After 40 days of rain we headed for higher ground. We are in our “city house” for the next two weeks, perched at the top of a hill overlooking Raglan harbor. It’s sunny and we’re house sitting for again. Life is good.
Kitchen table.

Kitchen view.

Our bedroom with a view.

Fagan the cat.

How to turn your average suburban yard into a food bonanza.

Step one: Evaluate said yard. As a designer you may want to work with existing structures, such as paths and laundy poles to minimize digging. This designer chose not to. Perhaps this is because he had a willing helper along to do the dirty work (or maybe it was because it worked better with the overall design).
From the top of the hill.

From the bottom of the hill.

Step two: Dig.

Step three: Build.
Step four: Repeat.

Step five: Repeat Again.

Step six: Hire cheap labor to finish the job.Johnny was paid in chocolate cake (which he helped make).

Step Seven: Plant
Step Eight: Fertilize.
Thanks Stanno.

Step Nine: Try to avoid the mud

Step ten: Ta-dah!
From the top of the hill.

From the bottom of the hill.

For this garden we chose to make curved raised beds. The raised beds terraced the yard which was sloped in two directions. The curved beds were just cool. The new main path will be laid in a curve going down the hill along the side of the beds. This allows more room for a small orchard, which will be planted along with wildflowers in the bare topsoil next to the house. Beds along the fence line were leveled and prepared for subtropical fruit trees and vines.

First of all, I can’t believe no one commented on the last post. I loved that tiny shower bathroom. Couldn’t get over it. Really.

So went up to Aukland last weekend for two reasons. We were hired to do a garden installation (more on that later) and our friends Rory and Catherine were getting married. Being engaged has heightened my wedding senses during normal every day life, so I was sure that going to my first post-engagement wedding was going to be an idea overload.

And it was. Unfortunately I forgot my camera, so I don’t have any pictures from the actual wedding. In summary, she looked gorgeous. He made a great speech. The church was fabulous. But our favorite overall element of the whole shebang was the reception venue which was in Fabel’s Rug Gallery, an old warehouse converted into a rug gallery and events space. I didn’t even know there were rug galleries. And even if I did, I didn’t know you could hold events in them. It was all very cool. In fact much cooler and more sophisticated than anything the boy and I could pull off. They even had a jazz band.

The other thing that struck me was the size of their wedding. When we were sitting in church (between devout prayers) and at the cocktail hour (between devout champagne-ing) we were trying to figure out how many people were there. We were guessing about 150. Hmm… so this is how many people will be at our wedding we thought. Wrong.

A closer inspection at the table charts revealed that there were less than 70 people there. Our wedding will be more than twice as big… maybe even three times, and that’s assuming we cut our guest list by half. That’s a lot of people to feed. Start growing those veggies folks.

How to stop habitual shower-peers. Build a bathroom so tiny that the entire thing is a shower. Thank you to the City Groove Hostel for unravelling this enigma with your clever space-saving bathroom. Yes, it may be a bit inconvenient if there are two people needing to shower/ potty at the same time. And yes, the toilet paper did get wet. But hey, I’ve never been able to sit on the pot and shower simultaneously. Have you? Not only space saving, but time saving too.

A touch of home from our trip to Aukland this weekend for a wedding and garden installation. Pictures of both soon to follow.

Big D is in the hospital. It is very serious, although not immediately life threatening. Little d is doing the best she can to make herself feel like she is not a terrible daughter for being 10,000 miles away. She’s not doing a very good job of it. She may be on an east-bound plane next week.

Big D and little d 1982

Just before I left the States my brother-in-law linked our blog to Google Analytics. Now, not only can I spend hours writing blogs and reading comments, but I can also spend hours analyzing the intricacies of my audience. A most productive way to spend my days. So, what have I learned?

You enjoy posts about babies and playgrounds more than posts about cereal.

I average about 15 readers a day.

We have a very international audience.New Zealand and East Costers I understand. I even understand Korea and Salamanca. But Brazil? San Diego? Hot beds of Dani and Ned supporters. Who knew?

Sure plenty of exciting things have happened since I arrived home to Raglan. I started working at Solscape again. Nelson and I performed a karaoke duet called “Permaculture Lovin'” to the tune of “Summer Nights” from Grease (it was a runaway success… I love my man). We helped build an earth pizza oven. But none of those events compare to the discovery of Double Crunch! cereal.

Some of you may know about me and my siblings’ obsession with Oh’s Ceral. We love it so much, that we bought the Piggly Wiggly’s entire supply when we were on vacation this summer. Do you think the store manager was confused? Did he think Oh’s were the next big trend? Now that we’ve moved on is he left with 100 cases wondering what happened? Ride it out buddy, we’ll be back in 11 months.

If you haven’t tried Oh’s, and live below the Mason Dixon, you need to find an all-night supermarket and go grab a box. If you’re feeling generous you can grab one for me and send in a little care package. Just kidding. Kind of. Its really the only reason to ever shop at a Walmart, which was the only place I could find it when I lived in Baltimore. Just be careful because they really cut the crap out of the roof of your mouth.

But anyhow, I digress. Oh’s are obviously not available here in the land of Kiwis. Mildly disappointing. But, even more disappointing was the lack of good cereal in general, and the complete lack of granola. Sure they have mueslix, but why would you want untoasted granola? That’s just gross. So, needless to say with no Oh’s and no granola, my cereal consumption was at an all-time low when I headed back home this summer.

But, having been reminded of the joys of cereal as I downed bowl after sweet bowl this summer, I was envigorated to begin my creal quest anew. And then I saw it. Glowing like a beacon among the many mueslix(es) at the Pak ‘n Save:

Double Crunch! ?
Ummm… yes please.

Imagine Honey Bunches of Oats (my second favorite cereal) with dried apricots added in.

The best darned thing on this side of the Tasman.

I’m going through some serious baby withdrawl. Going from spending almost every minute of every day with Tilda and Annie to none has been a bigger blow to my system than the jet lag I’m fighting. To make it worse, they’ve been away at a wedding all weekend and have been un-Skype-able. I’m sure Annie has forgotten who I am already. And Tilda? She picked the day after I left to start walking. Dagger to the heart T, dagger to the heart.

I’ve been easing my heartache by retouching some of the portraits I took on my last weekend in D.C. My half-day photographer stint made me appreciate just how hard it is to take family portraits. And the kids are only half the problem. I would finally get Annie and Tilda to smile and Joe and Kristen would be looking down at them, I can only imagine thinking “Wow, I made some good looking kids”. Snap out of it and look at the camera already! Jen, I don’t know how you do it.

We shot at Glen Echo Park. Funny how a run-down amusement park could be the perfect setting for both horror movies and family portraits. Out of well over 200 shots I think I came away with a dozen that I like. Oh well, those will have to hold me over until next summer I suppose. Here are some of my favorites from that day. Some are retouched slightly. Most are not.

Air travel is truly amazing. I woke up on September 9th in Washington D.C. at 8 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. I woke up on September 11th at 32,000 feet above the Pacific to an incredible sunrise. And here I am at 4 a.m (International Date Line East or New Zealand Standard Time) on September 12th lying in bed in our house truck wishing the rooster next door the most painful of deaths.

The body does not adjust to time changes as easily as my trusty travel alarm clock. So here I lay suffering the pangs of pre-dawn jet lag.

I heard once that this new-fangeled ailment exists because the human mind can only adapt to new surroundings as quickly as the human body could propel itself into them. Jet lag wouldn’t exist if we limited our pace of travel to man-speed, not machine-speed. How far could someone possibly walk in a day? 100 miles? Is that the evolutionary limit to the amount we should travel per day?

I’m willing to stretch that to a horse-ridden day. I remember learning in elementary school that the conspicuous symmetry of the midwestern territories is due to the limits of one man riding one horse as far as he could in a day. (Mr. Oklahoma should have gotten a better horse). If that’s true we can up our speed to about 300 miles per day.

It’s about 7,000 miles from D.C. to New Zealand. So my mind should be arriving in another 22 days. Wish me luck until then.