A brief Taranaki sojourn, a peaceful Xmas, holding David back, and shopping

Taranaki Sojourn

On the Sunday before Xmas, after a fun dinner here the previous night at Cafe Rata with Rob, Glenn, Jane and Simon (caramelised onion, brie and mushroom pies; asparagus; plus corn, avocado and tomato salad followed by roasted stone fruit) we headed off to Taranaki. We had a snooze stop at Whanganui for half an hour or so and then on to Waitara to stay with my lovely sister Dee and family at the Holiday Park. I forgot to take any photos but it was lovely to see them all. Dee and David and I had brunch in town on one morning and bought reef shoes - somehow we have lost our former pairs of them. They will turn up very soon of course, having been put somewhere safe and obvious, never to be found again ...

We wanted to have a couple of nights at Tongaporutu so we collected Judy from Onaero and headed north. Jim was going to come up for dinner and they'd head home after that. However, as we approached Wai-iti the heavens opened, the sky was extremely black and we almost turned around and headed back to Onaero. The rain through the Mimi Valley was torrential - mimi is Māori for urine - and it was pissing down! I'm not sure why we persisted, but I think in the main it was because we had already driven 200 miles to get there and I really wanted to touch it again - more aptly, I wanted it to touch me. It's the place I consider my turangawaewae, the place where my roots are, so to get so close and not do that seemed wrong. Also, I never worried about rain up there as a child and teenager - it's where I started my mantra of 'it's only water'.

It was still raining when we arrived, so we had decided we wouldn't stay overnight - the access to the best spots for camping can be a bit dodgy in/after heavy rain. So we parked in the day visitors' carpark and the sun came out! Yay!!

Judy and I decided we would go for a walk around the front and it was just wonderful to be there.

The river mouth at low tide

Two happy women, facing away from State Highway 3 which you can see in the background on the other side of the river.

The mud and sand (mostly mud) to be traversed - that round rock is one of those accretions I am sure I have posted about before. It came down from the cliff above a few years ago, and I am amazed it was survived the twice daily tides.

The most seaward of the Sisters - used to be number 2 of 3 but is now about number 4 because of the erosion happening on the Taranaki Coast

There's 4 in view there and more forming from the eroding cliffs - the farm up there is getting smaller ...

There they are again

That greenery was at the top of the cliff before...

There's those women again!

There were several people who took advantage of the break in the weather to do the walk - lovely to see people enjoying it. Judy and I encouraged some Harley Davidson riders (younger than us but not young) to go around - they did, but went in their biking gear. We didn't stay around to see the state of their boots and leathers when they got back... But, honest, I had suggested they take them off!

We had planned to stay the night at Onaero parked in Jim and Judy's driveway, but on the way back, Judy had a text to say that the woman she'd been at yoga with that morning had tested positive for Covid. So on with our masks in case Judy was already harbouring and incubating the virus. We dropped her off and headed for Hāwera - and just in case, we weren't prepared to go back to Waitara where we would come into contact with numerous people ...

So we stayed at the Hāwera NZMCA park - a very quiet location and were up and away heading home early in the morning - so early that we didn't have brekkie till we got here!

We've tested negative each time since then, so have dodged that bullet again thankfully.

A peaceful Xmas

We were pleased about that, because we would not have been happy having to miss out on Xmas dinner at Bruce and Gary's. It's a shared pot luck meal and is always yummy. David and I avoided the meats (ham, turkey, lamb) and indulged in the vegetables as well as the salads that I took (potato; coleslaw with vinaigrette; avocado, corn and tomato with lemon, honey and ginger dressing) plus caramelised onion, brie and mushroom pies.

Boxing Day breakfast was at ours - there were lots of new potatoes left over from xmas dinner so I suggested that the chaps come up for breakfast and I'd do the things that went with the potatoes. Gary brought bacon; and because I didn't have enough eggs to do scrambled or poached for 8 people, I made a quiche with sauteed onions, silverbeet, salmon, feta, parsley, eggs, cream and cheese. It was yummy - thank you, Sarah, for the inspiration. Along with baked beans, sourdough toast, bacon, asparagus, and a medley of onions, mushrooms and capsicum, I am fairly sure no one left still feeling hungry. Leith brought along some sparkling red wine - an Italian one that could easily have me resile from being a non drinker ...

 Holding David back

David has for some reason decided that he needs to start packing (and get me to start packing) the house up NOW - and it's 6 weeks until we have to move out. (I know we are going away for a couple of weeks in that time, but even so, there's plenty of time - two weeks would be sufficient, honestly.)

Even though I had said to him once we had an unconditional offer on the house that I did not want to have the next 2 months living in a semi- or partially-packed up house, he has not been able to resist. So given he has been sorting the attic (i.e. bringing things down and placing them in the most inconvenient places), and sorting his former office (i.e pulling crap out of the wardrobe and placing it in the most inconvenient places), I have got increasingly stressed.

Gentle reminders and gentle requests had zero effect. So I had a tantrum - mini, by my standards, but there was no doubt I was very pissed off   grumpy ... (Please note that the situation has been rectified and things are being sorted but are proactively corralled now. However I notice the op-shop pile keeps being added to ...)

Apart from the house looking like a tip or an auction house or an op-shop, the things that made me grumpy were:

• being required to ooh and aah at his progress** (didn't look like progress to me; it just looked like more widely spread mess) ** there is a wonderful book called Reflecting Men at Twice their Natural Size - I think of it often when required to give praise...
• the way his crap/tat/equipment started spreading out around the house:
• in the hallway - stuff I needed to review for whether it should go to the op-shop (aaarrrggghhh)
• in the sunroom (which had formerly been my office and was then cleared for the sale process - and I liked the way it looked, just as I'd liked the way David's office had looked when it was cleared for the same reason - how short-lived was THAT, I ask you (double aaarrrggghhh)
• in our bedroom under a desk he'd parked there alongside another table with the printer on it so it was out of his way in his office (triple aaarrrggghhh)
• knowing that he would keep doing this until mid-February and that one or the other of us would be dead by then - if the dead one was him, I'd be in police custody and there'd be no need for the villa at Parkwood, unless of course, a jury of women would refuse to convict me!

 So, as noted above (praise where praise is due) the mess/tat/crap has been retrieved and confined to his office, apart from the stuff that is still accumulating in the hall for a trip to the op-shop. I've already been there about 5 times and will go again on Saturday morning.

I've done a recce of my tat (Lesley will be pleased to know) and have selected a number of cups and saucer sets that I can live without - the aim is to reduce my china cabinet count from 3 to 2. I have been in touch with Kirsty's friend Lisa to see if she would like some of the ones I can live without. She is coming out tomorrow. If there are any that Lisa doesn't want, I will take them to the op shop. I am planning to take a few to Scotland for Marta next year, so will sort them and pack them.

Please don't think that I am depriving Kirsty of them - she wants a couple of them (to remember me by perhaps ...) but has long declared that they are not her style.

Shopping

To ensure David didn't spend the day sorting and spreading and packing, (well not after 9am anyway - he did start at 5.30am though) we headed off to Palmerston North to 

• choose material for roman blinds for the lounge and our bedroom at Parkwood, 
• buy a new topper pad for the murphy (drop-down) bed in the sunroom - the current one is tatty and we'd like to leave a nice one for the new owners
• buy a couple of light fittings for the Parkwood house that the Paraparaumu store didn't have.

I'd checked out Spotlight's range online but the fabric I'd tentatively selected wasn't available (doh - why was it on the website?) and one I saw in store wasn't going to be available for about 16 weeks, even if then... 

So off to Guthrie Bowron's where I'd purchased the fabric for our current bedroom's blinds 8 years ago. We found some very lovely fabric, very similar to the bedroom blind material, and that was an instant yes.

For the blinds in the lounge and dining area, I have chosen the same fabric in a dark grey.

It was a good day to be shopping using the car to move between spread out places (Palmerston North could definitely not be described as compact). It's been very very hot and the UV rating has been excessive. Aircon on in the car and a husband who fell asleep on the way home...