Wednesday, April 01, 2009 Comment0 Comments


Jan 11th to Feb 2nd

James’ place is some 8 ha in the Waitakere Ranges, 15 minutes drive from Piha and Karekare beaches.

Note for those interested: Karekare’s the more beautiful, but has nothing, whereas Piha has a bar of sorts. Important considerations for more lubricatory types…

We then spent a very pleasant 3 weeks at James’, during which the following occurred (although not necessarily in this order):
· Weeding, shredding, compost heap building and subsequent flipping
· We got a van (yay!)
· Garden (re)landscaping
(This sounds a lot less impressive than it actually was – we must have moved several tons of soil, dug out some very large
roots/trees/bushes, put in retaining walls, weed matted, grass seeded, bird netted, watered and so forth



· Sheep shearing
(Well, I watched while Simon and James flipped the sheep, to be passed onto the shearer, an external guy who had come for the
day. Some 18 sheep were sheared completely, and the lambs had their backsides sheared (there’s a name for this, but I forget
what it is).
The shearer, who spoke uninterruptedly for the 2 or so hours he was there, was full of such gems of knowledge as sheep nuggets
– the poop which gets stuck to the fleece near their backsides, and forms pellets/nuggets – being great for growing marijuana
(sic), as it fertilizes them and also keeps the possums off. He also waxed lyrical for some time about wonderful a delicacy sheep
balls are – how large they are (larger in ratio than any other animal’s), how many he has in his freezer, and how much he
enjoys eating them. Marvellous
On a side, somewhat testicular note; they really are huge, and the boys display an amazing ability to hoist them when
walking or otherwise necessary, and then to drop them again, normally one at a time, when clearance is correct. The mind
boggles before such visual treats.
· More garden stuff
· We met some lovely people, including neighbours of James, who were kind enough to give us some extra timber they had lying
around, as well as lend us the tools, to build the base for our mattress in the back of the van, talking of which (more on that later)

We also ate an awful lot of sheep (some male lambs from his flock). On average, once or twice a day for 3 weeks (well, there was the occasional bit of cow). It was great, though – I’d always thought of lamb and mutton as being very fatty, but turns out, it doesn’t have to be – just depends on how it’s processed. We had sausages, mince, and chops (although I’m never going to be a fan of those) – the sausages were the best – pure meat! What a thing!

West Auckland (in the city itself), is also the place where we saw our first ever, real life car chase. We were on the corner of a major intersection (Rata and Great North, for anyone interested) looking at some shops, and had noticed a helicopter flying around in the area, when suddenly the police had arrived, stopped traffic, set up their cars, and were doing the whole running-bent-double-with-guns thing. Mad. Next thing we knew, an old black car, bumper scraping on the ground (it had evidently already met spikes) came flying down the hill at at least 150km/hr, and just kept going. The police, thankfully, didn’t try and shoot the wheels, as the potential collateral damage of the car losing control could have been huge (indeed, the police have been getting flak recently for just such cowboy behavior, and so are behaving in a suitably chastised way). Anyway, that was it, apart from our mild disappointment that it hadn’t all happened in that intersection. Sadly, it did culminate in a death, and we figure it was P-related (P, like tik tik, is cheap, horrible crystal meth, and has the usual horrible effects), especially as we saw, a little way up the road, a police van with dogs parked outside a house…
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