November 2017

This month seems to have flown by. It's nearly Christmas and it already feels like the height of summer. I actually can't remember when it last rained here, and we've already gone from water restrictions to an absolute ban on sprinklers. And that happened just three days after I bought a sprinkler! It was going to be great, I was going to multi-task and water the garden while also being free to get other stuff done, plus it would save me from all the mozzy bites I get when I'm outside watering in the evening. But now it's right back to using the hose. Only it is very dry here, the grass is all getting brown, and it's forecast to be a pretty hot dry summer so I'm going to do my bit to save water and only use hose water for my veggie-beds and herbs - I'm setting up a laundry drum this weekend to catch my laundry water to use in the garden. Which is coming along very nicely by the way - my broccoli plants finally have little broccoli heads growing in them. They take up a lot of space though and grow very slowly, considering how much broccoli I like to eat I don't think it's worth growing it next year. I could fit so many more other veggies in that garden bed and broccoli isn't overly expensive. My flowers are doing well too, all my lillies are starting to flower. They are protected from the wind because last year when we moved here (which will be exactly a year in 8 days) the summer was cold and windy and all my flowers got destroyed as soon as they opened. They're pretty safe from that this year.

So what else has been going on? Well I had my birthday at the start of the month so I'm 30 now. It's not so different. There were fireworks in the Wellington Harbour, the last time they'll be doing that for Guy Fawkes because apparently they're spending their fireworks money on matariki in the future. A great idea but riskier in terms of weather. And we went up the Kapiti Coast - weather wasn't so hot yet, there was a cold wind and piles of blue jellyfish washed up on the beach. It's still nice to get away and just be somewhere different though. And Cher came - she certainly didn't mind the presence of lots of smelly dead sea creatures on the beach!



Then I went down south for a conference, which went very well and also had a couple of really amazing speakers. There was my favourite fabric pop-up sale and I bought yet more fabric - I am actually getting into sewing and finishing some stuff though, I recently finished a blouse and a dress (I started both quite a long time ago though). Work has been fine - pretty busy. Things are getting quieter now so I can catch up on all the things that got put aside when everything got busy. And we're having a Christmas decorating competition - I'm going overboard of course.

Now it's the first day of summer and if it gets hotter I'm going to have a tough time of it. Work gets pretty stuffy and all this insulation and double glazing at home means I come home to a hot house in the afternoon. I think I need a paddling pool. We are having a very quiet Christmas this year, just the two of us - I'm feeling ready to get decorating so we'll look for a tree this weekend. I'll probably have to tie the decorations to the branches because my ridiculous cat will definitely think the whole set up is a toy for him to play in. I'll be taking a whole two weeks off over Christmas and I can't wait. Three weeks to go. I'm so tired of work, I need a rest. No plans yet, but if summer is going to be so nice as the last weeks of spring were, then we definitely need to get a BBQ.

Looking back through my photos, in November almost all of them are of the animals. With a couple of pretty skies thrown in and one where you can see some of our house. I'll make a point of taking better photos of other stuff for the next time - after all it is our house-anniversary in December.