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

Actually, the “starlings are pests” statement, while true in an absolute sense, may not actually be true in our case, since we’re not currently trying to grow grapes, olives, or berry fruit. I think the starlings in our neighborhood may actually be helping us by eating the grass grubs. Which doesn’t make it any less creepy to see black hordes of them lining the transmission towers and swarming home to Steve’s gum trees in the evenings.

In other news, we have a new member of the Hill Club — Stephanie not only climbed Marchant with us, she made it all the way to the back boundary post. We need to come up with some goofy prize, or maybe one of those little patchlets like you get for various legs of the Appalachian Trail.

Then we went down the front, stomped around in the stream and terrorized pukekos in our gumboots. Then Steve and Jennifer came over & we played with the ‘paca, had stir fry, and talked about how telling ghost stories around a fire at summer camp is not so much in the Kiwi collective experience.

Coolness: the work we’ve been doing with the alpacas seems to be paying off ! Steve remarked how much friendlier they were than the last time they visited, and shy little Pointer actually walked right up to Stephanie and let her scrooch his head while he ate pellets out of the ice cream tub she was holding for him. Very very cool !

BTW, “scrooch” hasn’t yet made it into the Kiwi slang vocabulary, although “snarf” has.

So, over the last few weeks our hot water supply had been dwindling. This hit a crisis point a few days ago when the showers essentially stopped giving us hot water. We knew the tank was full of wonderfully hot water- it would just not give any to us! A bit of investigation on my part suggested a big air pocket was blocking the flow, but there was no way of removing it (no handy valve).

So yesterday (Monday) I called the plumbers who installed the system (which is solar hot water, not just a regular water heater). They sent out a plumber. He poked around, checking some filters and valves. He agreed that it was probably and air-lock, but could not figure out how it could have possibly gotten into the system. As part of his checks we turned off the water, shut down the pressure-tank-pump, and bled the pressure from the system. When we brought it back up- everything was fine. Our house plumbing is like a computer! Have a problem? Reboot! The plumber was a bit mystified how this could have cleared the air-lock, but fixed is fixed. And if the problem reoccurs, I know what to try first!

As an extra bonus Rasputin got to spend a few hours in the attic. He slipped in, and then did not scratch on the door hatch to be let out until many hours later. I hope he had fun.

And yesterday Azami caught her first bird, an adult Starling. I can only presume it was stupid or hugely unlucky. Either way she improved the local gene pool. Which of course we don’t need, as Starlings are pests.