Ditches N’ Hoes
Posted: May 9, 2013 Filed under: New Zealand, Random Thoughts | Tags: feijoas, Hippy Nonsense, rain rain go away, salad, sunshine, tree accident 4 Comments »
It’s nearly midnight and considering my day started at 4am this morning I should be the Mayor of Snoozeville right now. But Im up, reading celebrity gossip and learning how to grow pink oyster mushrooms in a laundry basket… hrmph.
Its been a crazy week. Work is SO much work! Weather has been totally mental here. Sunday night we lost power here and just sat in the living room with our nerdy hand-crank radio/siren/flashlight pressed against the window watching the wind push all the trees towards the ground, palm fronds whipping past us at 100km/h. At one point I remarked that its crazy we can see the tree from the front of the house at the side of the house. This is why..
It had a bit of an accident. In the morning it looked like a giant had grabbed the tree, twisted and pulled. Half of it was torn away and leaning against the house. An hour of CB playing tree bondage with some rope and a saw, and it was down. Now it’s laying forlornly on the path into our backyard. Something tells me we are going to be renting a chainsaw soon.
Oh and then the real fun started. Our driveway completely washed out, it was like a waterfall. Right before I drove CB to work we were out in the pissing rain digging a trench down the side of the driveway. CB with a gravel rake and me with my trusty hoe! So much mud… It was actually kind of fun.
Just as we were making it up the driveway the sun came out and it was beautiful. The sunset was fiery orange and we watched the water evaporate in great clouds of steam off the hills around us. It was pretty.
Tuesday we had very nice weather, and I bought all the fruits and vegetables.
Feijoa’s and a wrinkly little yellow passion fruit.
Our most healthy lunch of all time. Salad made from the beet greens and rocket from our garden, with beets, purple carrot, winter pear, almonds, cheese, hard boiled eggs, spicy hungarian salami and sprouts. Woooo! It was delicious hippy nonsense in my mouth.
Sometimes my skirt looks pretty in the sun. Lame.
So much sunshine!
Thats all thats been happening here really. I got to feed Will.I.Am today, sort of.. he requested peanuts and raisins… probably wont be posting anything for another week or so, work is mayhem. Mothers day. Pah! Bunch of mothers, is right..
Love you mom!
Lawn Gnomes
Posted: May 2, 2013 Filed under: Garden, Nature, New Zealand, NZ, Photography, Travel | Tags: birds, butterflies, doing it the hard way, flowers, garden, gardening, house, lawn, mosquito bites, native trees, new zealand, new zealand house, old timey lawn mower, tui, valley, waitakere 4 Comments »
This is our house! Its a cute wee thing in the middle of the woods and I’m so damn happy to be calling it home. To find it you have to go careening up curvy mountainous roads, make a sharp turn into what appears to be a solid wall of palm trees and bamboo and then go rumbling down a steep, pebbly, homocidal driveway and try not to disappear off either side and go rolling in a fiery inferno onto the fields below. Fun, every time.
But as the reward, you get this. Nice eh? Not a house or car in sight. Just grass and trees and birds. Tuis, spectacled finches that look like they have googly eyes glued to their heads, wax-eyes, fan tails, hawks, birds that look remarkably like Eugene Levy, little brown ones, little black ones, and one giant fat pigeon named Greg who is seriously exactly like a basketball covered in feathers. He takes immense pleasure in pooping on me when I walk under him. We are enemies. Damn you, Greg!
Come, walk with me around the gardennssssss…
Today was the day we Took Back The Yard! It involved a giant bloody pair of shears and a beauty of a lawnmower that’s leftover from some war time era. Did they have any wars in the Victorian times? I also spent the bulk of the morning picking off leaves and stems of every plant, eating them and declaring what they were before pruning or pulling them out of the ground without mercy. Everything turned out to be some kind of lettuce.
There she is! I can feel everyone in the entire world laughing at how impractical and stupid this is, but holy smokes.. its so fun. Its such a cool, simple, practical machine and it does its job really damn well. As my parents can both attest to, I detest mowing the lawn, but this was actually really fun. And an incredible work out. I didnt realize I had muscles under my arms and in the backs of my knees… ee…
Here is our glorious pile of clippings that I was very proud of! This is also a picture of our new gym.. I was sore after this.
A pretty flower. I can’t remember what these are called. Bird of Paradise? Anyway, very pretty and we have a wall of them around the front of the house.
Doing the laundry. Also the old fashioned way because we are too poor for a washing machine right now. We do it by hand in the sink.. it takes about a week to get it all done. Thats not an exaggeration.. Anybody in the Auckland area want to donate a washing machine to a couple of broke ass but loveably dimwitted Canadians who seemingly insist on doing absolutely everything the hardest way possible??
Also for the record CB is way better at all of these things than me. Somehow when I do a load, all my tshirts come out smelling like my socks and when he does it it’s like we’re both wearing clothes washed in springtime rainbows. Argh..
A tamarillo tree. I can’t tell but I think they are ripe— anybody in the Auckland area want to swap a washing machine for 20kg of tamarillos? Mmmm tamarillos, for when you cant decide whether you want to eat a tomato or a .. grape?
A little tiny grasshopper thing! I was going to say Weta but I’m not sure. We definitely have wetas here though, they look like prehistoric grasshoppers and are more amazing than they are scary. Greg likes to eat them.
Nasturtiums looking for the light. Future plans to turn this little shed into a chicken coop until the landlords notice… CHOOKS!
Looking up into the tamarillo tree.
This tree is growing beside the tamarillos and I don’t know what it is. It is some kind of fruit for sure. Feijoa??
The insides taste nice but have that bitter pectin-y taste.. hm..
An armload of the worlds most beautiful beets!
The back of the lot, not much going on back here. Just grass and some .. even bigger grass.
A nice fern that shades our garden.
This beautiful tree covered in purple flowers is my favourite. They look ultra violet against the green background of New Zealand bush and are so mesmerizing.
The healthiest silver beet in the universe. We will be eating this everyday forever.
A look out into our valley.
Celery! Growing out of the ground! I didnt know it did that!
Little pink rosebuds.
These are two of the strangest flowers in the garden. No idea what they are, and they do not taste good.
Prettiness.
Flowers.
Mowing down the foot of thick, wet grass.
A monarch sipping the sweet nectar of this lovely tree. Some kind of rata? I really need to get a book on this stuff..
Squishing a tamarillo and eating its GUTS!
All the while, a tui sits and watches me, whistling like a little old man.
The Boons
Posted: April 26, 2013 Filed under: New Zealand, Random Thoughts Leave a comment »We r 1 2 b conxd!
I mean.. WE HAVE INTERNET, FOLKS! Crikey though its like we’ve been shunned from society like a couple of stink lepers or something for years, even though its only been a couple of weeks. We’ve become all amish. Seriously, my qwerty muscles have atrophied and Im just wildly slapping my phalanges onto the keys and hoping to the computer god that Im getting it right. Is english? Oh the typographical errors!
Not to even mention the DAYS of celebrity gossipy I’ve got to catch up on. Ive been getting my fix from 4 month old womens mags on the counter of the take aways.. and they are 100% about kate middleton. Yawn.
No more stooping so low as to actually watch the couple of Vin Diesel movies we had downloaded and never watched… we have live streaming capabilities NOW!
Oh! Anyway! Lots to say, for sure, and all that. BUT its late, and Ive had very, very little sleep so Im going to go do that now.. But here’s a blog I wrote eons ago on my second night alone in this house. I was having blog withdrawal issues and just opened up word pad and pretended.. sigh…
P.S Ill email you tomorrow mum! Love ya!
April 12, 2013
Well hello there good lookin!
Whacha got cookin’?
Mmmmm that sounds mighty fine, indeed.
Oh me? Naw I’m not cookin’ jack, cupcake. Too lazy!
This blog post has started off in a weird way. You know what makes it even weirder is we’re without internet and I’m typing it into a word processor. Thats probably why its coming out all skewed. Only perverts and alcoholics use word processors. Or you know, writers…
Im home alone tonight. I’ve noticed when I spend an evening alone, I participate in a few ritualistic habits. Like, if I walk down to see CB at the White Lady, I end up walking home and I always, always get gelato on the way. I walk up the never ending hill, eating ice cream and thinking thoughts. Mostly about ice cream. Or imagining showing my siblings around the city, where I would take them, what kind of ice cream they would get. Ya know, ice cream stuff.
HOWEVER. Im at our new house! It’s a bit sad because we have both been working opposite shifts so far and haven’t been in the house at the same time. We just do a hand off of gate keys every 12 or 13 hours. Bah. Next week I will take pictures and write a serious love letter to this place, but for now I’ll just tell you about it.
Okay so.. I have the night shift at the house, so I haven’t had too much time to explore. But I get to drive up twisty mountain roads going WAY too fast listening to my Motorheads and singing with intensity, playing Dodge The Fat Hedgehog. Its properly fun. And then I rumble down our suicidal driveway through a fortress of palm fronds and see our little house. I stand outside the car for a few minutes, and listen to the valley around me. I can hear so many morepork owls, hooting back and forth to each other in their soft little owly voice. I can also hear a strange chirpy gurgly noise that my heart tells me is a Kiwi but we’ll see what google says when I get the hook up. Eeee I hope I have kiwis! Oh god right now I can hear something shuffling around by the front door and I nearly just pooped my Star Trek nightie… fuck. Its scary being here by myself with no cell signal or internet.
Which brings me to my other habit when I have the night by myself. Grocery shopping. Grocery stores are my church I think. I’m immediately at home at them and when I’m sad I always find myself wandering up and down grocery store aisles. Tonight I went to the Asian supermarket by my work. I got cheap veg, and all kinds of exotic treasures! So Im nice and relaxed.
Now I’m at home, made myself a nice pot of creamy tea and a delicious dinner. A mango and an assortment of mochi: taro, seseme and peanut. The peanut one is amazing and I totally just drooled on my shirt when I put it in my mouth. Oops. Lalala Kara dinner! I got the squishiest mango I could find. I could see other peoples thumb dents in the flesh and I knew that was the one for me. It was perfect. Mangoes are THE BEST.
Okay Im gonna watch the last Doctor Who episode for the 6th time and try to stop jumping at every damn noise and go to sleep. Night!
What Would Kong Say About This?
Posted: April 26, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »
Mr. and Mrs. Goose show Mr. Silverback who the boss really is. And it ain't Tony Danza.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Oq0gZiJxP5Q
Video by the Sedgwick County Zoo of Wichita, KS as seen on DP&F.
Moving On Up
Posted: April 10, 2013 Filed under: New Zealand, Random Thoughts | Tags: beautiful, birds, hot dog stuffed crust pizza, lucky bastards, moving, no pants time, veggie patch, weta Leave a comment »
Life Update: We moved!
Well, mostly. Everything but the bed, so.. not quite there yet. It’s going to be an adventure moving our king size mattress on the roof of my honda civic up a mountain.. so stay tuned for that nonsense..
We moved into the ranges in Waitakere and its stoooooooooopid beautiful. Our new house is a cute little 2 bedroom villa down a suicidal driveway in the middle of nowhere. Standing on the porch we look out over a valley, and you can see for miles and miles and not a single house in sight. Its so quiet. Just palm trees and pastures and birds. A MILLION BIRDS! Our house is underneath a line of Kauri trees and they are full of Tuis, and big fat wood pigeons– one of them nearly flew straight into my head and we both made the exact same sound when it happened. I sat on the grass in the sunshine and fantails zipped around checking us out. The birds were all very curious. I found a real life weta on our front door! SO exciting. We have a little veggie patch that is currently growing super tasty cherry tomatoes, really shiny healthy silverbeet, a variety of herbs and a tamarillo tree. I wish I had pictures, its 100% my dream house. I can’t wait to show you. Hopefully by next week I’ll have a few pictures. It’s like living in a goddamn postcard. Finally I feel like I’m actually living on a tropical island.
The kitchen is lovely and I cant wait to cook in it. The garden and lawn are a bit messy right now and I also can’t wait to get on my boots and do some proper green thumbing. CB and I spent tuesday afternoon having a no pants pizza party in our new living room. Did you know that Pizza Hut makes a HOT DOG STUFFED CRUST PIZZA. *Brain Explosions* I ate a whole one. Don’t judge me, The Rock would have been proud.
In completely unrelated news, my stomach has completely stopped working…
I Never Shook Babies
Posted: April 10, 2013 Filed under: Music, New Zealand Leave a comment »Auckland musician Darcy Clay. I can’t stop listening to this song. Topped himself just before he was scheduled to perform at the Levi’s Life Festival, a suicide prevention and awareness event. Yup.. dunno, song is pretty great though!
P.S Don’t get bored while on the toilet and paint your nails. Because then you have to wait until they dry and you’re trapped on the toilet forever, and THEN when you come back to bed your boyfriend thinks you have Major Poop Problems when really you just have poor sense of timing. There, just saved you some future embarrassment.. no problem..
Hot BM
Posted: April 10, 2013 Filed under: New Zealand, Random Thoughts 1 Comment »
I would like to share an interesting fact about me, Kara.
Sometimes, I get the road rage.
Mostly just when driving in a car. It happens nearly every day, though. My blood pressure rises, the muscles in my neck become taught with anger, like ropes of sinew straining to keep in all the boiling blood pounding through it. I grind my teeth down to flat porcelain nubs to keep from sharing my constantly evolving vocabulary of seething vitriol. Wowza. If something happens so often like this, I sometimes think it requires some self reflection, because ya know, maybe I am the problem. But no. It’s not me, it’s you. It really is you.
It’s you in the BMW, “Hot BM”. Like.. BMW or like.. Bowel Movement?
It’s you in the Toyota, reading THE BIBLE ON THE ON RAMP TO THE HIGH WAY. We are not in stop and go traffic by the way, we are going about 30km/hour. I hope you’re reading your last goddamn rights lady. All I can say its “Holy Shit.” Literally.
Seriously reading the bible on the highway. Seriously.
I’ve seen people eat breakfast. No not a granola bar– one hand holding a BOWL OF CEREAL and the other hand holding a spoon, and I dunno, steering with his bloody knees? God knows. I watched a women in front of me in a little suzuki wipe off her make up with a make up remover, apply moisturizer, foundation, blush, EYELINER, mascara, eye shadow, lipstick and then style her hair all down the road, it took 45 minutes. I’ve seen people brushing their teeth, popping pimples– one lady meticulously plucking her eyebrows and CHIN HAIRS and I could not look away. I watched a lady merge on to the highway with a stack of dishes on her roof, which then went sailing all over the highway smashing like fucking bombs across 3 lanes of traffic. I saw a guy on a motorcycle texting. YOU’RE ALL TEXTING! Damn it Auckland. I swear to god, I will get out of my car, and take your (tweezers, fork, mascara, toothbrush, John Grisham novel..) and stick it in your tail pipe.
BAH!
You
