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

It’s been a week !

Tuesday — LAST Tuesday, that is — Prince went to his new home in Auckland. Just when we were really starting to make progress ! Ah well, his new owner should be able to take him on from here. I’d really love to hear how he gets on; we were quite fond of him. The same afternoon, Jacqui dropped off a new dog, “Casey”, who has an owner waiting for her in Christchurch.

Casey is quite different. For a start, she’s got all her fur ! She’s at a better weight, and she doesn’t have Prince’s myriad little knicks and scars. She’s not as leggy as Prince, but her tail is really long — I had to take a look at everyone else’s tails at the dog walk on Sunday, to see if I was imagining it, but I think she had the longest tail there — and her ears don’t stand all the way up. She’s much more coordinated on the stairs, and when she flobs on the sheepskin, she doesn’t fling herself down with quite the THUD that Prince did, and she manages to get all of herself neatly on it, with her head on the floor-pillow (Prince was always sort of half-on, half-off, and as often as not it was his back half on the pillow). Prince would fling himself down anywhere; Casey goes for the sheepskin. Or else the beanbag. You could look at it as if she’s spoiled or delicate, or you could look at it as an easy way to get her to lie down where you want her to. :^)

She’s afraid of the alpacas. She’s fine with horses and traffic, was initally nervous of the ceiling fan, but is fine with it now.

As far as the cats go, if they’re not moving, she’s not interested, which is a good sight better than Prince was even when he left us. She’ll go after them if they run, though, but in the last week she’s gotten better even about that. And the cats are likewise getting much more relaxed around her. Well maybe not *relaxed* exactly, but they’ll mostly go about their business. Slow Top has even come in to lie in front of the fire not three feet from her (he likes the fire, does Slow).

Regarding toys — Casey knows how to play ! Prince didn’t, really (and how sad is that ?!). If you threw a ball or a stick, he’d just stand there, waiting for you to do something that might have something to do with him, like call him over or pet him or something. He *loved* the bounce-and-squeak Irene sent (hi Irene !!), but he didn’t “play” with it, really, so much as kill it repeatedly and then try to eat it (which was a hoot to watch, if a little bit alarming; and no, we didn’t let him eat it). Casey, by contrast, will pick up the toy (we got her a caterpillar — why is it so many dog toys come in feline-patterned fake fur, I wonder ?) gallop around the house with it, throw it down onto the beanbag, mouth it a half-dozen times, pick it up, spin around, throw it on the floor and pounce on it, repeat from the top.

The only hitch with Casey: she’s got what they call “separation anxiety”, which in her case takes the form of barking (intermittently, but thank goodness we don’t have close neighbors !) and occasionally piddling on the carpet when we leave the house for any length of time. There are two different schools of thought on this. The first is that most of these dogs have always been kept in the company of other dogs, with lots of people around as well — they’re not used to being alone.

The sort of “natural dogsmanship” theory, on the other hand, is that when introduced to a new pack (me and Stephen), the dog is going to try and figure out who is alpha. If we are not convincing alphas, then she’ll feel it’s her responsibility to take the lead. She therefore feels responsible for us, and when we go away, it’s as if children you’re in charge of wander off on their own into the city, and you can’t follow them to look after them. She’s worried about “her charges” (us). Interesting way of looking at things, no ?

So anyway, Tuesday, we get the new foster dog, Casey. We pretty much immediately have to toss her in the car again and take her over to Sean’s place for gaming. Sean, mind you, has two young daughters, something like three and five, I think. We’d gotten premission to bring Prince over to “kid test” him, but we ended up bringing Casey instead. She performed with flying colors, I must say, and won herself a young fan club. She tolerated quite alot, and when things got a little too much for her, she just got up and walked away. Perfect.

The rest of the work week was “normal” — we bailed on A&S to get some time with the new dog, Thursday was dance class, Friday was the Ars Magica game (Casey flobbed on the floor).

Then The Weekend struck.

Saturday, we tossed Casey in the back of the car (she and Prince both travel well) and drove up to Otaki for the small-farmer’s field days. Chatted with various alpaca people, and achieved all our shopping Victory Conditions (alpaca nuts and fencing staples) and then some (also scored new mats for the catboxes, 50 root-trainer sized natives to plant in the shelter belt and bush block, and the massive “Flora” two-books-plus-CD set for less than a third retail).

Then we zoomed back home to host a Day O Fun. The weather was largely crap, so mostly there was a lot of hanging out indoors. I spent the first several hours hovering defensively around Casey, to make sure she wasn’t overwhelmed by her fan club (four girls, including Sean’s pair). You hear stories all the time along the lines of: Kid pesters dog. Dog tries to warn/avoid kid. Kid continues to pester dog. Repeat a few times. Dog gives up and snaps at kid in self-defense. Dog gets put down for being “vicious”. She’d done really well on Tuesday, and the kids were generally pretty good, but neither I nor their parents had much experience managing child-canine interaction, so I didn’t want to take chances. It was awfully sweet, though — the girls brought Casey a present — a rubber doggy ball on a foot long cord, in a pink gift bag with “Casey” written on it (and mind you Hazel, who’s I think five, “only writes for special occasions”). Awww !

I *think* everyone else enjoyed the party.

The highlight was setting the old horse trailer on fire. With the new shed now keeping the rain off the hay, we wanted to get the scrap metal guys to come and take away the nasty old trailer in the glen paddock. It still had a lot of wooden bits attached to it, however, so they suggested we burn it out and then get them to take away what remained. Luckily, it wasn’t actively pouring rain on us (like it has been the last couple times we’ve tried having a bonfire), but only kind of drizzling. It burned real good. Plus, there was cool stuff like holes in the sides sort of melting and flaking and the fire coming out in great big plumes (did I mention Stephen has spent the last several months stuffing the thing with cut brush ?).

Sunday, I bailed on dance class. Stephen bailed on fighting and went to gaming instead. I puttered around for a few hours until it was time to take Casey up to a gathering of Wellington area greyhound people, who all brought their dogs to walk in a big mob in Queen Elizabeth park. I’d like to say it was fun, but with a new dog I didn’t know very well, it was a bit fraught. She growled at a lot of the other dogs, for a start — assertive, we reckon. Then when we got to the beach, several of the other owners let their dogs off lead to run around on the sand. Casey was *really* excited and *really* wanted to go running with them, but I had no idea after the growling if she’d get into a fight with another loose dog, and she still barely knew her name at that point, FORGET coming when called. My triceps got a good workout clutching the leash. Considering there were a good twenty greyhounds there, about half of which were loose and running singly or in small packs at various times, it went remarkably well. One of the other dogs bit his tongue while racing, and one somersaulted over another’s leash and landed on her butt. No fights or anything, and nobody ran off and disappeared. It was pretty spectacular to watch them racing around in the open though, I must say. Casey calmed down quite a bit by the end, and stopped growling and pulling. I think she may even have made friends with a couple of the other dogs. Kylie was once again my dog-handling inspiration, though I think even she was a little rattled by the chaos (and potential carnage).

So the dog walk, while certainly exciting, was ultimately a bit more stressful than otherwise. Though I would have stayed at done some socializing at the end, I had to race home to go to Emily’s housewarming (she’s got the cutest little place in Strathmore/Miramar). Emily as usual put on a lovely spread of cheeses, dates and crackers, with port, sherry and watermelon (some supplied by guests). There were some familiar faces from the Cinco de Mayo shindig, and some new ones as well, and the conversational topics ranged far and wide. A haunted painting was given away.

So after a weekend like that, Stephen and I were pretty well wrecked. It’s no wonder, really, that Casey decided we needed looking after. Of course, multiple puddles in the conservatory did exactly nothing to help our stress levels. :^P

Monday night, Sybille came over so we could put together a CD of her dance music — she’s doing some restaurant work and the pieces needed a bit of editing.

Tuesday was another game night back at Sean’s. We brought Casey again, and discovered that the girls had been “playing Casey” all week (I can only imagine what that entails…). Iris refused to go to bed except in “the dog bed” (actually a large-ish cat bed). There was a bit of drama, and I’m not sure that Sean and Susan weren’t having second thoughts about the dog thing by the time they finally got the girls to bed. Bless them, though, for their parental perspective. We’d cautioned them that Casey had been a little less than reliable when it came to toiletting recently, and Susan promptly brought out a thick bath towel. Old hands at toilet training, what’s a little more urine ?

We left the game a bit early because our alpaca friend Andy, from Otago, was coming in on the ferry, with plans to use our place as a base for running an assortment of errands around the north island. And I think I’ll leave it there for now. Hoepfully, we can put some pictures in, and Stephen can pick up from here…

So, these last few weeks have been consumed by wrangling large pieces of silk. Come April is Rowany Festival, the big SCA event in Australia (and probably the biggest in the southern hemisphere). Southron Gaard, the SCA group down in Christchurch, decided that cool silk banners would look good. They arranged to buy silk and silk dye. Each major group in NZ had to do two banners, one with their own heraldry on it, and one with another groups (as part of a gift/surprise). Tam, as the resident artist, got tagged with doing the banners. This involved many hours of drawing, transferring to the silk, pinning the silk into frames, painting resist onto each piece of silk (the banners are in two pieces and will be about 2 meters square when done) and then applying the dye. The first time we tried to put dye on the bottom half ot the Rowany banner, we screwed up. We didn’t realize you had to dilute the dye 1:1, and it went on too think, and dried all funny. That was depressing, as it added many hours to re-do that would piece (thankfully we were given extra silk in case of screw ups!). We also learned that there is a lot of skill involved, we were much faster at painting silk dye by the end! I should also say we got lots of help from fellow Dartonians, and we have had lots of people over these last two weekends to help with the project.

As of last night, the last of the painting/dying work was done. Now the banners get passed out of our hands to others who will do the sewing! Huzzah!

In other news, this past weekend we took the ‘paca walkies. Kerry had some over to help with the banners. While the resist was drying we had an hour or two to kill, so we haltered up Jim and the cria (though they are nearly a year old now!) and took them over to Stuarts property. Stuart has a bunch of concrete culverts that he got years ago. He is slowly using them up around the farm, but about 20 are still left standing in a paddock. These making interesting tunnels. Perfect size for llamas and alpacas.

In animal training, if you can convince the animals to do something strange/frightening/unnatural, and then it all goes well, you build confidence. These tunnels fit the bill perfectly. We started on some of the larger tunnels, and then moved down to ones where they had to duck to get through. While nervous in the beginning, they seemed to enjoy it (being curious creatures).

As we were finishing up Stuart dropped by on his spiffy new quad bike.

This past weekend was another over-booking special, starting with Friday night’s first session of the new Ars Magica game.

Saturday morning, Emily arrived at 6:15 and we lit out over the Hill to Martinborough for the big annual Martinborough Fair. There are several hundred stalls (with a 3 year waiting list to get a stall, apparently), and you need to show up bright and early if you want a parking space closer than a half kilometer away. We got there about 8:30, and by the time we left (around 10:45) it was indeed getting hard to elbow your way through the crowds. Thanks to advice from Sharon, we got a close parking space around the back. The trip over the Rimutakas was more interesting than usual, as Emily is not too keen on heights. We picked up a new kauri cutting board, an oil hurricane lamp, a merino micro-knit for me, and a bag of walnuts. I also got the card of the guy in Featherston who makes the neato leather aviator helmets.

Stephen will have to remind me what we did with the rest of Saturday afternoon, as I was so brain-dead I don’t remember. Saturday evening we hooked up with Emily again, her friend and fellow tech-writer Dawn, Susan and Beverley, and went to see “Heavenly Burlesque” at the Fringe Festival. Kewl. Especially the “cleaning lady” with the hula hoops, and the chick doing sleep-gymnastics hanging from the ceiling by her sheets.

Sunday was an SCA “war practice” which was largely organized so that a bunch of people could come over and work on the banner project that is currently living in the dance studio. That started around 8am, with Stephen making a killer breakfast for StephenR and Jennifer, who’d come over for riding lessons with Yvonne, and also Dillon and Cordelia, who’d gotten a ride with S&J. Stephen made up a printed “Chez Stephen” menu and everything. We got a ton of work done on the banners, which is good, because they are doing that Sword of Damocles thing.

In other news, the horses got into the garden and ate all our carrots, but the tomatos are going like gangbusters. Stephen and I can both eat cherry tomatoes like popcorn & Stephen’s even started making noise about getting a little glasshouse so we can have them year round. Woo ! I wonder if the conservatory would work ? It would presumably be easier to keep gorse out of a glasshouse.

Also, I’ve had two mornings in a row now that I haven’t had to unglue my eyes when I woke up, so it looks like the dryness may be easing up a bit (knock wood). My first checkup is next week.

Still haven’t got the girls back. We’ve dropped an email to the breeder to find out if they’ve scanned yet. *Definitely* going to try to get a stud in next year.

So, as our dear readers know, we have beeen very slack about updates recently. Let me try a bit of catch-up.

The last weekend in January was filled with events. Our friends Sylvia and Michael got “civilized”, that is they had their civil union ceremony. They rented out the Carter Observatory, which is located in the middle of the botanic gardens, for the event. This provided a lovely outdoor setting for the ceremony (under the glaring yellow eye of Mr Sun), and the reception afterwards was held in the observatory buildings. They had informative space-type videos running in one room, and ran periodic planetarium shows thorughout the night. Once it got dark enough they fired up the two telescopes and you could look at a star cluster in the magellanic clouds, or look at Saturn- the rings and some moons were visible! Very cool!

That same day our friend Emily arrived from Auckland. She is staying with us while she apartment/job hunts down here in Wellington. We would have dragged her along to the CU, but after a 9 hour drive she was a bit shattered.

Last week was the frenzy known as “preparing for Cantebury Faire”. This is the biggest SCA event held in NZ each year, sited about an hour north of Christchurch. Tam spent the week working madly to create two Dells, which are a mongolian/central asian garment that has been worn for thousands of years. They are very nifty, her design is a double-sided/reverseable one with silk on one side and cotton on the other. As is so often the case, doing something for the first time takes waaaaay longer than anticipated, due to the whole learning curve. She got one done in time though, so we had new garb at an event! (For the first time in many, many years.)

Canterbury Faire (CF) was fun. We went down Friday morning, catching the 3 AM ferry. This “cunning plan” allows us to get on site by lunch time, without having to take a vacation day on Thursday. Like two years ago, we traveled with Steve and Jennifer, allowing us to switch passengers between cars to vary the conversation. The event was not too hot (which Cantebury can be at this time of year), with periodic showers cooling the place down nicely. Dillan designed some very fun war scenarios, and with a hundred or so hay bales we made a fort (which we took turns defending, whoever could hold it longest won), a ship, and other sorts of battlefild terrain that we fighters (and combat archers) could run around and in. At peak we probably had close to 35 or 40 combatants on the field, which was pretty nifty. The total population at the event peaked at about 200, with a number of participants over from Australia, inclding the King and Queen. (And I killed the king the first time I met in him in single combat! Woot! The unexpected style of the Katana led him to make a mistake the the local fighters know all about now. I just need to get more tricks in my basket so I can win a _second_ bout against a skilled swordman!)

Satruday evening we left the site and drove 30 minutes south to visit Silverstream Alpaca Stud. We had met Kiet and Sheryl at many previous events, and they were happy to have us crash their BBQ. A fun evening of socializing, but we got so into chatting, we forgot to tour their farm before it got dark! Ooops! We did get a glance at their new $100K stud male (Jolimont Attitude). It would be nice to have such money to throw at problems.

One bit of Drama was on Monday night. Tam and I were helping in the kitchen to prepare dinner, as they were short on staff (and not very organized). At 5 PM the deperate cry went up “we need butter!”, as 2 kilos of needed butter was missing from the fridge. I hopped in my Ute and zoomed down the road to Amberly, the nearest town (about 6 km away). Problem! It was Waitangi day, and little Amberly’s (Pop 1100) one small supermarket was closed. Nearest supermarket- Rangiora. Distance- 26 km. Insert scene of ute zooming down Cantebury back roads at 107 km/hour (just below the limit where police will tag you). I made it back just before six, when dinner was to start. The head cook looked up from her work, said “Oh, I found the butter”, and without a word of thanks walked away. Not so impressed with that lady now.

On the way to the ferry yesterday we had a lovely long lunch in Kaikoura, and stopped for a chat at Totara Grove, an old alpaca/llama farm outside of Picton. Totara Grove is the first alpaca farm Tam and i visted in NZ, back in 1999 when we came here on Vacation. Russel is one fo the pioneers of camelid husbandry in NZ. We made it home by 10:30.

And now our short work-week begins. After the long weekend I expect a certain zombie-factor these next few days. But it was a fun event.

A little tidbit I noticed on my trip north 2 weeks ago, but forgot to mention. The airport in Kerikeri was quite small. Quite. Small. It had, as near as I can tell, 2 staff members. The plane refueled from a conventional gas pump with an extra-long hose. While waiting for my plane out a NZ Navy helicopter (one of 2 total in the whole navy?) landed, taxied over, and parked, so the crew could come into the little terminal for a coffee break!

In such a small place, there is no food service. But they had a drinks-vending machine. And they had a rack full of snacks, with posted prices, and an “honesty box” where you could pay. I think it says good things about a society when you can do food sales using an honesty box.

In other news, Tam had her big performance in the “Feet with Heat- dance your socks off” show this weekend. Our dance troupe was invted to do a few numbers (quite an honor, this is a big yearly all-styles dance show). The troupe had a big group number they wanted to do, as it had worked so well at the Yalla! show a few months ago, but the lead person was missing, so Beverly asked Tam to fill in. It apparently all went well, and afterwards they all went out to a new moorish-decorated bar/restaurant that just opened downtown. To the great delight of the Turkish owners, who suddenly had a bunch of happy, excited women in costume dancing away in the place.

On Sunday we had our first War Practive out at our place. We had 4 heavy fighters, 2 combat archers and a javelin thrower running around in the Gallop Paddock, running various practice scenarios. A really good time was had by all. Hopefully we will do this monthly, and by Cantebury Faire in Februrary we should actually be pretty good as a unit. That would be fun. Sarah and JoAnne got a surprise, and quite a laugh, when they came over the hill to collect their horses, and found the paddock full of silly people running around and clubbing each other with sticks! Added a touch or surrealality to their day.

This weekend was DA- Darton Anniversary. This is a yearly event held by our local shire. Fighting, feasting, Arts&sciences classes, archery- all the good stuff. Also a chance to meet people from Christchurch and Auckland who have come in for the event.

The “big event” which had us all nervours was the feast Saturday night, as for entertainment we were doing a play between courses (La Mandragola, by Machieveli). This play is a comedy about a man who lusts after another mans wife, and the hijinks that ensue as he gets caught in a strange plan to satisfy his desires. It was an ambitious play to try adn perform, a bit more than an hour long. Lots of lines for the main characters to learn (Tam, Sharon and I, and to a lesser extend Beth). We made it through the first act pretty well, then started forgetting our lines. Things got rather hilarious after that.

We learned some important lessons. One was that the cast should see me in my disguise before the play. Otherwise they might be trying to do a serious scene, but every time the looked into the wings and saw me, the lost it and laughed uncontrolably.

There was also some inspired casting. Madonna Leucretzia, the “beautiful and well-mannered” woman which was the cause of all the madness, was played by Geoff- a large, shaven-headed bearded fellow. Even better, Geoff played here using his “Paremarema maximum secuity prison accent”. The lovely lady woud respond to many a situation with a belligerent “Wot?” Hi-larious.

Many members of the audience laughed to the point of pain. A night none of us will forget. At least not without extensive therapy and perhaps some serious medication.

To my utter surprise I won the archery tourney on Sunday, which was nice after a rather disappointing performance in the fighting tourney on Saturday. But at least I got a good funeral! This year as a fund raiser Darton brought in the (newly formed) Mourners Guild. Fighters could pay a fee, and get a funeral. The quality of the funeral depending on how much you paid. Stretcher, pall, hearse, priest, women wailing and earing their clothes. All were available for a price. Only one person did not pay- which would have earned him a loot&boot, then dragging him away to a mass grave. And wouldn’t you know it- he won the tourney! It’s amusing as most of the audience was hoping he would lose, just to see what a loot&boot looked like.

After the event about 15 people came over to our place for a “post event revel”. Many of these people were hand spinners, and we ended up sending home some bags of alpaca fleece with them, which they will sping into yarn for us. Pretty cool. We also sold a few hundred grams of fleece to Jennifer. Woo! A sale! I will actually have a positive cash-flow thing to report on our next tax statement! :)

And today… today I was supposed to be taking it easy (trying to recover from a cold that caught up with me this weekend during the frenzy of activity and lack of sleep). I was going to take Jim for a walk after lunch, but Stuart came by to catch his errant ewe. He had his bike, and the two of us got her herded down into the yards. Only one thing went wrong in this whole operation. She ran into the mob of horses at one point (we had to move her through a paddock where the horses were), and as we were trying to get her through one horse paniced (Casey, of course), bucked and gave me a really solid kick to my left leg. Boy, it certainly hurts when a 450 kg animal kicks you! Thankfully nothing was broken- which was good because a few seconds later I had to tackle the sheep as she tried to break past me back into the paddock! Gee, and this was supposed to be a “take it easy” day! Never a dull time here on the farm.

Wednesday at A&S, a bunch of people chime up with “Hey, it’s been a while since we had a party at your place !”, plus a bunch of new people have recently moved into the area and everyone’s feeling festive, so lo, we schedule a Day O’ Fun for Saturday. StephenR generously volunteers to help us get the back gutter on the shed (so we can get the inspector to finally sign off the thing…), and we need to do some serious work on the play we’re supposed to be doing at an upcoming event. So plans are: gutters, then play practice, intermingled with hanging out, and — weather permitting — archery, maybe some fighting, etc.

We figured out after putting the front gutter up that we really need two ladders. Luckily, one of the guys I commute with (John, who brought his kids up to see the alpacas a couple months back) says we can borrow his super-long painting ladder. Friday we’ve been showing Twelve Kingdoms (SO good, so VERY VERY good), and Saturday his kid has a soccer game, so Thursday we take a break from tidying the house and jump in the ute to go pick up this ladder. It’s been raining off and on for a couple days, and on the way out of the valley we swing around a corner and –

BANG!

We fail to miss a biggish rock that’s fallen out of the bank and onto the road. Yep. Flat tire. We limp into Lloyd’s place at the bottom of the valley and luckily they’re home, because we ran out without the cell phone. We bang on the door and ask if we can borrow their phone to ring John and the Automobile Association (we have a spare, but, it turns out, no tools). Instead, he has Stephen pull the ute around into their shed and the two of them change the flat while I go inside to admire their 150-year-old farmhouse, and provide a bit of novelty for Shaunie’s two wild boys. Then off we go to borrow the ladder, only an hour late. Aren’t neighbors great ?

Friday, I take a long lunch and Stephen and I go see Steamboy at the film festival — very pretty. Especially if you like steam-gear. The evening’s anime night goes off hitch-free, but Saturday is a mixed bag. A beautiful morning gives way to steady rain, so no archery or outdoor fun, and the gutters will have to wait. We do bring the girls into the shed for Maggie and Martin’s daughters to meet, and Concetta is limping. We grope her leg, but can’t find anything amiss — maybe it’s a sprain ? We’ll have to keep an eye on her.

While we’re out there, and it’s raining, we make another unpleasant discovery: the gutters we’ve already hung are canted the wrong way. Argh ! No water is coming out of the downspout — it’s all pouring over the endcap at the wrong end of the shed. We carefully measured the drop when we installed the gutter clips, so this means the whole front canopy is off-level. Did I mention Argh ? Right now, we think we’ll cut another downspout in the other end of the gutter, and just let the water go where it’s going — the alternative being to take down the whole front gutter (which is rivetted to the clips) and re-hang it from the purlins out. Bleah. The next question is: which way is the *back* gutter slanted ? The clips are already up… Fun fun fun.

Speaking of fun, though, the Day O’ Fun seemed to be a success, although I can’t vouch for how SCAdian it was or wasn’t. Mostly it was a low-key hangout, and that seemed to be was folks were after — that and a bottomless kettle of tea.

Sunday, Stephen and I head into town for a couple more films, checking out the F69 and getting some more Mexican in between. And now, a relaxing evening at home !

Ever get the feeling that you step outside the social loop for a few seconds and suddenly everything goes wild? This happpened to us this week.

On Monday Tam ran into our friend Fiona downtown, and Fiona handed over an invite to a dinner get-together. Seems she is getting married to a young Turkish fellow (Emrah). (Married?!? She was dating?) We were a bit gob-smacked, as this really seems to have come from nowhere. We get to the Istanbul cafe last night and discover that they actually got married that day, and this was the after-ceremony celebration! Ahh! No card! No present! Oh, well, no warning either!

Over dinner we had many conversations, and one of them was not so cheerful. A friend of ours who is a government lawyer has been flying to Auckland regularly for meetings of a committee to discuss and formulate plans for a bird-flu pandemic. Apparently they have already selected the mass-grave sites. Eeek. We also discovered that the are pretty much going for the “we are an island, use that advantage” strategy. They watch possible human-human transmissions cases verrry closely. The cases they just had in Indonesia almost resulted in a border closure. I think they want to try to minimize the spread within NZ and hope to ride out the storm until mass-vaccine production can start. The estimates is that this will be about 8 weeks. Grim possibilities. But, it is good to know they are thinking and planning, which is better than getting caught with your pants down if a worst-case pandemic starts!

In other news I have spent the last 2 days helping a new friend from Australia search for an apartment here in Wellington. Robin and her SO Selwyn were over here back in November for Crown Tourney, and enjoyed Wellington. But they both had jobs/careers in Sydney. Then both their jobs started to go belly up, so they decided “what the heck”, and are moving over here. Selwyn will be over ina few weeks, once he packs the house and ships the cats (sounds familiar). Darton (the local SCA group) continues its “expansion by stealing the best people of neighboring baronies” policy!

The weekend flew by, filled with various original activities.

On Saturday we, along with most of the rest of the Shire of Darton, trooped up to Masterton for a Day-O-Fun at Oscar’s place. We forgot to bring directions, so we stopped at his bottle store on the way and had the duty managed (Ciny?) give him a call for directions. This stop also gave us a chance to load up on discounted Cantebury Cream for hot chocolates!

Most of the afternoon was spent fighting, which was fun. Oscar had brought out The Dragon, the arbalest he has spent the last year building. We were testing how hard it hit to make sure it was safe and legal for SCA combat. Much of this involved Oscar in minimum armor at 10 meters taking hits from it (as the rules wsely state that you must be willing to be hit by any weapon you want to bring). The rest of us also took shots throughout the day- and we kept requesting that they turn down the power, again and again. Wow, but it hit like a truck! I took one hit at 20 meters on my thigh that I can still feel. It hit cleanly, so that there was no deflection or give in my leg- probably the hardest hit I have taken in 12 years of fighting. My leg is still very sore. Strangly it left no mark- no bruising or swelling- yet it hurts like heck. It must have inflicted some weird deep-tissue damage. I am very glad it had only a tennis-ball tip and not a sharpened steel spike- nothing like a hit like that to give an appreciation for what period seige weapons much have really been like!

On Sunday we were mainly doing animal maintenance. This involved vaccinating the cria, drenching all the adult animals (injetable anti-worm medicine), and weighing the cria. Later in the day we decided to take Jim for a walk. I had taken him around twice the week previous, and he was getting used to the halter again. It was also clear that after 7 months he now trusts us lots more. We got him across the bridge using a sheet of ply across the cattle-grid, and took him all the way up to the end of Takapu road (about 1.5 km), and brought him back. He was a very good llama. It is a great deal of fun to be able to just go out trekking wiht your own llama. Eventually we must get a panel-van so we can take him to the beach or othewr such fun places. We also need to get (or build) a set of packs for Jim, so he can carry our lunch for us. The work would be good for him- he could do to lose a few kilos, his thighs are nearly rubbing together!

I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but I recently became the owner of, not one, but *two* used spinning wheels:

I got them at the auction house (I only wanted one, but there were two in the lot, so I ended up with two) with the idea that I’d learn a bit about how fibre gets used, so that it’ll mean more when I’m feeling it on the animals. I mentioned this on the local SCA list, and before you could say Jim’s Your Llama Uncle, there was a Spin-In scheduled at our place.

My two, as you can see, are little upright jobbies, but Dayna has herself a lovely Sleeping Beauty-style one with the wheel on the side. She’s been spinning wth a drop spindle for yonks, but had been struggling to teach herself how to use her spiffy new wheel from a book & wasn’t having a lot of luck. Maggie, I believe I’ve mentioned before, is the crazy-mad chick who spins her own thread to sew with her hand-made needles. She spent the day using a satay skewer with a knob on the end (actually a very fine little drop-spindle) to turn a pile of white angora rabbit fur into soft, snow-white thread — but she also brought a very spiffy upright wheel to play with.
Jennifer, it turns out, is (or at least was, at one point, and may yet be again) the spinning wheel equivalent of a Boy Racer. She cut back to only one spinning wheel when she moved up from Christchurch, but it’s a big double-pedaled castle wheel (another like Sleeping Beauty) with a wacky screw-clutch mechanism to let you change gears & she told us all the ways you can “hot them up” with special oils and polymer drivebands and yadda yadda. Wow.

Anyway, so we sort of taught me to spin. The hard part is getting the pulling and pinching and feeding right. Jennifer very very generously let me mess up a wodge of her slivered (meaning, carded into a long strip) wool, and left me still more of it to practice on.

And then we ate chili. Which Stephen made for us, even though he wasn’t feeling well. Yay !