West Coast

Photos From Early July 2019

July 27, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We’ve had a busy month! Here are a few photos from the first couple of weeks of the month.

We’ve had a few sunrises! It’s been a very rainy month, but here is proof that occasionally we see a little sunshine (actually, this week has been sunny). The person walking along the road is Mr. Intellectual, heading down to bring up the milk for me.

Esther went to the library one day, and the little ones spent a lot of time that evening reading library books!

Every time a pilot vehicle goes past, Mr. Diligence tries to grab my camera to get a photo of whatever big thing is passing this time.

This is a kayak going down the Nile River!

Something that makes me very happy! Mr. Diligence actually reads for fun sometimes now. This has taken a lot of years and much hard work to accomplish. He discovered he can enjoy reading when he was sick in the States in February and didn’t have an audio book to listen to, but couldn’t do anything else.

A few years ago, my boys found a huge ball of yarn at the dump. It was hand-spun, and fairly loose; I suspect it was actually roving, which was intended to be spun into better yarn. I crocheted it into a rough rectangle, and now I’m making it into the inner for a baby-sized duvet. It smells of lanolin—a smell I love! I’ve gotten as far as sewing a cover over it, and sort of quilting it together with the sewing machine, and cutting out fabric patches for another, removable cover.

So, we wash a tub and put it outside in the sun to dry—and what does Goofball do? Ensure that we have to wash it again! Doesn’t she look happy.

June 2019 Photos Part 2

July 13, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Here are the rest of June’s random photos.

Little Miss got hold of my camera one afternoon and took a bunch of pictures of the toys she was playing with. I saved a couple I thought were interesting!

One Saturday evening, Simon went with me to milk. Because of the steep hill down which we have to go to reach the cow right now, and the fact that I’m pregnant, I need help carrying the bucket back up, so the bigger three boys all help out. Simon rarely gets the privilege, because he’s usually not home from work yet when I head down. This time, though, he needed a piece of wood for a project he was working on, so he took his ax along and accompanied me. Just after we left our street, Esther and Mr. Sweetie came up towards us from a walk around the block, so she took our picture.

All seven children played a game of Skip-Bo Golf together one Sunday evening!

Mr. Imagination created this deer for his daddy’s birthday present!

I was amused when this happened one evening! I was helping Simon with a lesson for his apprenticeship, since he has trouble reading, and Esther wanted input on an order she was putting through for me with some company.

Princess is rather a spoiled cat. She thinks the space in front of the fire belongs to her. A lot of mornings, she will sleep there with her paw tightly clamped around her eyes, like this!

Mr. Sweetie built this train track one day, then wanted to document it.

June 2019 photos Part 1

July 6, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I have a lot of random photos this month! So many I’ll have to divide them into two posts, so watch for the next installment in a week.

One Sunday afternoon, around the beginning of the month, the mountains were covered in snow and so beautiful! All the children decided to go on a bike ride up the road and enjoy the beautiful winter sunshine. Esther took this picture.

Simon goes through a lot of mayonnaise. Every work morning, he fries two eggs for his breakfast, spreads mayo on two slices of bread and puts the eggs on top of that, then eats them with a large cup of creamy tea. Because he uses so much mayonnaise, he ends up making it for us quite often in the evening, to make sure he’ll have what he needs in the morning!When I took the children to Hokitika for the homeschooler’s art day, we had another gorgeous, sunny day. I asked Mr. Diligence, who was in the back seat of the car, to take some pictures for me. This is the bridge going out of our town; it’s scheduled to be replace within a year and a half.

Looking downstream from the bridge, down the Ahaura River. Its confluence with the Grey River is just downstream—the Grey is under the line of fog. See the snow on top of the Paparoa Mountains? The Tasman Sea is just the other side of those mountains.

Going on down the road towards Greymouth!

Another view of the Paparoas, across a dairy farm. The Grey, again, is under that line of fog.

This is the bridge my sons built me over a ditch in the paddock our house cow is currently living in. They built it strong enough that a couple of big boys standing on it can’t make it sag! I requested the chicken wire to be stapled on so I don’t slip on wet or frosty mornings—and I’ve been very glad for it! During the summer, I milked at about the place the fence turns, just above the end of the bridge, but the cow didn’t like crossing the ditch after the rains started, so I knew I would have to cross it myself. The new milking shed is just behind you, if you were standing where this picture is taken. By the way, I plan to get a photo of the cow in the shed sometime, but I’m milking before sunrise and after sunset right now, because our days are so short, so there isn’t enough light! It’s working well, though. She has learned to walk right in and put her head in the proper place, and the morning it was pouring, I was very thankful for the roof.

Midwinter harvest! I got the cabbage, leeks and carrots from the garden, and everything else came from the greenhouse. We are enjoying this feast.

One evening while we had family worship, Mr. Imagination was acting up, so I told him to do 5 push-ups. Mr. Intellectual and Simon couldn’t resist; they had to join in. Simon did 20, I believe, before he had to give up. Mr. Intellectual saw his brother grabbing the camera, and jumped up on his chair before the picture was taken.

Milking Shed!

June 22, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

For six months, while we lived at one particular rental house, I had a shed to milk my cow in. She hated it. Otherwise, I have milked out in the weather, except for a few times at a different house when it was raining and blowing and I took her into a shed. The most recent house we lived in had no shed that would work, and we didn’t have anything here, either. However, in this region it rains a lot! I have just been tying my cow to a fence to milk her anyway, because that was all I could do. There were some very frustrating milkings, with rain pouring down in sheets and the wind blowing. I got drenched, and the cow did not hold still. In case you’ve ever wondered, it’s hard to milk when the cow moves sideways every few squirts.

Then, Mr. Diligence came to my rescue! A few weeks ago, he got started building a portable milking shed. Portable, because part of our problem is that we are using someone else’s land for grazing the cows, and we shift them from one place to another every few months. His dad helped him with the design, and he used all recycled timber and roofing iron to build this masterpiece. Today, it was finished, and the fellows all worked together to take it down the hill to where the cows will be for the winter and secure it in place.

Here are Gayle and Mr. Diligence working on the first part of the frame.

This was a week ago, when they got most of it put together.

Yesterday or the day before, Mr. Intellectual and Mr. Diligence finished the roof.

Today, they loaded the shed onto the trailer and took it down the hill. Once down there, they chained it to a fence post and pulled it off the trailer.Here comes Poppy to see what is happening in her paddock!To prevent wind from blowing the shed away, they pounded a standard deep into the ground at each corner, and screwed the shed to it.Mr. Diligence built metal brackets so that boards can be slotted into the sides for times when we need to hold a cow from swinging back and forth.Poppy and Pansy investigating the car.Mr. Sweetie and Little Miss supervising.This is the view I get to enjoy while I milk!

The real test came tonight when I milked: Would Poppy accept the new place to milk? She did! We had to push her in, but she quickly relaxed and stood still better than she ever has before for me. She even started chewing her cud before I was halfway done milking, which she has never done before.

My New Greenhouse!

June 8, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

My boys spoil me. They do so many things for me, and I just have to keep wondering how in the world I ended up with such wonderful sons! The most recent big project was building a greenhouse. When we lived in Cheviot, we were given the frames for two greenhouses, from two different people. We used one for a couple of seasons, and Simon assembled the other but it didn’t get covered with plastic before we moved and had to dismantle it again. They were two different shapes, but when the boys started working on erecting them here a month or two ago, they figured out how to put them together to make one long high tunnel, about 40 feet by 10 feet (13.5 m by 3.5 m)! The next hurdle was to cover them. After some searching, they found the old plastic from the hoophouse, and the new plastic we had bought for the other one. They were able to cobble them together and cover everything except the lowest part of one side; Gayle built a device for rolling up the lower couple of feet of plastic on the other side, for ventilation during the summer. We bought sheets of clear plastic to finish the part we didn’t have plastic for, and they built frames for them, and hinged the frames so they can be opened in the summer, as well. Now, I’m enjoying having salads growing in there for at least part of the winter! Here are a couple of photos of the boys working on tacking down the plastic.

This was a peek inside, during construction.

….and a view from the same place, this week!

This is a close-up of the bed right inside the door. I found a new-to-me variety of radishes called German Giant. They were advertised as getting large without getting pithy, and not going to seed so quickly. So far, they’re living up to their promise—I’ll sure be interested to see how they work in the summer! We’re really enjoying having radishes on our salads.

We transplanted the lettuces on the left into the ground here right after the framework was erected, and have been eating salads from that bed for a month now. I set out the lettuces, bok choy, and other things on the right a couple of weeks ago, and we’ll start eating them soon.And, here’s a fun picture! I found this leaf one day when I was washing lettuce. It was two leaves grown together! It’s hard to tell, but the midribs were stuck to each other. I had never seen one like this before.

May 2019 Photos

June 1, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

Can you believe the first of June has arrived already? This year is flying past!

Here is the canoe the boys have built. Mr. Intellectual worked on the epoxy a day or two at the beginning of the month, then pulled it out of the garage into the sunshine to get the epoxy dry. With the cold, wet weather we’re having, it’s been next to impossible to work on this project.

One morning while her brothers did school, Little Miss played, “Going to a Conference.” She took all her dolls along. Here, she had been singing, pretending to be in a meeting; later they went to a bedroom (she carried all four at once) for lunch, and then went to the hallway to “sleep at Katie’s house.”

The boys noticed a pear tree across the road, beside where the cow grazes, with pears littering the ground under it. They asked the owner of the property if we could have the pears, and he gave them to us, so Gayle and the younger boys picked them all up one Saturday. We made a couple of large pans of pear/cranberry crumble–yum! Mr. Imagination and Little Miss helped me peel and cut up the pears for it.

When I placed an order recently for schoolbooks, I added the last two Pleasant Valley Farm picture books to the order for Esther. When they came, she showed them to these two, and they jumped up and down and squealed in glee–they love those books!

One day this week, we noticed a 20-foot shipping container being loaded into this truck! We had never seen that done before. Notice the rain falling heavily in this photo? That was the story of our week. For five days straight, we had torrential rains, for a total, here, of nearly 10 inches.

Mr. Imagination took this picture of a digger he is building. He loves to put things together.

Little Miss apparently brought a wasp in the house on her hair one day. It stung her just below the eye. She screamed for a good while. The next day, when I took this photo, it had swollen some, but not as bad as I thought it might. We had put plantain on as quickly as possible–it really helps!

I guess Mr. Sweetie was quite impressed by the way his milk foamed one day! I have several boys who love foamed milk (Esther found a foamer at a secondhand shop recently), but our milk often won’t foam.

This was our living room one evening this month. Simon and Mr. Diligence were listening to an audio book on Simon’s phone (which is only used as an audiobook player, by the way!). It looks like Mr. Sweetie was trying to listen in, as well. These boys are addicted to audiobooks.

My artist, Mr. Imagination, with the horse he made from marbles one day.

April 2019 Photos

May 18, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

Little Miss draws a lot of pictures! This is a horse she drew for me a few weeks ago—see its hooves?

Mr. Diligence and a friend built this bike trailer for Mr. Imagination’s birthday. The little fellow has had a lot of fun pulling it around behind his bicycle.

Little Miss built a house in the living room one day.

Mr. Intellectual has done a lot of wood working lately. Here is one of his recent creations, a pancake turner from an old electric pole. The wood was very hard, but brittle, so this turner ended up breaking beyond repair, unfortunately. It was beautiful, though!

Simon can still get Mr. Diligence down!

One evening, the fire got going so hot that the children asked for marshmallows—and toasted them through the closed door! We’re being more careful now as to how full we load the stove with the offcuts from Gayle’s work at the mill.

Traffic

May 11, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Our house is right on a main highway. I’m thankful that our driveway is attached to a very small street, which in turn goes out to the highway, but there is only an empty quarter-acre section between our house and the main road. That gives us ring-side seats to everything that goes past! We don’t pay a lot of attention most of the time, but sometimes there are unusual sights in the trucking yards across the street that catch our eyes, and when the boys see a pilot vehicle go past with a Wide Load sign on it, they run for the window. Mr. Diligence grabs my camera as he goes, in case there is something very different. Here are some of the things we’ve seen in the past few months.

Traffic jam at the trucking company! What we didn’t get a picture of was the concrete truck that S-L-O-W-L-Y inched its way between these two trucks! He had mere inches to spare on each side.

Look closely—do you see the cow’s heads sticking out of the top of the truck? They were transferring cattle from one truck to the other here.

We frequently see big diggers go past.

One Friday morning, this house went past—and then my crew got to watch it be set down on a foundation in a section a block away from us!

This was the most recent odd load we saw go past—a toilet block!

And then there was this sight. When the ditches were being dug in front of our house for the fibre optic cables, the digger brought up part of the chassis of a vehicle! It appeared that the rest of the vehicle was still down there, rusting away.

One morning early, just after it began to get light, I was out milking and saw a pilot vehicle coming. The driver stopped and waved a lighted wand at a truck going past him down the highway, then went on slowly. Another pilot vehicle came along, and waved a lighted wand to stop someone coming off a side street. I was pretty curious by then, so I watched for the big load. It was the base of a giant crane on tracks! The boom of the crane had been taken off for transport.

Bits and Pieces

April 27, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

When we were in America a few months ago, I was trying to explain to a few people exactly how small our kitchen is. These two pictures show all of my workspace. Quite often, the first step, when starting to cook a meal or do anything else in the kitchen, is to wash and dry dishes and get them put away.

A month or so ago, the electric line to the garage started blowing fuses. When Gayle and the boys looked into it, they found that a hole had been rusted through the box around the connections, and the wires inside were bare. No wonder it shorted! They got the wiring replaced, and decided to replace the old, rotting pole, as well. That turned out to be a huge ordeal; they had to chip through concrete several feet down. The replacement pole, while not new, is much better—and it, too is concreted in securely! This photo shows part of the process of chipping out the old concrete.

Mr. Intellectual has been enjoying making things out of wood lately. Here are two of his recent creations. I really like the pancake turner for doing stir-fries!

Mr. Imagination grabbed this winter radish and pretended to be a rhinoceros!

The younger children have harvested most of the pumpkins by now. They enjoyed all those different shapes and colors!

One evening, Mr. Imagination and Little Miss got out all their soft toys and lined them up on the couches. Someone enjoyed it enough to take a couple of pictures.

We had a few mornings chilly enough to start the fire in the living room. One of those times, someone noticed a flame coming out of the center of a log! He was impressed with it and wanted a picture.

As part of the process of installing fibre optic cables in our village, the company had to put everything back into the state it was in before they started working. The last step was to put some tarseal on our driveway where they had cut through to put the cable in. The boys really enjoyed watching that!

Reefton

April 20, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

A couple of weeks ago, we went to church in Reefton. We don’t normally go there, but occasionally we find ourselves with a Sunday free, as in the people we normally worship with aren’t around. There is a very small Baptist church in Reefton, however, that we are learning to know, and we have greatly enjoyed the few times we’ve been with them. Each time, we have come away encouraged. Because it is a half-hour drive from home, we took along a picnic lunch and enjoyed some time in a park. Mr. Diligence climbed this large oak tree, and his brothers, of course, had to pick up acorns to pelt him with. He did his best to deflect them, and they all had great fun.

After we were finished with lunch and had everything packed away, we called him down from his perch, and drove up to the Reefton Lookout. We had an amazing view from the top, over the valley in which the town is built and beyond.

The “road” on which we drove up and back down was very narrow and rough. Simon did a superb job of navigating around the washouts and under fallen trees, but the branches and brambles that leaned over the track scratched the sides of the van.

This sign greatly amused us. Especially read the small print! (The large print points to the Lookout and the ZigZag, which is a walking track at the end of where vehicles can go.)