Ahaura

Picnic!

October 10, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

One sunny afternoon, our little girls went outside to play. Little Miss packed a snack for the two of them, and took out a sheet, and they had a picnic together. I got the camera up just too late to catch the cat who wanted to join them!After their picnic, the girls went to the empty section in front of our house, which had just been mowed, and raked up the grass. First, Little Miss buried herself in it.

Then, Mr. Imagination joined them, and they organized the grass clippings into walls to make rooms of a house! They spent at least 2 1/2 hours playing outside that evening, having lots of fun. It was getting pretty chilly before they came in. The cat liked having them out there, too!

August 2021 Photos

September 26, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Here are the last photos from August!

This cow took us by surprise on her due date. She had bagged up a little, but not much, and sure didn’t look like she was ready to calve, as far as I was concerned, when I looked at her the night before. In the morning, there was evidence that she had calved—but no calf! We searched around the area, and down the cliff which she was at the top of, and couldn’t find anything. Several hours later, Mr. Diligence went back out and searched more. The calf was at the bottom of the cliff, way back in a blackberry patch! He pulled it out, and he and Mr. Sweetie carried it up the steep cliff to reunite it with its mother. That calf is fine, but we know now—this cow doesn’t bag up much, and we can’t go by the way she looks!

During lockdown, Esther and Elijah got the tiny house painted. We were sure thankful we had bought the paint a month before that!

Gayle spent one afternoon helping get the chicks outside. One of our cats is a hunter extraordinaire, and had pulled one chick out of the coop through a crack under the door (I discovered the crime when I went outside and found her eating it on the step of the house). Therefore, we decided we had better electrify the top of the fence around the run, since that cat likes to perch on top of it. Here, Gayle is stringing up the wires.

The tulip magnolia bloomed—so gorgeous! See Little Miss swinging in it?

This is what is left of my winter garden—broccoli, cabbage that didn’t head, and leeks.

Inside the greenhouse. This is a patch of peppers we wintered over; I think two of them have made it through two winters now. Gayle transplanted the aloe plants into that area, as well, and there are two or three Cape Gooseberries.

Because lockdown caught us unprepared (I planned to buy enough potting soil for the year, but couldn’t because we were locked down so fast), I started my tomato seeds in the ground in the greenhouse, and then put them in punnets after I was able to get some potting soil. Here are the tiny baby tomatoes, starting to come up.

Most of the greenhouse is full of lettuce and spinach.

See how wet it is? This is a common sight. Any time it rains, we have surface flooding in the yard.

The garden on a rainy winter day.

The chicks are cosy and warm! This was a month ago, when they still needed heat from the lights.

About the end of August, they were big enough to go out into the run.

Simon replaced the head gasket on this car. It was Esther’s car, till the head gasket blew, and now he uses it for hunting.

A lockdown Sunday afternoon. We played an entire game of Chicken Foot dominoes—from Double 15 down to Double 0!

Gayle played games with the younger ones.

Esther saw this funny sight one day! They sure do enjoy the sun.

Simon’s birthday presents. We each gave him a bag of salt and vinegar chips, his favorite kind, wrapped in all sorts of wild and wonderful packages. By the third one, he had figured out the joke. The last one included monetary gifts from several of us.

We saw this out the window one morning. Our cows were at the top of the hill as the sun came up.

Children’s Fun in August

September 19, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

One Sunday afternoon, our little girls decided to play the piano in the home in which we had church that morning. Gayle grabbed a couple of pictures with his phone.

Our younger children had fun digging holes in the sand down by the river with some other children. This is an area that frequently floods; the sand is deposited during the floods. There are several acres of it!

Tug-of-war another Sunday after church.

The first day of lockdown, Gayle took the younger children down to the creek in the paddock in which we keep our cows, and they tested out a boat they had just built.

They tried going through the culvert with it, but that didn’t work so well!

Little Miss was thrilled to be allowed to paddle the boat by herself!

Mr. Imagination made cookies one day, and made one of them very big! He didn’t eat it all at one go, though.

Birthday girl! Esther made her a cheesecake for her special dessert. She loved it!

She loves sitting in the dishpan! She says she’s taking a bath.

A quiet Sunday afternoon.

Birds!

September 16, 2021 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

Mr. Imagination, who is my nature-loving, scientific sort of child, spent a couple of weeks recently taking photos of all the birds he could see around here. This wood pigeon posed for him on top of the electric pole.

One morning he was very excited to see a baby plover in front of the house! I could hardly believe it, since it was a month earlier than they hatched last year, but he was right!

A couple of thrushes of some sort.

A blackbird on the neighbor’s rooftop.

One of the adult plovers.

The thrush again.

There’s the baby plover again!

And a picture of it with one of the parents. That baby was the star of the show that day! It was a bit difficult to keep attention focused on school books.

Jim’s Flat Area

September 5, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago, our older boys announced they wanted to take us to see the area in which they have been hunting possums occasionally this winter. We got home from church about halfway through the afternoon, and quickly took off up the road to the east out of town. When we got to the track that leads to Jim’s Flat, we turned off the main road. The boys wanted us to see the hut and the cage that goes across the river at Jim’s Flat. However, when we got about halfway there, Simon, who was driving, suddenly pulled off and stopped. He had found a walking track, which they had been looking for for some time. (It doesn’t work very well to find a poorly-marked track in the dark!) We decided to walk along this track and see if we could find a hut someone had told them about. The track turned out to be easy to follow. It looked like it was probably a bush railway line at one point, likely when the area was logged a hundred years ago or more. It is straight and fairly level, and built up a little from the surrounding terrain in most places. There are a few very muddy places, but we discovered that if we walked right in the middle of them, the ground was firmer than at the edges! The biggest problem we had was that a few years ago, a lot of trees had fallen down across the track. It was likely the cyclone we had in February 2018, right after we moved here. Someone had gone through with a chain saw and cleared enough of the track that we could get through. A couple of those spots the trees were so thick that we pretty much went through a tunnel! We never did find the hut. We think we got close to it, but we were in danger of losing daylight and being stuck out in the bush for the night, so turned around. It was a great walk, though! We all thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s wonderful to have older sons who love to take the family on an adventure.

Did you notice the moss and ferns? They are very typical of the bush around here. We get plenty of water!

Here are a couple of photos Gayle took at Jim’s Hut the first time they went there, in early July. This cage on a cable goes across the Ahaura River. The boys usually take it across the river to go hunting possums. Apparently it’s really exciting when the river is in flood! I’m not anxious for a ride on it myself.

July 2021 Photos

September 1, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Finally, the last few photos from July!

Two little girls reading. Miss Joy is sitting on a bag of little bits of firewood.

I’m not sure what Simon was doing here! It was bedtime.

Our backyard most of the winter. I was glad when the boys dug in and tidied up that pile of wood.

I went out “shopping” one evening and brought all this in. It made two meals.

The blocks got used for a few days, as the younger ones enjoyed building towers.

I was delighted one evening when Simon and Elijah, both in their upper teens, played a game with Little Miss, age 6, for an hour or more.

What is he holding? Spider webs! We read a science lessons about spiders and their webs, so he went around the house collecting silk to see how strong it is.

June 2021 Photos

August 21, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I never got a post up last weekend. I always plan to do that on Sunday after we come home from church. This week, though, we came home for about 10 minutes and then took off to a hut the boys have been going to every so often the last couple of months, hunting possums. We stopped before we got there, though, and took off through the bush on a walking track the boys have been unsuccessfully searching for for about six weeks. I had been telling them they might find it more easily in the daylight (they hunt at night)…. This track, they were told, goes to a hut beside the river. We spent almost an hour walking along it before we decided we’d better turn around so we wouldn’t get caught in the dark. What a tramp! It obviously used to be a fairly easy walking track; it looks like it may have been the grade for a bush railway back in the logging days. Now, it’s getting overgrown, and there are trees laid down across it in many places from a cyclone 3 1/2 years ago. Someone had gone through with a chainsaw and cut out enough that we could get through, over and under the trunks, but it was a fun adventure! I may post about it sometime; Esther had her camera and took pictures. Anyway, that’s why you never saw a post last week, in case you noticed it was missing!

Here are the rest of our June pictures. Esther happened to be with Elijah at his job one day, and got a couple of pictures of him working. He was spreading glue on the floor, and when it dried, he laid down carpet tiles.

Two brothers conferring about the tiny house.

We went to Canterbury one weekend for a midwinter dinner, and then visited a couple of other friends. One person gave us a large stack of puzzles she was clearing out, and as soon as we got home, they were all being used!

We had to replace our stovetop. The boys enjoyed working on that!

This truck stopped across the road one day.

We grew a mixture of colors of carrots last year. Look at the white, yellow, orange and purple! It’s been pretty fun to have so much variety.

Hallway Makeover

August 8, 2021 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

The day before Christmas, we replaced the carpet in the living room. It looked wonderful! We had enough left to do two more rooms, so we decided to do the hallway next. It still had the old carpet from the 1930s, which was very pretty when new, but by now…. It was quite threadbare. This is what it looked like:

When I took that picture in early February, I had already packed all our books and we had taken the bookshelves out (this hallway is wide enough that we have made it into our library, with bookshelves on both sides of the room). Elijah finished ripping out the carpet so it was all ready to lay the new carpet when he and his boss had time to do it. This next picture shows Elijah working on laying the carpet, with his boss overseeing him.

The end of the hall toward the laundry room/entry to the house looked like this. In May or June, I got the idea that floor-to-ceiling bookshelves would be a much more efficient use of the space, so asked Elijah if he would be interested in building them. He was! I used my spare time one day to draw up plans, and then one day when Elijah had an unexpected day off, he went to town and bought wood for building the shelves.

Over the next month or so, Elijah worked on the shelves when he had time, and once they were in place, I painted them. It took a few more weeks for the wood to completely dry, but last week I was able to fill them with books. Instead of having books here and in our bedroom, they are all here now, and very well organized. I even labeled the shelves so everyone knows where each category of books is supposed to be! (We’ll see how long that lasts.) I dreamed, when I was a little girl, of being a librarian. It looks like that dream has come true!

Elijah was excited to put the games on the second-to-top shelf yesterday. They had been in a deep closet, where they were hard to find. Now, we can easily see which one we want, even if not all of us can easily reach them!

Flooding

July 18, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Three weeks ago, while Gayle and I and the five youngest children were in Canterbury for the weekend, there was a lot of rain over here. That Saturday, our three oldest drove down to the river in Simon’s 4WD Pajero to check out the flooding, and Esther took pictures and a video. Little did we know that this weekend would be even worse! I would guess that the flood waters were about twice as high. We never got any pictures this time, though; we stayed inside while it was pouring for several days! Simon had planned to work on the piles under his house on Friday, but as fast as he scooped the water out of the holes it flowed back in! A lot of roads were closed with slips, and the road from here to Greymouth was closed for a day and a half because of flooding. The rain stopped last night, and already today when we went to church the Ahaura River had gone down quite a lot. It’s still as high as I’ve ever seen it!

This is Orwell Creek. This weekend, the water was over a foot deep on the road here!

That’s the Ahaura River ahead, in the gap between the trees. This is normally a parking area.

The nearer bridge is the old one, which by now is completely gone. The other is the new one.

This morning, the water was still up over that spot where the pipes are! This afternoon it had gone down to where the gravel is.Here is a video Esther made of the flooding. The first two clips are from driving along Orwell Creek, both going toward the river and coming back, and then some from crossing the bridge. The road along Orwell Creek is where we walk when we go to the riverbed for picnics.

The Ahaura Bridge—Old and New!

July 11, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

When we moved to Ahuara three years ago, the only way out of the township to the south was by way of an old one-lane bridge. This bridge was also the most outstanding feature of our little village—if we were trying to describe where we lived to people, we would say, “The town with the long one-lane bridge!” Almost anyone who drove through here would remember it. We soon started hearing rumors, though, that we would be getting a new bridge sometime. It took another two years before work was started, but in January or February 2020, we saw the beginnings of a bridge just downstream from the old one. Lockdown slowed the work a bit, but by the end of this summer, it started looking possible that the new one would open soon! We first heard that it would open in April…then May. Weather delayed it some, and a rafting accident which took the life of a local man delayed it more. Finally, the date was set: the grand opening would be on the 12th of June! (Most of us drove over it a week and a half before that; because some paving had to be done on the approach on this side, traffic was diverted from the old bridge over the new one for a day, although we only used one lane.) A few of our boys decided they didn’t care about the opening, and went to town to get supplies for Simon’s house, but most of our family went. After the speeches in the township hall, the crowd of about 200 people walked down to the new bridge. The local school children sang a few songs in Maori,

the Mayor (in the green coat) cut the ribbon with the biggest pair of scissors I’ve ever seen, and the first three vehicles ceremoniously drove across. (Two of the vehicles were school buses, with the children on board.)

Then, the bridge was opened for walkers. We enjoyed walking across and back on the roadway! There is a pedestrian lane on one side; we decided to walk on the other, since we’ll never be able to again!

Looking downstream at the rail bridge.

Looking upstream at the old bridge. See the horse going across, about in the center? The woman who rides him said she often rode him across, but she won’t be going over the new bridge, with its two-way traffic. She took advantage of the last hour that the bridge was open. After we went home, the old bridge was closed and the new one opened. The last vehicle to cross the old bridge was driven by descendants of the woman who was the first to cross it when it was opened in 1929 (they won the bidding for the privilege!). We thoroughly enjoyed the chance to cross the new bridge on the day it opened, and we enjoyed the sunshine, too! Within an hour after we went home, the rain closed in again.

A few days before the new bridge opened, our children and some visitors ran across the old bridge. Esther had always wanted to cross it on foot, and this was the last chance. See the condition it was in? It needed either replacement or a lot of renovations. It’s a little sad to see a landmark disappear, though.