another sunny, calm, cool day, turning to gentle rain by nightfall. Quiet day for me. In the afternoon Karola went with Bridget and children to an exhibition of Michael Tuffery at the Pataka gallery in Porirua. Bulls sculpted out of cornbeef cans etc.

Hawkes Bay Weather:9°C—16°C; 18.9mm rain [?]

Bridget, Chris, Natalie & Alex(andra) came out to the Days Bay beach this morning, joined by Penny Dallimore & Brian, her partner, and Lulu, their 1-year-old child.

Then we went in to sister Gill & Ben’s place in Seatoun Heights for lunch and to cut down a eucalypt tree – about 200mm thick at the base and 4m tall. In return we’ll bprrow their chainsaw for a couple of months so I can finish cutting up the old apple tree trunks still to do in the Front paddock at Karamu – there are about 300 to do I think.

Finally we went to Bridget & Chris place in Khandallah and ate Karola’s chicken caserole she’d prepared for them earlier.

Hawkes Bay Weather:5°C—17°C; no rain [?]

Beautiful day, sunshine and gentle breeze, harbour sea like a millpond-ish. Karola went shopping in the morning and late afternoon went in to see the granddaughters and then on to a concert (Wagner) with grandmother-in-law Anna More. I cleaned out leaves from drains; the Kowhai and Wattle trees near the back door drop huge quantities of small leaves and seeds. Rest of time taken up with walking Bicka on the beach and reading. I have a backlog of half a dozen Economists and it’s surprising how long they take to read.

Hawkes Bay Weather:0°C—13°C; no rain [?]

We walked the length of the beach and round the corner to pick up a paper from the garage, then did the saddle walk up and over the ridge and back down to our Pitotoi Rd flat. Last time we tried it a big slip had laid waste a 40m wide gash in the clay and rock hillside, extending up the hill for a couple of hundred metres and felling several large old beech trees; the track is open again and the surrounding bare clay has been replanted with native trees and toitoi.

Increasing fine spells and the faintest of breezes, Kirsty Faulkner and Bruce Utting came to dinner. A good time was had by all.

Hawkes Bay Weather:0°C—11°C; 0.1mm rain [?]

Raining with occasional sunny spells. Another peaceful morning by the fire, tinkering with my latest chookhouse design, optimising the use of standard 8′ by 4′ (2400 x 1200) expensive sheets of plywood.

Karola went in to be with the granddaughters again and brought Mary out for pleasant and filling afternoon tea by the fire, looking out at the harbour. After taking Mary back to Karori we met up with Gill & Ben back fresh from their Australian adventure – including brazen wallabies and terrible storms (I call 800+ mm of rain in 2 days ‘spectacular’ indeed). Bens niece Kate and partner Ross joined us for dinner at Elements in Lyall Bay – quite expensive but very good food.

Hawkes Bay Weather:3°C—12°C; 3.8mm rain [?]

Now this is a holiday. Karola has gone off into town to see the granddaughters and here I’ve had the morning reading in front of the fire with a view out into the harbour and gusty squalls of rain rattling the chimney, cup of ‘gumboot’ tea to hand. Bliss.

In the afternoon we went to see Charles Bagnall and admire his new house – the one he’s building on a precipice halfway up a mountain a couple of bays away with views across the harbour to Wellington, out to the harbour entrance, and back almost to the Hutt river. He has designed every bit himself; it’s low maintenance, energy efficient, and includes a self-contained bed-sitting room downstairs for future income. If the drive up from the main road weren’t such a pig – very very steep and winding and narrow – it’d be an incredible place to live. Charles owns much of the gully in front and alongside the house and cannot be built out; you can only see glimpses of two other houses, it’s very private.

In the evening Karola cooked a meal for Bridget and Bridget showed me a little of the programming she’s being doing over the last couple of years – a large application providing project management tools and reporting for her husband’s business, all on the Web and providing reports and graphs all in printable PDF format. Smart girl!

Hawkes Bay Weather:8°C—21°C; 10.5mm rain [?]

Set off mid morning to Wellington; another beautiful morning here. We stopped off in Waipawa to pick up my last evening’s Trade-Me purchase of a “spinning jenny” for winding/unwinding fence wire; the seller was working on some of his farm about 2km out of Waipawa.

Had lunch in Dannevirke – rather average – and then had afternoon tea with Lucien Johnson (Cecilia Johnson’s son) at Cecilia’s house in Pukera Bay – while I installed a free “anti-virus” program on her PC. Dropped in to see Bridget in Khandallah for an hour and then on to Days Bay. Going to be stormy in Wellington soon, says the TV forecast and it was bracing and enjoyable taking Bicka for her evening “constitutional” along the Days Bay beach around 7:00pm.

Hawkes Bay Weather:6°C—19°C; no rain [83.3]

GST for August done. One of the strainer posts on the fence Karola requested be adjusted is now in place – the digging is exceptionally soft without being sticky. Karola continued mowing some of the rougher areas of the garden. We learned that, as I feared when I saw the lawns hadn’t been mown while we were in the UK, Mike Croucher (Garden Groom) had a heart incident and has been off work for several weeks.

I saw a magpie attack a goldfinch today, exit one goldfinch. There’s a lot of dead small birds about so I wonder whether it’s all down to the magpies or whether someone local is poisoning birds eating their crops – I don’t think it’s Craig Vernon, the hydroponics vegetable grower next door. The grey heron is still around and I hear tui in the trees all the time.

Dabbled on Trade-Me this evening – bought 305m of blue “cat 5E” telephone cable for possible use in connecting Graham & Tracey’s house to the nearby Touchwood Books office, which has broadband. Saved about $30. Also bought a 2nd-hand “Spinning Jenny”, almost new, after a bidding contest that lasted all afternoon I somewhat unexpectedly won the auction; hope I didn’t pay more than it would have cost new; I did check out a few online prices but couldn’t get an exact match – maybe I saved $40, maybe I paid $24 more than it would cost new. Quite fun, anyway.

Hawkes Bay Weather:2°C—19°C; no rain [83.3]

Spent 4 hours last night and this morning writing a short Javascript program for Bridget; as usual the end result was only partly successful. Amazing how quickly one forgets stuff these days.

More satisfying was my start on moving a 20 metre stretch of netting fence so that Karola has room to plant a holly hedge along it. The netting fence comes out at right angles to the roadside boundary fence and ends where the old wooden gate guards the track onto Karola’s grass bridge. In its new position that piece of fence will run parallel to the house rather than at right angles to the road. Today I undid the wires and removed 3 ordinary 1/4-round posts and 2 strainer posts.

Graham Harvey and Tracey Craig came to dinner; Karola made a large beef casserole followed by rhubarb crumble. They brought fox terrier Henry with them and Bicka had a great time playing.

Hawkes Bay Weather:10°C—20°C; no rain [83.8]