Time has slipped away again and suddenly a fortnight has passed since my last post. It’s that time of year: The Homestead season of birthdays, Christmas build up, turbo gardening and long days spent doing lots of stuff that I forget to photograph. This whole blogging deal has huge echoes in my educational past; my projects (as they were called then) were huge wordy affairs backed up by facts painstakingly garnered from our set of Grolier encyclopedias and lunchtimes spent in the school library, but were always marked down due to presentation. Apparently ruled red lines under titles (two for the main, one for a sub), a graph (usually bar, they’re still my favourite), and a picture that kind of fitted the subject hacked from The NZ Woman’s Weekly (we’re talking pre-photocopier days here and I was, still am, crap at drawing) just didn’t cut the mustard. Nowadays, I wander through life with a camera in my back pocket but still you folk get dealt up the equivalent of way too many words and not enough pretty pictures. But I digress.

This fortnight saw The Resident Engineer turn another year older.

Due to a work compounded by an upcoming long weekend, she chose to delay the celebratory meal out until the Saturday which in reality simply turned the intervening four days into a party and there’s nothing wrong with that. So, while we may have had a couple of takeaways and a bottle of wine or two in the lead-up, for the official meal she chose to revisit an old favourite from our days on the previous homestead, Casa Nostra, which has become much easier for us to visit due to the upgrading of the Christchurch southern motorway. Nope, not one photo; probably for the best as it was loud and raucous and a whole lot of fun.

The theme of this fortnight appears to be renovations, with the needed timber being purchased to enable the completion of the goat paddock/tiny house fence…including a slap of stain to make it look a bit fancy. The Tiny Housers are very happy with their entranceway, complete with mailbox and solar lighting (required when one of you finishes work in the early hours).

Spurred on by the nest building of both The Tiny Housers and Farm Girl, who is industriously putting her mark on The Farmer’s old room, we finally got out the roller and brushes and started work on the kitchen-dining room. Recently, we rejigged the lighting in both areas (it’s nice to now be able to use the oven controls without the aid of my phone’s torch function and the light over the dining table means we no longer cast shadows over our plates) which left our ceiling in need of some plastering and painting. Next up is getting rid of the blue walls; I can’t wait!

As for the rest of the time, it’s been taken up by garden and animal tending, general houseworking…and just the right amount of sitting in the shade of the peach sipping coffee.

Today it’s drizzly and Colin and I are passing the day inside. There’s a stock, destined for the freezer and future casseroles, chillis and gravies, bubbling on the stove and outside the garden, despite the weeds, just keeps getting prettier.

Now, to just pay a little more attention to presentation…