While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks. Xmas 2002

Following a Christmas day of extended family fun in the rain at Wainuiomata.... we forsook all the high tech gadgetry left by Santa that morning, including several worthy DVDs, and drove up to Otaki on Christmas night, in a successful effort to avoid holiday traffic.

And the weather from then until January 3, when we returned, was glorious.

The sheep are predictably still there. I was a little disappointed that they hadn't made much progress on the grass. And after a few days, mindful of all the advice I've received that they don't particularly like really long, tough pasture, I cracked, got the huge weed-eater out & gave them a helping hand by cutting all the grass growing around & between the concrete strips. About half of the paddock they're in, essentially. The idea is that when this has been nibbled down sufficiently, I'll fence it off from the sheep, spray the remaining grass with some noxious & environmentally unsound substance, and we'll plant rows of lavender & see how it grows. (Note from the future - I never did this)

Now these sheep are unashamedly pets. We don't intend eating them & if they turn out not to serve their grass controlling purpose very well, we'll sell them on. And so they have now all been named. Pearl & Plain are the two white ewes - I believe these are knitting styles or something. The black ewe is Jazz. The two coloured wethers are George & Otto, for no particular reason.

Every time anyone ventured into the paddock for any reason, the idea was to have a couple of slices of bread handy to coax them close. I figure this is the only way I'll ever get them close enough to check they're healthy. They do like their bread it turns out. With Pearl (she's the one in the profile photo... I think... taking an early lead in the brazen "Feed me" game. Oddly enough, Otto, the chocolate coloured one, became the brave one later in our stay.

And T & M experimented with a few different things & I can report that sheep rather like strawberries, but not tomatoes

They will come if called - if they can see the bread. If you happen to be out there without treats, they'll pay no attention for a while, but finally gather close-ish & bleat like they're irritated with you & expectant. Any fast moves or noises though & they'll bolt for remote & long grass.

Most mornings, they're in the corner closest to the house - it's got shade from a big willow & a bath full of water handy. The rest of the time they're at the back in the shade of the forest - although they did start grazing the concrete strips just like they're supposed to.

One evening, I was watering the vegies & noticed they were all out in the open, butting each other, running round in circles, bleating & jumping in the air. It was utterly remarkable, so I went & got the team to come & look. They were positively gambolling. Tim later told me this means they're happy & well fed. Either that or they were experiencing a sugar rush from the large, stale panatone friends fed them earlier in the day. Although I think Brian might have eaten most of that & he fell asleep.

The setting looks rural, but there are some reminders now & then that we're in a residential zone. Byron's Motor Camp is just a couple of houses away, and I was out in the paddock, tinkering with a couple of gates (had to put new hinges on one, and my drill turned out to be inadequate & it took me 3 days of drilling, then recharging, to drill a hole through the post.), and I could hear Shania Twain blaring through a public address system. And I kept wondering why "I'm gonna gitcha good" was constantly in my head. A few days later, hearing it again & wondering why Byron's had Shania Twain on constant repeat, it dawned on me that it wasn't Shania doing the singing. And I began to suspect that someone nearby got the Shania Twain Karaoke Songbook & a very large amplifier from Santa. Yay!

As it turns out, discovered at drinkies at Tim & Mary's for the neighbours, it was the local musician practising for her gig at Byron's the following Friday night. I'm so glad I resisted the temptation to ask "OK, who's the loser with the Karaoke round here?"

Doesn't seem to worry the sheep though.

Actually, drinks at the Coopers' may have turned out to be quite profitable for us. Dave, an orchardist, was there and he reckons he can get us olive trees at a very good rate. He also said he'd tip us the nod if any local orchards are ripping out mature trees of any kind - for the cost of transportation & a bit of digging, we can score fully grown trees which can be transplanted.

SO aside from general maintenance & some looming shed demolition & asbestos disposal, the thing on our minds most is to get a picture of what we want the property to look like in a few years, and plan where the access road will go. We've got a few ideas about where we might build a couple of extra houses - a big nice one at the back of the sheep paddock in front of the forest, for us on the off-chance we ever move up there to live. And where the big shed is currently standing, we think we'll probably put a smaller house - possibly one of those barn-style jobs, up for a homestay.

Whether we keep the existing house & rent it out, or sell it & its quarter acre or so to fund some of this has yet to be decided. But the road, or driveway is the plan - once that's been decided we can start to plant things without fear we'll have to move them later. Personally, I think we could make things real easy & just follow the natural line of existing driveway & gates & we'll end up with a nice meandering road which starts at the street & ends at the forest - brilliant access through all the property & if other houses are built (we don't intend to subdivide - but we'll keep that option open in the event we sell it later), driveways can be built off the main road to them.

We came back to our sadly neglected house in town on friday the 3rd - leaving Sarah & Annette, our first paying guests (!) with the run of the place & a lot of thinly veiled warnings about keeping gates closed at all times :-) Looking forward to their feedback - I promise I'll have all the toddler-traps loaded into a skip & gone to the landfill by the next time... We'll be doing some much needed gardening & preparation for painting our place here (never any rest...) and will be back in Sunny O for Wellington Anniversary Weekend - which (not so) coincidentally, is when the Levin A&P show is on... hee hee.... looking forward to that. I'll be wearing my hat....