December 2012

End of the year. I have travelled for about two and a half months September to November and then again end of November to early December, and when we got up to Hukatere the first time after that I almost fainted: Everything was totally overgrown with weeds! We had been up once in between and all was good. Just the last month it got warm and we had lots of rain - perfect condition for weeds ;-)

But not only the weeds were growing nicely :)

The rosemary and the silver plants are actually in the planter boxes!

 

The great news is that we will build a new bach! The new one will have a proper bathroom and kitchen. We can't wait to have a shower up there (instead of the solar outdoor shower bag), and also to not need to use the camping toilet in the shed any longer! I submitted the building consent application to the Council a day before I left for Canada (26th November), and before Christmas we had the building consent! Our Council up there is well known to be very friendly, helpful, and fast. We were not disappointed! Our current bach will stay where it is and will be my office. That way I will be able to work up there, especially write. It will be fabulous!

Our building site was also totally overgrown:

 

Between Christmas and New Year's I started weeding with our (baby-)weed eater. The building site needed to be cleared, so that the positions of the pile holes can be properly measured out and drilled. One day, Adrian came up and brought his 'real' weed eater. Man, what a difference! It was a solid 3 hour job, and while he was cutting the stuff, I kept raking the chopped weeds out of his way.

We always thought there was a ridge, but what we had was layer over layer of old grass. Adrian had to go through it layer by layer, and finally we saw the real contour of our land, haha!

 Thick layers of old grass!

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And done: The building site is cleared (for now)...