NZ Filbruns

January/Early February 2023 Photos

March 5, 2023 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We’ve had a wonderful summer! My mom was here for three months (December, January and February). She left a couple of days ago, just as the weather is turning cooler and feeling like fall. We’ve been very busy canning food from the garden and going on trips, so we’re hoping life slows down a little now. I’ll soon start writing posts and sharing pictures from our week of vacation a couple of weeks ago, but today I’ll share a few other pictures that have been waiting.

We washed Miss Joy’s blankie one afternoon, and she watched it spinning around in the washer! She can hardly function without that blankie, although we’re working on weaning her from it except in bed. Slow process, that.

We haven’t seen that many rainbows this summer, because it’s been a very dry year, but this double was gorgeous.

We played a lot of games with Grandma while she was here. This is TransAmerica; we also played a lot of Wingspan.

Even with a broken collarbone, Simon can play a game with his little sister!

The inside of the strip canoe finally got a coat of fibreglass and epoxy! Now it sits in the garage and waits for the gunwales and seats.

I took the picture above and then headed for the house. On the way, I noticed Gayle chopping wood, so got his picture, too.

All those tiny green plants are baby beets! I let six Chiogga (candy-striped) beets go to seed, and these came up from the seeds that dropped.

James and his crew are building a house at the far west side of our village, about a five-minute walk from our house. We went to visit him and see what they were doing. They had built the forms for the concrete, and were lining everything with polystyrene before pouring the floor.

The girls often went on a walk with Grandma, and this one frequently campaigned for a stop at the playground. I love how her ponytails are flying up in this picture!

Book Review–A Ransomed Grete

March 1, 2023 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

About the Book:

Book: A Ransomed Grete

Author: Chautona Havig

Genre: Christian Historical Mystery, Fairytale

Release date: December 28, 2022

October 1939—What happens when you run from danger… and into a trap?

After the Anschluss, Austria becomes a place its citizens don’t recognize—especially its Jewish citizens. Whispers ripple through Jewish communities—whispers about a chalet where a woman protects Jewish children from discovery. She’ll keep them safe, fed, and far away from Nazis.

Parents are forced to make horrific decisions. Send their children away to safety, possibly never seeing them again, or keep their families together and risk their children’s lives?

Hans Hartmann arrives at the chalet with a chip on his shoulder and a little girl in tow. He found Grete waiting at the train station. Alone. But life at Chalet Versteck feels more ominous than the streets of Vienna. Children sometimes vanish, and before Hans can figure out what’s happening, a high-ranking officer appears—and is killed.

It’s a race to find out who killed the man and get himself (and probably that pesky Grete) out!

A Ransomed Grete is the bridge book between the 1920s and 1940s Ever After Mysteries, combining fairy tales with mysteries.

My Thoughts:

Because I will read anything that Chautona Havig writes, I signed up for a review copy of A Ransomed Grete as soon as I could. I knew that it was a fairytale-inspired mystery set in the 1930s in Nazi controlled Europe. That means that parts of it are not very nice to read.

To tell the truth, I was quite confused through a lot of this book. I believe that was intentional on the part of the author, and there were definitely some red herrings thrown in to confuse the mystery. Because I knew that the story is based on the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel, I figured that the woman in the chalet must be on the “wrong” side, but it took a long time to figure out how and why.

While A Ransomed Grete will not likely ever be one of my favorites of Chautona Havig’s books, I like the way she ended it. Her note to the readers at the end is most of what made the book have value to me.

I received a review copy of this book from the author, and these are my honest thoughts about it. Links may be affiliate links, which will benefit Esther’s website if purchases are made through them.

About the Author:

USA Today Bestselling author of Aggie and Past Forward series, Chautona Havig lives in an oxymoron, escapes into imaginary worlds that look startlingly similar to ours and writes the stories that emerge. An irrepressible optimist, Chautona sees everything through a kaleidoscope of It’s a Wonderful Life sprinkled with fairy tales. Find her at chautona.com and say howdy—if you can remember how to spell her name.

More from Chautona:

Picture it. Ventura, California,1982. Why I went to the lock-in, I still don’t know. It wasn’t my church, I didn’t actually like the girl I went with, and I knew no one else. In hindsight, I think God put me there, because that was the night I was introduced to Corrie Ten Boom.

Yes, they showed The Hiding Place, and a near obsession with all things Holocaust followed.

I don’t remember when my brain connected The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to that same war and helped me realize that the people bombing London and making the need to protect those children were the same ones ripping fathers, mothers, and children from homes in other countries and sending them “out into the country” too. But it happened. A sickening, nauseating understanding that still infuriates me today.

I railed against the evil soldiers. How could they do such a thing? My ever-patient father said, “Like our airmen should have refused to drop the bombs that ensured we’d end the war with Japan? When do soldiers get to decide which orders they will obey and which they will not?”

In my self-righteous, ever-black-and-white mind, I remember saying something to the effect of, “If they’d all refused, then the generals would have to listen. You can’t kill all your soldiers for insubordination.”

Dad’s quiet voice (it wasn’t always, but it was when he was deadly serious) answered that with a… “Considering the millions of Jews they slaughtered, I think they might have. Live soldiers can make a small difference.”

Look, Dad wasn’t defending the Nazi regime. He wasn’t defending sending innocent people to their deaths because some madman said they must. He did, however, point out that sometimes what seems to be acquiescence is really a front for helping people under the radar. Without proof of someone’s guilt, we could hope there was more to it than fear for self.

And that taught me another lesson—to assume the best of people until they gave me a reason to know otherwise. It also sparked ideas. How many men, women, and children pretended to be in league with the Nazis when they weren’t? How many people cowed to Nazi ideals out of self-preservation? How many others didn’t really see the evil until it was shoved down their throats?

It took forty years to do it, but those questions became the basis for A Ransomed Grete (pronounced Gret-uh, if it matters to you). What happens when the horrific occurs and self-preservation becomes a means of evil? I hope I offered enough hope amid the horror of Jewish genocide.

To purchase your copy, click here.

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To enter a fun giveaway, click here.

Hangi

February 26, 2023 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We decided to spend Waitangi Day this year with friends on the other side of the island. Waitangi Day is a celebration of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the English and the Maori, and is on February 6 each year. When we first talked about visiting these friends that weekend, I mentioned that Esther wanted to come home in time to go to the hangi in Greymouth. This is a big community picnic; a hangi is a traditional Maori way of cooking food by digging a hole and lighting a fire in it to heat up rocks (or large pieces of metal). The food is placed on the hot rocks, the hole is filled in with dirt and left for several hours, and then the food is dug up to be eaten. Our friends decided to have a hangi themselves, so that we could all experience it together, and as it turned out, the one in Greymouth was canceled due to heavy rain, so it worked out very well to stay there.

The children went swimming, and then warmed up by the fire. Notice James’s seat?

They tossed some old freezer baskets into the fire and burned off the plastic coating, and then we lined them with foil.

We put the meat in the foil-lined baskets, topped with pumpkin chunks and potatoes.

When the fire had burned down enough, the big embers were raked out. James was still supervising from his wheelbarrow!

After covering the baskets with cabbage leaves, they were lowered into the hole on top of the coals.

Next, wet sheets and wool blankets were put on top of the baskets.

After covering the blankets with wet burlap bags, the dirt was shoveled over everything, and we left it for about three hours.

Is it ready? Only one way to find out! They started digging the dirt out again.

All that wet cloth kept the food baskets clean.

We opened the baskets to check. What a delicious smell! The meat was cooked, but the vegetables weren’t quite done. We should have left it another half an hour and it would have been perfect. We finished the cooking in the house.

Everyone enjoyed the feast! Notice that Simon’s arm is in a sling. He came off his bicycle in January and broke his collar bone. This picture was taken two weeks after the accident.

We finished the evening with a round of singing children’s Sunday school songs. Everyone enjoyed that very much!

Waiuta

February 19, 2023 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I have already written about Waiuta in at least two other posts, so I won’t go into a lot of detail. We took my mom there on New Year’s Day. We went to a small Baptist church that day in Reefton, and then had a picnic at the old mining village and walked around for awhile. It was a beautiful day! One interesting thing from the day was figuring out what area of the village our house came from. We ate lunch in the lawn of one of the few remaining houses, and Esther noticed that the original paint color was the same as ours, and the roof is the same color. Then, I saw a photo of the entire village, and that section of houses are the only ones near the size of ours. Fun!

We got Grandma to take a picture of our family. It wasn’t as good as the one we had gotten the week before, at Punakaiki, though, so we’ll get that other one printed.

The little girls wanted their picture taken. They are rather photogenic!

My love and I!

Little Miss on top of an old wine cellar.

Simon, James, Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination off on an adventure.

While Mom and Gayle checked out the foundations of an old building, Esther found a patch of self heal and harvested the flowers.

We went up to the Prohibition mine, at the top of the mountain. What a view!

One would think that James was tired that day!

On the way down the mountain, we had to move over to let another vehicle past on the narrow road. We got a little too far over, and the wheels got sucked into the soft ground at the edge. We were very thankful to be on this side and not the other, where the cliff drops away sharply! It didn’t take the men long to get the van out, once everyone was out of it. Those of us who were not helping with the rescue walked down the road just a bit and stood at a bend, so we could stop anyone who happened to come along up the road–thankfully no one did. That’s an old watering trough from the horse-and-wagon days beside us where we were waiting.

Photos–November/December 2022

February 12, 2023 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Somehow, I missed sharing these photos! This first one was a rainy Sunday afternoon, and obviously Simon and James were tired.

Mom was sending a birthday card to one of my brothers in the States, and several of the younger children wrote letters to their cousins to include with it. Mr. Sweetie took several pictures to add to his letter. This one was taken from the hill across the road, and shows our house and garage, and, to the right, the small guest house Mom is staying in.

A thistle on the hill across the road.

Foxgloves–a major weed in the pastures.

A view of our back yard from the roof of the tiny house.

Next, he climbed the garage roof to take some pictures. This is Esther tying up the tomatoes to the posts on the other side of the greenhouse. It sure looks different now–the tomatoes are taller than I am!

Another view of the garden from the garage roof.

Looking down from a tall tree at part of the back yard and a corner of the garage.

The corner of the back yard by the garage, with the boys’ collection of bicycles and their workshop.

A photographer has come several times to take pictures of our family. Here, one of the children got a picture of him!

Little Miss learned to make hollyhock dolls this year. She loved them!

After she took a picture of her doll, I suggested she take a picture of the incredible hollyhock plant! I’ve never seen one so tall. It no longer looks so nice; it’s about done, and falling over.

She also took a picture of a potato blossom.

Esther spent several days staining the woodwork around the deck of the tiny house. It now has a roof, too!