In celebration of being...

One Harf of a whole for a whole 13 years.

Watsonia, shade #127

Watsonia, shade #127, originally uploaded by Fi@PhotograFi.

Fields of growing gold

It's quite a humid evening here, and I am sure I can almost hear the grass growing outside of the study window. You see, it was a rather warm day yesterday as Northland November days go (a whole 26 degrees celsius!) and today it tipped it down with rain, the sort of rain that rivets holes in roofs and carries away small children and animals.

So all in all, prime weather for growing.

Unfortunately, due to a rather absent-minded young lady leaving a towel out on the front lawn and her grandfather running it over on the ride-on mower, causing said towel to entwine itself round the blades in a spectacular and catastrophic manner, the grass will continue to grow for a few more days yet...

However, the grandfather's swearing is predicted to continue until further notice.

I like butter do you like butter?, originally uploaded by Fi@PhotograFi.

Tractor-jam

Traffic congestion, country-style.

"Dancing Queen, young and free, only 39..."

Because your 39th birthday should be all about having the time of your life.

Assume the recovery position

It's been a very, very long day indeed and at last I get to loll on the sofa.

The reason for my malaise is due to a rather big night out - a combination send off for the four of us who chose to take the redundancy option. We're not all finishing on the same date so it made sense to combine it into one all-singing, all-drinking, all-dancing-till-2am extravaganza.

It was a fabulous night but oh! How I am suffering for it now...

As Julie Andrews would say, these are a few of my favourite things

Inspired by the simply delightful hula seventy, here are 100 Everyday Things That I Love.

Well, not love as in love love, but they all put a smile on my face, that's for sure.

1) fridge magnets 2) driftwood 3) naan bread 4) black and white photographs
5) daffodils 6) '65 Ford Mustangs 7) ducks 8) Russian fudge 9) retro fonts
10) new magazines 11) cooking programmes 12) hole punches
13) coloured pencils 14) seahorses 15) christmas tree lights 16) swallows
17) neon signs 18) lemon cheesecake 19) 1930's furniture 20) purple
21) silver bracelets 22) chrome bumpers 23) teapots 24) sandy feet
25) surfboards 26) ladybirds 27) eggcups 28) opshops 29) champagne
30) arrival halls 31) foreign currency 32) raspberries 33) libraries
34) skylarks 35) train rides 36) old maps 37) cashew nuts 39) Sunday lie-ins
40) cheese scones 41) lavender soap 42) freshly cut grass
43) stickers 44) pineapple juice 45) toenail polish 46) sunglasses
47) stripey scarfs 48) pony stories 49) cold cider 50) pianos
51) corduroy 52) porridge 53) grapevines 54) new potatoes
55) fireplaces 55) salted licorice 56) merry-go-rounds
57) Marmite 58) one hit wonders 59) tie-dyed anything 60) boysenberry icecream
61) corkboards 62) sweetcorn 63) chunky coffee tables 64) freesias 65) dinghies
66) shagpile 67) rainbows 68) garlic bread 69) seaside promenades
70) picture frames 71) thunderstorms 72) pohutakawa trees 73) merino jerseys
74) the Milky Way 75) apple crumble 76) verandahs 77) Thai green curry
78) bedside lamps 79) beanies 80) cherry tomatoes 81) iceskating
82) old wharves 83) origami animals 84) stuffed olives 85) concert t-shirts
86) bay windows 87) postcards 88) mustard 89) margaritas
90) telephone boxes 91) rhubarb 92) gumboots 93) otters 94) toasted bagels
95) breaking waves 96) gramophones 97) bubblewrap
98) chorizo 99) coloured photographs 100) holidays

Care to reciprocate with your 100 things?

The "Teatoaster", my most favourite teapot ever

Tuesday means...

Gratuitous self portrait

So it's Monday and I don't want to think too hard

I spotted this food/photo meme using the wonderfulness that is Flickr and the cleverness that is Mosiac Maker over at Inherent Passion and thought it was about time I did a meme, so here it goes.

First the rules:

a) Type your answer to the questions into Flickr search
b) Using only the first page of results, pick an image
c) Copy and paste each of the URLs in the Mosaic Maker

And here's the questions:

1) What is your favourite restaurant?
Flickr couldn't find a photo of the wonderful A'Deco, Whangarei's finest dining establishment, so this photo of an Art Deco style building had to do.
2) What is your favourite type of cuisine?
Northern Indian food, love eating it, love making it.
3) What is your favourite comfort food?
Cheese! A nice wedge of cheddar, tangy feta in a Greek salad, a creamy slice of blue vein on a watercracker, lashings of cheese sauce all over steamed cauliflower. Oh yeah.
4) What is your favorite childhood food?
Fudge, particularly Russian Fudge, a delectable caramel flavoured variety, popular in all school fair cake and sweet stalls (usually stuffed into a paper cup accompanied by toffee brittle and coconut ice) - it dissolves in your mouth and makes your teeth shiver
5) What is your favourite dish to prepare for company?
Chicken, Ham and Leek pie, with steamed green beans and cheesy mash on the side. This pie takes hours to make, but is always very well received.
6) What is your favourite wine?
Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc, chilled. Church Road, or Oyster Bay. Don't come anywhere near me with that bloody chardonnay.
7) Who is your favourite chef?
Rick Stein for his enthusiastic delight for all things foody. This is a photo of his restaurant in Padstow, Cornwall.
8) What is your least favourite food?
Mushrooms make me quiver in revulsion, but silverbeet can send me running from the room, gagging.
9) What is the most adventurous food you’ve eaten?
A medium rare kangaroo fillet steak. Delicious. Boing boing!

Two kilometres and ten metres, exactly

Two kilometres and one metre up the road, originally uploaded by Fi@PhotograFi.

In rural New Zealand there are no street or road numbers as such. Rural homes are designated a rural delivery zone surrounding the nearest big town or city, and are numbered depending on how wide the zone is. We live in rural delivery zone 8, also known as "RD8" and have our mail delivered at breakneck speed by a smiley bloke in a tired old Toyota Hiace van who always waves as he almost runs you off the road.

However, to make life easier for posties, we also have a system which takes the distance from the nearest main road as a "letterbox" number.

Not that our letterbox is particularly flash that is, but the succulants, bracken, moss, agapanthus and spiders seem to like it.

Just quietly, I blew it.

Okay, so I fully intended on doing a quick filler text-post/riveting dissertation on the simply joy that is popping bubblewrap before I went to bed on Saturday night, but I sort of dozed off on the couch watching Me, You and Dupree after a couple of glasses of wine and a big day of gardening and then I mooched off to bed and completely forgot, so I'm kind of hoping nobody noticed the lack of a post dated 15th of November, 2008.

Does this mean I don't get a really cool badge to put in my sidebar on the 1st of December?

Stop on the side of the road

...and take a photograph.

Jumping in the deep end

In the past month two work colleagues have announced they're getting hitched next year.
As soon as I heard the happy news I instantly volunteered my services as a photographer, an offer that was taken up with enthusiasm.
Now, both ladies are easy going and laid back and both are having small, relaxed weddings.
And one I'd call a friend; the other a close acquaintance.
So I want to take the best photos possible. I'm very excited about this, but also a *tiny* bit nervous...

He manu ruku ika i ngā awa, i ngā roto*

Over the ditch in suburban Sydney Deeleea snapped a gorgeous kookaburra sitting on the **Hill's Hoist and to reciprocate here's (almost but not quite) the Kiwi equivilant: a kotare sitting on a Hill's swingset.



*"A small bird with shining pale blue feathers on the back, wings and tail"
** A rotary clothesline

Your wise and learned opinion please...

Decor only fit for a) Pizza Hutt/pool hall or b) a particularly classy lampshade?

Back in the olden days when there was only film

I'm working on a little large project at the moment - scanning old and new photos to go in our hallway gallery. It's a blimin' mission, as our scanner is painstakingly slow, even in Greyscale mode, and as it syphons up memory I can't faff about with anything else on my PC while it does its thing.

And I have boxes and boxes of Mum and Dad's photos to go through as well as screeds of photos that belonged to the Other Harf's parents, and I also have (on very temporary loan) photos of my Glaswegian great-great grandparents to scan that are due back to my elderly Uncle as soon as possible even though I doubt whether they've seen the light of day for donks. Turns out he's quite possessive of them and keeps phoning up Dad to ask how "I'm getting on".

So no pressure.

I picked up a stack of photos yesterday, and this one fell out. I was intrigued by it, and l loved the many shades of grey and black and white in it. I have no idea who it was who passed this beautiful view on their way from Geneva, but thought it was wonderfully romantic and evocative...

Up in a cloud of smoke

So last night, while the vote counting boffins did their thing (New Zealand now has an all-new, right-of-centre government after nine years of a left-of-centre one) the family gathered on the verandah rugged up against a rather chilly breeze and watched Bruvinlaw (who is always roped into doing it) set fire to sticks of gumpowder in celebration of the foiling of the plot by the dastardly Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament 403 years ago.

I wonder how much longer, in this day and age of political correctness and red tape, will we be able to celebrate this odd, ancient custom.

And New Zealand votes...

Friday evening on the verandah

...and I feel good.
What are you up to?　

Gumboot Bootcamp

Today when I arrived home from work all the gumboots were assembled in an orderly rank on the back porch. Seeing as the back porch has been littered with all manner of abandoned footwear for weeks now, I had to stop and admire them, all standing to attention.

Then I thought, hmmm...seeing as there are six adults and four children currently residing in the house it would appear that we have entirely too many pairs of gumboots.

Of course, this does mean all visitors (open invitation) can be fully catered for.

If you're ever passing through these parts.

Home on the range

Dedicated readers with razor sharp memories may recall that six or so weeks ago I found out that my job, along with ten others in the department that I work in, was being "disestablished" and then relocated to Auckland, and four new roles were being created doing the leftover work.

We could apply for the new roles, the roles relocating, or take the redundancy package offered of four weeks pay for the first year of service and two for each subsequent year.

After a great deal of hand wringing over many glasses of wine, and intensive analysis of the situation with colleagues, friends and family, I decided to go with the latter option.

I've now been given my finish date of Friday the 19th of December - a date extremely convenient in that a) it's the day school breaks up for the year and b) the company Christmas party on the following Saturday night will double as my leaving do, woo-hoo!

It's also convenient in that come January I'm going to be an aunt, again. Lil'Sis is having Baby No4 (oh how her and I have differing ideas on motherhood!) and I'm seconded on nanny duty to look after Nephew T and the rest of the motley gang, as Bruvinlaw will be frantically trying to finish their house in order to accommodate all their offspring.

In between all the child-mongering I plan on getting our unruly, overgrown garden into shape, and spend lots of time outside in the fresh air and sunshine, away from desks and offices and number-crunching.

Come February it will be time for the big children to go back to school, and time for me to think about finding employment again. I don't know what I want to do, but I do know that this time that I need more time doing what really makes me happy and that involves spending more time here, at home.

Rodney and the Giant Thistle, originally uploaded by Fi@PhotograFi.

Fair share of the steer!

There's an argument or (in reality) a heated discussion brewing in our neighbourhood over the future of the beastie in the photo below.

Geordie Neighbour up the road found him wandering along the road as a calf, and he, along with their other two cows, spent last summer grazing on our land along with our herd of nine young calves.

The older cows moved back to Geordie Neighbour's, but this one stayed behind, and has spent the rest of his life with our lot, munching on our grass.

Now Geordie Neighbour wants to whisk the beastie off to the local butcher in time for some prime Scotch fillets over Christmas - and no cut for us.

Is this a fair share of the steer? Oh the dilemmas of rural living...

Steer stare, originally uploaded by Fi@PhotograFi.

Mt Hutt - a day way up the mountain

The last day of our wonderful South Island adventure. No skiing was done, but a lot of snowballs were thrown...



Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

For a rosier future

There is never enough time to do want you want to do in the two days that is the weekend (although I finally managed to attach the climbing roses to the verandah after two and a half years of procrastinating so they can actually climb instead of sprawl).

Next weekend our country is holding its general election, and I personally have scoured the propaganda from all the major political parties from cover to cover, and unfortunately there is no policy on the possibility of three-day weekends.

Because I'd so vote for that party.

Now I know that the world will not be waiting with bated breath on the result of New Zealand's election, but they will be on the edge of their seats waiting on the result of the US Presidential Election this coming Tuesday.

So get out there and vote whether Kiwi or American; if you don't vote you can't complain.

Dublin Bay , originally uploaded by Fi@Photografi.

To knackered to blog

It's been a large day in the gardening department and I've only just wrenched my gumboots. Need to shower. Need to eat. Most importantly, need to lie down...