s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

Thursday: After work, scooted up to Willowbank Farm to take a look at some alpacas they are selling. Picked some out. Linda’s coming by our place this Thursday to make sure our facilities are suitable (apparently, she once had a potential buyer who not only didn’t *have* any fencing, but didn’t understand why she would *need* fencing…).

Friday: After work I went busking in Cuba Street with a couple of other African drummers. Fun ! We made all of maybe a buck or two each, but met a couple new people who might be interested in joining the class. More importantly, though, we were actually pretty good ! Passersby smiled at us, and several sat down on nearby benches to listen. Pretty neat !

Saturday: Put together My Desk. The Behemoth. I’m sure we did other stuff besides just unpacking, but I can’t recall exactly what. Oh yeah, some shopping. We each bought our very first pair of gumboots ! Hee. I feel silly clomping around in my bright shiny new gumboots — it’s like I’m playing pretend-farmer. Except that they really are damned handy things — for mud (we’ve got boggy bits down by the streams), for the horse poop you don’t quite notice in time, and also just for going out into the yard or paddocks where rain or dew on the long grass and plantain stems would soak you to the knees otherwise. Damned handy things.

Sunday: Stephen has largely recovered from his (much less debilitating) encounter with (we are assuming) the Kiwi Death Flu. It only had him down for three or four days, and he wasn’t nearly as dead out of it as I was. By Sunday, though, he’d recovered enough to go to fight practice, and then come back home for The Odyssey.

Our Big Weekend Adventure this week was… going to the back of the property. Yes, we hiked up to the top of Marchant — up one fenceline and back down the other. We had to do large chunks of it on the neighbors’ sides of the fences, because our side is inaccessible in a lot of places. Wow. It goes back quite a bit farther than we thought it did. And there’s a lot more grass up there than we thought there was, too. Once you top the crest of the steep bit, it goes rolling again, and there’s all this long, long grass. You can even see all the way to the sea from up there. But boy howdy getting up there is a challenge. (Stephen, BTW, is totally my hero. I lost my jacket at one point, and he valiantly went back down and down and then over into the bush for it. I was *almost* ready to just abandon the poor thing (the jacket, that is.)) Supposedly, there was once a bridle path up the hill — we’re going to try and find that and clear it, if only so we can walk around up there without going hand-over-hand up the neighbor’s hill. (In some places, it was so steep you were almost tempted to try using the fence battens as a ladder.)

Still haven’t quite made it to the spring — Stephen tried coming at it from above, when we briefly cut in from the fenceline, but was forced to give up by thick brush and an overabundance of stinging nettles (yeowtch!). Brush, nettles, and the firm conviction that having to be airlifted out of your own back yard would be the height of embarrassment.

In the meantime, though, the battle against the gorse and ragwort in the paddocks nearer to the house has to take precedence.

No sign of the neighbor’s calf — I think he must have come and caught it himself at some point — but we still have Molly and Dolly, the prodigal sheep. They both look much fatter than their flock-mates on the other side of the fence.