It’s nice to laugh on a Monday morning, well, Monday afternoon (I’ve actually been working today – albeit a MAF fact sheet on deferred grazing…) so I thought I would share this story from the stuff website.

A Dunedin man could be in hot water with his fiancee after he ended his stag night in police custody for allegedly smashing a shop window with a ball and chain. The 32-year-old allegedly swung the “seriously heavy” ball and chain at a shop window about 2am on Saturday, after friends attached it to his leg during celebrations, the Otago Daily Times reported. He would appear in court on Thursday facing one charge of wilful damage, just days before his wedding next weekend, Senior Sergeant Mel Aitken said. “I think he’s feeling worried because his wife-to-be took the phone call (from police),” she said.

Not that I have been to a stag party before, but here I was thinking they were a lot tamer than they used to be!  It’s ok, you’re safe, I won’t discuss my own hens night (mainly because I can’t remember most of it).  The best hens do I have been on was a trip out to the gannets at Cape Kidnappers on the tractor trailers (try drinking wine on one of those). But that’s another story.

Stories used to run rife (or was it just in the movies) about grooms turning up with full leg casts (fake ones) or waking up on a train to the other side of the country two hours before they’re supposed to be  at the altar.

I have vague memories of a few with rural twists including dousing the groom in pink gorse dye (try washing that from behind your ears and up your nose just days before the wedding, not to mention more private parts that won’t be seen in the photos.)

Another had super glue applied to  a tender place. Let’s not go there. Removal was probably rather painful. Not a job for the chief bridesmaid

As the closest neighbour (and formerly a nurse) Mum was roped in to administer assistance to one guy on the night of his stag do in a local woolshed (back in the 80s, we were so classy) after he got covered in tar and they had to put holes for his nose etc so he didn’t croak it (or am I letting my childhood memories go a little too far – Mum, explain please if you wish…)

Any how, if you have read any of my previous blogs about procrastination (please feel free to use the little search engine there!) you will understand me when I say I have to go and find something to do inside to save me from doing any more work.

  

  

As lunchtime approaches, I am pondering what to talk to Jamie Mackay about on his radio Farming Show today.

The weather? Flooding in Gisborne after months of drought conditions? My hay paddock already looking like a lush green carpet (so much so I couldn’t raise a hug from my pet cow yesterday because she was far too busy consuming it) or the mushrooms popping up around the place (I have seen my neighbours out with their icecream pottles but unfortunately none have popped up here …. yet).

Usually this blog is looking at very light glimpses of life in rural NZ. Bringing up a family on a farm in provincial New Zealand and remembering my childhood on a farm. But people often ask me what I write about for a living (as opposed to blah blah blah on here). So here’s a glimpse.

The next Federated Farmers magazine, National Farming Review, has two very different pieces with my name on them.

One is promoting Farm Day 2010 – when dozens of farmers across the country (including the ones I interviewed in Invercargill, Woodville and Clevedon) open their gates to the hordes of townies keen for a bit of dirt in their high heels and a whiff of manure. I’m not that cynical – I know there are hundreds of people out there who are in need of breathing some fresh air and seeing that milk really doesn’t come straight from the supermarket.

Gone are the days when people living in cities had grandparents, aunts and uncles or family friends with farms. We had family friends who lived in Musselburgh, in Dunedin, with children relatively the same age as us.

The two youngest girls would come and stay with us on the farm and wax lyrical about the cats, the dogs, the cows, the sheep, riding the horse or crashing into fences on the motorbike. We, in turn, would visit them in town and wax lyrical about riding on a bus, going to a movie, wearing good clothes every day, spending our $5 at DIC department store or buying a 50c mixture at the corner dairy.

That is how it used to be. 

I sincerely hope the future of farming is not where the other story points. Licence to farm.  The right to farm. we already have OSH, ACC and the RMA to change the nature of farming as we knew it (that debate is certainly ongoing).

Anyway, “licence to farm” is what many are calling the Farm Strategies in the Horizons Regional Council’s One Plan.

That issue is too technical to get into debate on my little blog, but the side issue that pokes it’s head up just as much is the council’s perceived “big stick” mentality. Thou shalt do. By law, under the RMA, etc, I guess it is more than entitled to do that. But I do alot of work for the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, particularly with its pest control and land management teams, and education, involvement, communication and some element of respect is more forthcoming.

Read the story. I believe it’s a fair assessment of how farmers are feeling about the One Plan, but Greg Carlyon from Horizons also gets right of reply.

If you’re in the Hawke’s Bay region, read the issue of The Big Picture newsletter that will be delivered to your mailbox soon. Many of the stories in there are mine too (so of course I think they are a nice council, they give me money).

A pat on the back for a Hill Country Erosion fund that is helping three northern Hawke’s Bay catchments (Whakaki Lake, Nuhaka-Kopuawhara and Ruakituri River). The best thing about writing that story was stopping at Nuhaka (between Wairoa and Gisborne) on a sweltering summer day and climbing (that was the hard part) to the top of a hill to get a photo of the great view over the mouth of the Nuhaka River (Lachlan ran all the way to the top and back again and to the top again before I could get my sneakers on – oh to be young again).

So it has been a busy year already…. from Federated Farmers to regional councils to Ravensdown (I’m doing a piece on EcoN) and MAF (I’m writing a case study about a HB farmer using deferred grazing as a pasture management tool).

Long may it last. I have last year’s building renovations to pay for!

As much as they love the holidays, kids are always excited for the first day back at school (how long the excitement lasts is a whole other story…)

It is with great delight that my working life is returning to some resemblence of routine this morning after working for a month around walks, cycling, trampoline bouncing, movies, games of Monopoly and SkipBo and cleaning up after marathon pikelet, pancake and muffin-making adventures.

Both my two are in new classrooms with new teachers this year (after two years of the same) so I’m waiting with baited breath for the end of the day to see how it all went.

They were asked this morning what they loved most about the holidays.

Sarah went horseriding in Gisborne while staying with Grandma and judging by the request for more jobs for money for her horse fund, I don’t think we’re going to get out of that one too easily.

Lachlan loved long cycles with his dad, going to the Amazing Maize Maze in Hastings, playing soccer on the front lawn with his cousins from the South Island and seeing kiwi and eels at the Mt Bruce wildlife centre (having McDonalds for lunch that day also warranted a mention).

My favourites included the weather holding out long enough for me to get my beloved long drawn out day at the beach in Gisborne (going after breakfast, swimming til 11ish, going home for lunch to escape the heat of the day and going back at 3ish til the lifeguards knock off at tea time). 

Beating that this year though was the visit of one of my sisters and her family from Dunedin. While they didn’t get treated to the blazing summer sunshine that Hawke’s Bay is usually blessed with at this time of year, it didn’t stop the fun. A thunderstorm put paid to the game of cricket on the front lawn, but the soccer the night before was only interrupted by the man of the house putting a BBQ roast lamb on the table.

We did do a bit of reminiscing though, as you can probably imagine, including summer activities on The Glen in West Otago where we grew up.

I had already had a big trip back in time. For the first time since coming to Hawke’s Bay, I helped with the hay (the other farm wasn’t flat enough and our lifestyle block usually doesn’t have enough grass at this time of year!)

The heat, the smell, the dust… the annoying little dry bits of grass EVERYWHERE……

We used to “stook” the hay into three high (the Boyds next door used to stack four high – bugger that!) Five in a row on their sides, four flat on top then another four on top again. Mum used to drive the rake that swept the hay into rows and Dad was always on the baler.

As I was picking up our bales one by one and putting them on the trailer behind my car to take to the shed (we own a lifestyle block remember – Dad’s hay paddocks would be bigger than our whole property!) I remembered our baler at The Glen had a sled behind it that collected the bales until there was enough for a stook and then Dad would pull a rope and release them.

We used to ride around on the back of that when we could. Don’t tell OSH.

Dad would then pick up the stooks with clamps on the front of the tractor to take them to the stack or hayshed, where, if we were lucky, members of the local fire brigade would be ready to help.

Picking up 150 bales wasn’t nearly as strenuous.

baler at work on the bottom haypaddock at Takapau

Most of my summer holidays at Kinloch on Lake Wakatipu (past Queenstown) or at home on the farm, which probably bored me senseless at the time, have formed fantastic memories.

My kids conversations this morning go to prove that memories aren’t made of big wonderful adventures that cost lots of money – they’re made of the little things that capture our senses in one moment of time.

(Five bucks says Mum will comment that I always buggered off somewhere and didn’t help with the hay nearly as much as I think I did…..)

Ninety nine bottles of beer on the wall….. or is it 696 bottles of beer in the car?

That was true for two pretty stupid burglars in Christchurch after police pulled over a low-riding Mazda 323 and discovered 58 dozen bottles of Miller Genuine Draft crammed inside.

The wannabe-beer barons had another 33 dozen bottles already hidden, police said on the stuff.co.nz website today.

I remember going on road trips with 10 dozen in the boot – but we’d bought them and had enough food for a week too!

Stolen from an email from my Mum!!

Forgetter Be Forgotten?
My forgetter’s getting better,
But my rememberer is broke
To you that may seem funny
But, to me, that is no joke

For when I’m ‘here’ I’m wondering
If I really should be ‘there’
And, when I try to think it through,
I haven’t got a prayer!

Oft times I walk into a room,
Say ‘what am I here for?’
I wrack my brain, but all in vain!
A zero, is my score.

At times I put something away
Where it is safe, but, Gee!
The person it is safest from
Is, generally, me!

When shopping I may see someone,
Say ‘Hi’ and have a chat,
Then, when the person walks away
I ask myself, ‘who the hell was that?

Yes, my forgetter’s getting better
While my rememberer is broke,
And it’s driving me plumb crazy
And that isn’t any joke.

A young New Zealand mother is this morning searching for the bodies of her children and husband under a pile of rubble that used to be a hotel in Haiti.

At the time of writing, her two-year-old girl has been found with a broken leg under the body of her father. Two more daughters, aged 3 and 5, are still missing.

The quake occurred at 4.53 pm local time, and was centred about 15km west of the capital, the US Geological Survey said. It caused so much destruction that authorities have no idea how many lives have been claimed, other than to say it may be more than 100,000.

It is such a tragedy – for them all, not just for the Kiwi family dragged into it.

As far as I am aware, my two are happily sitting in their grandmother’s living room in Gisborne waiting to go to the beach. I haven’t seen them since last Tuesday. Lucky to have all this time to work and do stuff around here, lucky they have somewhere cool to go like this, but also lucky they are safe.

Hugs and kisses over the phone isn’t the same.  Bring on tomorrow when I will be rolling in the surf with them - as long as I get some more work done!

I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or get grumpy when I read a story on the stuff website this morning that apparently I have hit middle age.

I’m 37. I laughed.

The item says worries about the economy and healthcare are pushing people into middle age earlier, making 35 the new 40. Research by the Philips Center for Health and Well-Being (just the name makes you cringe) showed that 40 had previously been widely considered as the milestone that defined middle age but this had been lowered to 35.

Absolute codswollop.  For goodness sake.

We are living longer. So many retired people are not sitting in their Lazy Boy with a cup of tea and Coro (no offence Mum lol) but buying motorhomes and zooming around the countryside or playing golf, going bungy jumping or cycling the rail trail with their grandies.

Middle age to me is when you suddenly realise you have no kids at home, the mortgage doesn’t make you cry and one bottle of wine is enough to keep you happy. Bring it on! (but not til I’m 50 please).

My mum’s genes dictate that I will live til a grand old age unless a big red bus gets me first.  I am not two years into middle age.  All the people in the US interviewed by the Philips Center for Blouses need to pack up sticks and move to Godzone.

My only worries this morning (apart from the 2000 word story that needs to be written instead of this blog) are watering my veges and deciding what to have for lunch.

Hakuna Matata.

In today’s world of everything beautiful and modern, I thought I would share something different – something completely out of nature’s colour palate.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rivettingkatetaylor/sets/72157623031401627/

What a nice way to spend half an hour on a hot summer’s day too.

Nothing from me today – I have a deadline approaching and a tennis tournament to prepare for (why do work and pleasure ALWAYS collide?!)

But I will share with you these thoughts from another blogger that I have just found through a mutual blogging acquaintance.

http://opinionatedmummy.blogspot.com/2009/12/defending-oppressed-narrow-gauge.html

Gardening is not one of my strong points. In fact, it is not even a weak point. Usually it is non existent.

But this year I have been behaving myself and not only have I planted five tomato plants, six lettuces, some leeks, cucumber, zucchini and strawberries…. but they’re all still alive! Touch wood quickly.

Now roses are a different story. The only roses to grace a vase in my house have been grown somewhere else. But imagine my surprise to find the three roses I do have flourishing quite nicely despite my lack of care and attention (possibly, no, probably BECAUSE of my lack of care and attention).

One was a yellow rose that Thomas bought me one year – I always used to give my friend Tracie yellow roses to remember her brother and my friend, Brendon, who died in a car accident on the night of my 21st birthday. One is a red rose called In Loving Memory given to me by Tracie’s parents when my Dad died (I gave Lynne and Ken one when BJ died). They both are covered with buds and look to be preparing for a great show of colour.

The third, I had completely forgotten about (as opposed to feeling guilty when I walk past the others for not doing more to look after them). 

The house across the road has a wonderful rose garden courtesy of the former owner.  When the tenant moved out, she asked me to take one of the roses she had put in, as she was moving to another house with heaps of roses (sucker for punishment?)

It is a dusky pink colour. That was in the first six months we were here and in the intervening four and a half years, the neighbouring trees (don’t ask me what they are) have overgrown the little forgotten rose.

I was looking for a mislaid golf ball in the shrubbery this morning (practising my chipping) when I glanced upon this little rose stem going up and up and up – in search of sunshine.

And I had to share it.

The effort it takes to soak in sunshine