Ahaura

Leaf Fun

June 23, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

When the leaves fell off the peach trees in May, the three youngest had great fun raking them up and playing in them. I remember loving maple trees when I was young, because of the wonderful leaf piles! This isn’t as good, but as close as our children are likely to get to that. While they were playing with the leaves, they got the idea of making a movie about it. I’m not sure what the plot was supposed to be, if any, but I put together the clips they got. You might want to turn it off when it starts getting crazy–when all three are tumbling together in the pile.

April 2024 Photos

June 9, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

Here are the rest of April’s photos! A few days after Easter, our new cow, Maple, finally calved–three weeks after we thought she would, based on what the previous owner told us. I had started to wonder if something was wrong! No, just a late calf. Elijah took this picture when he went down to take care of the chickens and discovered a new calf, which another boy had overlooked when he went down an hour or so earlier. The calf is a bull, a Jersey/Dexter cross. These first two pictures are from the first evening; the third picture was a week or two later, after we started bottle-feeding him and he decided that people were all right. His name is Clifford, as in Clifford the Big Red…Calf!

Remember how much fun we had earlier this year hatching chicks? Well, we ended up with a lot of them. The roosters from the first two batches have moved into the freezer by now, and we sold the pullets. These are some of the pictures we took to advertise them.

We went to Reefton for church one Sunday, and before coming home, drove around to check out the project that has been ongoing for several years: rebuilding the hydroelectric plant. Reefton was the first town in the Southern Hemisphere to be lit with electric lights, but the electric plant fell into disrepair a long time ago. They got a grant recently to rebuild it as a museum. This is the water race, looking toward the building that will house the turbine.

What happens when a four-year-old hurts her foot? She gets to sit on the couch with her blankie, a big stack of books, and the recordings that Grandma made of those books! She spent a couple of hours listening to those stories after cutting her foot badly.

I don’t normally take my phone with me when I go down to milk the cows in the morning, but one day I did. On the way up the hill, I looked up the valley to the east, and saw this breathtaking sight.

Here were our record-breaking vegetables in April–a potato and a tomato. The weights are in grams.

I was surprised one day when the children showed up with a pukeko chick. I had them take it right back down the hill and try to give it back to the parents–hope it survived!

Ahaura River/Lake Ahaura

June 2, 2024 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

One Sunday afternoon in April, our boys organized a kayak trip with friends from church down the Ahaura River. I got roped into driving the vehicle back after they unloaded the boats, which meant that I got to enjoy a scenic part of the river that I don’t normally get to see.

Another Sunday afternoon, they decided to go on a four wheel drive trip. They ended up at Lake Ahaura, up near the farm on which Simon lives. Elijah shared these pictures with me; the one of the mushroom was taken especially to share with his grandma. There were actually at least a dozen people on each of these trips, but because a lot of them are not our family, I didn’t want to post their pictures.

Garden–November

December 24, 2023 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We got most of the garden planted in November. We also got a water tank to collect rainwater from the garage roof to use in dry times! It is enormous; we estimate it holds about 15,000 liters (that’s in the neighborhood of 3,000 gallons). It took a couple of tries to get a HIAB truck (crane) to get the job done, and even then we were holding our breath to see if the truck would get back out of the garden after setting the tank down! It worked–praise God–and now we’re hoping for enough rain to fill the tank.

Our pitcher plant is blooming this year. Such an interesting plant!

We got a truckload of 10 cubic meters of compost delivered, and spread it through the garden. The children did part of the job, and Gayle finished it.

Remember my story about the tomatoes that didn’t grow? A friend in Canterbury mailed me her extra seedlings, and I potted them. A month later, they were looking like this, and now they are growing fast in the ground!

These are the ones I started in early October. This is seven weeks after seeding them. They grew fast!

After setting out the tomatoes we spread newspapers on the ground in between them, and then rotten silage that a local farmer gave us. We’re hoping for few weeds! This thick mulch is certainly keeping the soil moist. Other places have gotten rather dry already, but it’s very wet under those layers of paper and hay.

More Children’s Fun

September 24, 2023 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Our children are always coming up with new and creative ways to have fun together. One Sunday afternoon on our way home from church we stopped and let the girls pick a few daffodils beside the road. Then, Esther took a selfie with her little sisters and their flowers.

Mr. Imagination built this contraption for Miss Joy. It’s supposed to be a tractor; it’s more like a go-kart. They have spent a lot of time pushing each other around in it.

One afternoon, I noticed the girls playing that they were going shopping with the book bags Grandma made while she was here. I didn’t want to distract them by going in the room to get my camera, so I grabbed the iPad to take a picture. It didn’t turn out very well, but it’s precious to me anyway.

Miss Joy loves Goofball! Goofball isn’t sure she loves Miss Joy, but she puts up with a lot. She’s a very gentle cat who keeps her claws in.

Gayle frequently walks “around the block” with the children. One time, he let them slide on piles of gravel at the bottom of the hill. They sure had fun–and they sure came home dirty!

Scenery

September 17, 2023 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Elijah has taken several work trips down south to the glacier area lately. He took these two pictures on one of the trips. What amazing views he gets to savor while he drives for work!

But then, I sometimes have amazing views while I work, too! This is the view from the top of the hill across the road, where we pasture our cows at times. They have spent the winter there, and I’ve been milking by hand up there for the past month. I didn’t have my camera along the morning that there was snow on top of that range of mountains, but talk about a spectacular view! Wow. These pictures were taken the morning we had a full moon–that’s a supermoon you can see there. The layer of fog lies over the Grey River; you can often easily see where a river is by looking at the fog in the mornings. Our house, by the way, is just to the left of the picture.

I took this one about 15 minutes later, after the sun was up higher, from a slightly different place on the hilltop. It is looking down to the right of the previous picture, down the hill to the north of our village. We use the paddock across the highway from the road that comes up from the bottom of the picture for our cattle, chickens and turkeys.

Boating Down the Creek

September 17, 2023 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

About a month ago, Gayle and most of the boys and the little girls went down the hill to Orwell Creek, which loops around the hill on which our village sits before emptying into the river. They took an assortment of watercraft, and floated down the creek to the mouth. Gayle drove along to pick them up at the end, and took several photos and a few video clips when he was close to the water. These aren’t very good photos or videos, but they’re fun! The first photo is near the beginning of the excursion; the second is near the end.

June 2023 Photos

July 9, 2023 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Here are last month’s pictures!

I was working in the garden one day, digging oxalis corms and buttercups out under the edge of the greenhouse. Miss Joy came along and laid down flat on the freshly-dug soil, and started digging through it, finding earthworms. I suggested she “plant” the earthworms in soil in her container, so she did, and then tried to dig them out.

Jo-Jo the cockatiel and Kea the budgie get along pretty well most of the time.

We had a lot of frosty mornings the first two weeks of June. Mr. Sweetie used my camera one morning to get pictures of the sun coming up through the trees across the road.

He also got some pictures of a cold kingfisher that sat on this post for awhile. Once, we saw it fly down to the mud, pick something up, and eat it–probably a worm.

Another day, the children found this tiny frog in a flax bush behind the house.

Miss Joy loves to brush hair. One morning when Little Miss needed her hair brushed, and Miss Joy was at loose ends, I suggested she brush her big sister’s hair. She was delighted, and it kept her busy for quite awhile. She’s very gentle, and does a good job.

Mr. Sweetie was outside with my camera one day and took a picture of Grizzly. That cat is always looking for a new place to sit for a nap.

Ahaura River

March 31, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We live less than one kilometer from a rather large river, the Ahaura, which flows into the Grey River just downstream from our town. One Sunday evening, a couple of weeks after we moved here, the children and I walked down to the riverbed after Gayle left for the week. We had fun exploring down there. Here is the track that goes down to the boat launch from the main road.

We cross this one-lane bridge nearly every day, taking Simon to work and bringing him home. It looks fine from this perspective, and is sturdy, but it sure looks rough on top. It’s an old wooden bridge, with some asphalt on top. You can see every plank, and one day when I crossed, one of the planks had popped up. It was down again when I came back through, 20 minutes later. That doesn’t really inspire confidence!

The underside of the bridge.

This goat is staked out near the bridge.

Looking upstream from the bridge.

A lot of willow shrubs grow in the higher parts of the riverbed. I was interested in how the foliage had been swept in one direction by a recent flood.

Many stock trucks and other heavy trucks cross this bridge every day!

This is the railroad bridge just downstream from the car bridge.

This was the end of our walk. We decided not to try to cross this spot! The main river is just to the left.

Notice the silt? There were large drifts of it here and there. The boys had fun slipping and sliding in it—and then they had an excuse to dip in the river before we headed home!

Both bridges, from downstream.

That’s Only in Movies!?

March 17, 2018 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We had the (good) surprise of our lives today, and were rather in shock for a couple of hours. Actually, some of us are probably still somewhat in shock over what happened.

We’ve been discussing for a year or more what to do with the engine in our van. It was obviously wearing out, but wasn’t bad enough to replace yet. Then, right after we moved over here, I started having trouble getting it out of fifth gear (it’s a manual). It wasn’t all the time, just sometimes, but we also noticed a strange whine when going the speed limit. I didn’t think much of it, and kept double- or triple-clutching when necessary to shift gears. Then, on Monday this week, I took the van to Simon’s boss to get a warrant of fitness. He told us that fifth gear was going out, but if we only used it when going downhill we should still be able to use the van for awhile. He advised that it wasn’t worth rebuilding the gearbox again (we did three years ago), given the age of the van (a 1994 model) and the state of the engine. The next time I used it was yesterday, Friday. I drove it the six minutes to pick Simon up from work, and both times in that short distance that I tried to shift from fifth gear to fourth it took everything I had to accomplish that—and the second time, I had to actually turn the van off after half a dozen tries, and then keep working at it for awhile. So, I didn’t use fifth on the way home, and the noise produced by driving in fourth, even below the speed limit, was such that conversation was impossible, and I had a headache by the time we got home.

After all that, we decided it was probably time to either never go anywhere as a family until we can take two vehicles, or get a different van. Esther and Simon started looking for them online, and we prayed for direction, but I could tell that Gayle was dreading making a decision. Simon’s boss came by this morning for a few minutes, and Gayle asked his advice about rebuilding the gearbox, since he hadn’t talked personally to him about it. Simon’s boss said he’d think about a vehicle for us. Three or four hours later, he pulled into our driveway in a very nice van, and his wife was right behind him in their vehicle. He handed Gayle the keys. We were absolutely speechless. This is something we never ever, in our wildest dreams, would have imagined happening. All we can do is say thank you, to a wonderfully generous brother in the Lord, and to God Who orchestrates such things. And, I believe we’ll be going to Easter Conference in Timaru again as we had planned on doing before the van started acting up! (Unless the Lord has other plans for us, that is.)