Waiata Joy

I've stopped saying I can't sing, because lately I've been doing a lot of singing so it would be ridiculous to continue protesting that I can't. What I meant, for all those years of saying I can't sing, is that I can't sing reliably well. My voice still isn't very reliable, but lots of practice, good company and good teachers are helping me to understand more about how to control my voice and how to recognise the range where my voice is strongest and most reliable.

I'm singing waiata (Maori songs) with two separate groups. In the Waiata Class at work, most of the singers are not much more familiar with the songs than me, and while there are a range of singing abilities, we've been progressing together at more or less the same pace. The repertoire is designed for us to use in appropriate work contexts and ranges from funny nursery songs to himine (hymns).

At Waiata Joy (at Pehia Weri Marae on Tuesday evenings) I am the new girl in a loose group that's been singing together all year (and some of them all their long lives). The strength of the singing around me simultaneously carries my voice to a stronger place and helps camouflage my weaknesses. The repertoire there is slightly more weighted to the traditional and himine with lots of patriotic Nga Puhi anthems and old party favourites.

Last night we learned a new song (the first song taught from scratch since I started six weeks ago), a beautiful Maori translation of a Christmas carol called Holy Night. When I first heard the demonstration I was moved to tears, and not only at the assumption that there was no way I could contribute to such an exquisite and complex piece of music. By the end of the evening I had discovered I am an alto, and was singing along... not even close to perfectly, but well enough to be enjoying for the first time in my life the sensation of singing in a four part harmony.

Rahui at Bream Bay

Following the whale strandings and deaths near Whangarei earlier this month, tangata whenu (local Maori) from Patu harakeke - Takahiwai have placed at Rahui (ban) at Bream Bay. A Rahui is a ban on collecting kai moana (sea food) from this area and will last 14 days. Local Maori history recognises the Whangarei Harbour as a resting place and migration route for whales.

There may be health issues as a consequance the many whales that had to be buried at the beach and their possible effect on the water quality. The ban is not legally enforcable, but is tikanga (customary practice).

Snow White

Everything is bursting into bloom with the thrill of warm spring rains. Swathes of green are broken with pink, red, white, yellow, orange blossoms. I'm enjoying the sights but unfortunately my body is responding with a one woman show about seven dwarves: Sneezy, Itchy, Scratchy, Reddy, Bumpy, Swelly and Teary.

Tame garden, wild journal

What have I been doing lately instead of composing frequent, witty, thoughtful blogular commentaries on the world around me?

Well, the vege garden is looking very fine at the moment with the first brocolli ready to eat tomorrow and some tiny dark green nubbins of tomatoes popping out. Because its inside a plastic-house I have to water it even when there's been a lot of rain, and because it's sheltered from most wind, watering is a slow and careful exercise of not getting tomato leaves wet (and thus inviting fungi and moulds). So slowly and carefully do I water in fact, that there is plenty of time to pull all the weeds out at the same time.

And I've been making more an effort to socialise (as in actual face to face contact with other human beings in the same room) than I have for oh, at least two or three years. I still enjoy solitude most of the time, but that 'most' is quite a shift away from the hermit-like existence that I was dedicated to when I first moved to Northland 18 months ago. Yesterday I enjoyed visiting my local bibliophile-buddy who likes to lend me books and who has lots of books worth borrowing.

One of the books I borrowed yesterday is called Artist's Journals and Sketchbooks: Exploring and Creating Personal Pages by Lynne Perrella. It's wonderfully inspiring, as I've been really trying for some time to make my journals more colourful, textured, and playful (initially inspired by The decorated page by Gwen Diehn, also good but not quite so juicy). Immediately on arriving home with this book I started playing with my journal, experimenting boldly to various degrees of satisfaction.

One of my favourite things I read is that if you aren't happy with how a page looks you can just paint it all out and start again with another layer. You can do that?! Oh wow, the freedom... I feel like my imagination is all getting all stretchy and succulent as I let go of being precious about what I write and draw and abandon old rules and prejudices about collage and rubber stamps and texture and colour. I'm literally pushing my own artist's book boundaries by letting my journal bulge, buckle, sprawl and splay in an unseemly and undignified manner.

Stoat on the Run

Walking up the right side of the road, minding my own business I noticed a very small animal trotting towards me on the left. I stopped and saw that it was a stoat. A few seconds later she* stopped too, peered at me around the enormous mouthful of dead starling fledgling she was carrying, obviously decided I was not worth bothering about, and resumed running.

She ran right past, close enough for me to admire her white chest and notice that her mostly red fur was dripping as though she had just climbed out of the nearby creek. As she passed I turned my head and began to formulate a thought to take a photo.

At that moment she stopped, dropped the bird and in three sinuous leaps she disappeared into the long grass on the side of the road. I walked over to inspect her catch, saw that it wasn't a precious native bird, commended her taste and carried on walking.

*I'm guessing it was a she, taking lunch home for her babies.

Spring Garden

I went round to visit Mt Tiger, where I house-sat this winter.

I got to have some nice cuddles with Bonnie, who I have been missing lots. She hurt her back leg a few weeks ago and isn't allowed to leap or jump until she is fully healed. She's pretty frustrated with being kept inside (and who wouldn't be with a garden like this- full of birds- waiting just outside the window).

Over the winter I thought it was a nice garden but now I see what a wonderland it can be in glorious spring technicolour.

Vermin beware

October Garden

Every now and then something shatters my mild-mannered, peace-loving, bodhichitta-aspiring, hippy-dippy default mode of being. Usually vermin of some kind. Long-time readers may remember a certain over-excited rat that inspired a murderous vengeful rage in me. Cockroaches have a similar effect. Snails and slugs feasting on my seedlings can bring on a slightly muted version: not so much a red haze as an orange one, enough to make me buy (organic) snail poison.

Above is a photo of the vege garden taken three weeks ago. Below is a photo of the same garden (different angle) taken today. See how well it is coming along? I am overwhelmed with lettuces and peas needing to be eaten now now now. I tend it lovingly, enjoying the satisfaction only possible in a Very Small Garden: a temporary sense of completion.

November Garden

But! There is a thief enjoying the fruits of my labours. Every morning I see that something has eaten more of the unripe strawberries, still-small, pale green, seedy nubbins that must be awfully sour. My pleasurable anticipation of the enjoying a lush crimson strawberry harvest is dashed on a daily basis. I suspected that the strawberry thief is the same villain who is nibbling my bean seedlings, clattering across the roof and laughing maniacally outside my window at night. Have you guessed yet?

When I was a kid we had a possum wander through our house one evening like a family cat. I remember the hysteria when we realised it wasn't actually cat, but I don't remember how that particular possum problem was solved. My current possum problem made me go looking for a trap. Turns out the humane Timms traps cost more than I want afford (about the price of 10 punnets of strawberries) but then Nola at NRC offered me a Free Once In A Life Time Offer of a 'small bag' of possum poison. Was I interested? Oh yes I was, imagining a small (strawberry punnet sized) bag of poison. When she slung a big old paper sack on the counter I thought she would be siphoning off a portion for me. But no, as I signed the register for my Free Once In A Life Time Offer she explained that 2kg is the small bag. It usually comes in 20kg sacks.

Using a couple of old plastic milk bottles donated by a work mate I have made bait stations and set them up around the garden. After an initial cautious nibble the first night, subsequent nights have seen the possums gorging on poison and even trying to carry some away for midday snacking (I'm guessing this from the trail of blue bait strewn on the ground). I'm glad the poison is being eaten but it is slow acting and unfortunately the possums are still enthusiastically eating every baby strawberry they can find. See below.

Evidence of murderous rage
Exhibit A: strawberry plants with gnawed empty hulls in the foreground
Exhibit B: Bait station with poison in background
Bonus Exhibit: Stump in right background is a nasty tree I tore apart with my bare hands* because it was shading the strawberries, sucking up all the water, threatening to grow through the plastic sheet ceiling and dropping horrible sticky seed pods on everything.
*Have I mentioned that all this gardening is done without any proper tools?

Birds' House

Remember the baby birds I wrote about a few weeks ago? Well they grew up and fledged surprisingly quickly. I would look out at the nest and see six nearly identical birds overflowing for a second before they flew away in response to my attention. I also encountered them in the garden where the young ones were strengthening their wings with flying games that included dive bombing me in quite a startling manner.

Then about a week ago I looked out the bathroom window and didn't see the nest. Peering down I saw a splatter of dried dirt and bird shit on the deck below. Uh oh, the weight of six growing birds was clearly too much for their mud, straw and bird-saliva construction. The teenagers are still hanging around the garden, but I noticed this morning that the parents have started reconstruction. A lip of mud was balancing on the tiny ledge where the last nest had been. By this afternoon it had doubled in size (about a quarter of the full size of the earlier version). Every now and then I glimpse a wee bird flying in with a beak full of mud or a strand of dried grass.

What great role models for persistent commitment to having the home that they want, where they want it, not matter what goes wrong!

(bank)ing

Let me say that in... most... countries, 95 percent of the built environment is merchandise. It's not architecture. It's merchandise." What separates the two is art - art that springs from logic, from taking into account what Murcutt calls the “‘ings’ of things. The entering, the arriving, the greeting, the progressing, the communicating, the preparing, the eating the discussing, the leaving, the sleeping the loving, the caring, the touching- and all the senses,- the smelling, the feeling, the seeing, all of these things."

This is a quote from a Listener interview with an architect called Glenn Murcutt.

Sadly the kind of houses that are within the price range I can aspire to in the next year or two are not only artless merchandise but the shabbiest kind, the housing equivalent of worn-out and unloved second-hand $2 Shop merchandise. They are still terrifyingly expensive. It’s amazing how quickly one can come to think of $130,000 for a scungy one bedroom unit in the seedy part of town as a bargain when there is nothing cheaper to be seen.

I am giving myself a crash course in real estate, investment and personal finances. I’ve been hyped up by the books that tell me I can make millions in just three years, until I come down enough to realise what they really mean is it’s relatively easily to owe millions. I’ve been depressed by the sober investment books and their tables that show me how much I could have made if I had started being more sensible with my money 20 years ago or even five. I’ve done goal setting exercises and imagined the next forty or fifty years of my life: how I want my life to be and what I will have to do to make that real.

My housing goal is to live out my life in a home that embraces the particular ‘ings’ of the life I enjoy, aspire to, and anticipate: my dreaming, my creating, my sharing, my thinking, my developing, my reading, my cooking, my eating, my learning, my meditating, my stretching, my sunbathing, my loving, my growing old and eventually my dying. Unfortunately it will probably be necessary to invest in some very artless merchandise along the way to that home. And before I put my foot on the first risky rung of the property ladder I've decided to sort out a few things about my current money situation.

One of the things to sort out is my banking, so this morning I telephoned every single bank in the phone book. I was staggered by the differences between them and feel an evangelical urge to encourage you, dear reader, to make sure you are getting the best banking deal you can. Especially if you are up for internet banking, you can get the best bargains: no fees, no minimum balances, high intrest easy access savings accounts.

For the record, I am an internet banking user looking for a flexible, high intrest savings account that would be starting with a lowish balance, and a low or no fee day-to-day account. The winners were Westpac (which as of 1 November will be NZ incorporated) and ASB (Australian owned).

My banking survey was not only educational but quite fun, as the call centre folks are very helpful when you are a potential customer rather than a disgruntled one. It's amazing how many don't know who owns their bank/employer. I felt sorry for the lady at Superbank who told me they were closing for business at the end of this week, and that she would be out of a job. I was disappointed by National Bank who were utterly inflexible when I offered them the opportunity to match their competitors and keep me as a customer for another 10 years.

It took me a little over an hour to talk to nine banks and when I do open my new accounts I will be rewarded by saving $13 a month in fees and an increase of 4.25% in the intrest rate on my much more flexible savings account. Not a bad return for the time invested in research.

It's a number!

This is my odometer (123456) at about 8pm last night just before the turnoff to Oakura.
This post is dedicated to Rachel, Bill and Sylvie who invented the 'it's a number!' game.
I don't expect anyone else to care but I'm too tired to create a backstory to make it more interesting.

My friends are the best measure of my worth

Should I ever get too bogged down in self-criticism, I only have to think about my friends to help get a better perspective. First of all I have lots of friends, so many that in my frequent bouts of craving solitude, I will sometimes declare (quietly, and just between you and me) that I have too many friends. Of course that is nonsense because when the quality of one's friends is as high as mine there is no such thing as too many. But I do keep moving cities/islands/countries, a habit that allows the best of friends to rise to the surface by virtue of their willingness to stay in touch long distance. And fresh starts mean I make room in my daily life for a whole new batch of friends.

So, I can't be a total loser if I have lots of friends, most of whom have loyally remained in my intimate circle despite years or decades of little or no face to face contact. And, I hasten to add, my friends are not losers. They tend to be intelligent, capable, funny, unconventional, thoughtful, sensitive, generous, dynamic and picky about who they stay friends with. And they picked me (or allowed me to pick them)!

Most of my friends don't share my vices, so they can be trusted to pull me out of a hole rather than lead me into it. We talk about work, children, parents, partners, singleness, hopes, fears, food, troubles and successes. Some of my most treasured friends are those I trust to recommend music, movies and best of all, books. I've been indulging in 1+ hour phone calls these past couple of weekends, touching base with old friends and new. If my bladder was bigger (or the phone was cordless) we could probably talk for longer.

The Handmade House

The most adrenaline I've produced from reading a book lately has been my encounter with The Handmade House: A love story set in concrete by Geraldine Bedell. The experience of having their unique architect designed house build in the middle of London was as confusing, stressful, overwhelming and crazy as the house itself turned out to be sleek and minimalist. Ms Bedell is unusually candid about her family's finances and the passages describing their precarious money situation were what kept me awake at nights.

She is quite open about the fact that her and her husband were as naive about personal finances as they were about architecture and design. Basically, having decided that from the sale of their current Islington home they had about 600,000 pounds to spend on their next house she impetuously blew that amount on buying a bare section in Hackney. Bridging finance was costing them about 87,000 pounds a month (whimper) when the dotcom crash pretty much obliterated her husband's income. It took 2 and 1/2 years and cost about 450,000 pounds to build the house- while they lurched from one lump sum payment to another. While she never adds up all the sums (the nerve wracking finances aren't the point of her story which is a very interesting and compelling account of the whole process of designing and building as well as blended families and clutter busting etc) she does say that they were living in the house a year before their cheques stopped bouncing.

Yikes! My own response to finding out exactly how much money I could borrow to buy a house was to buy a lotto ticket so that I could cling to some small vestige of hope.

Twitching

Two new (to me) species spotted lately live and loose in Hukeranui.

1. A stoat ran across the road like a ripple of fox-red fur, stopping me gaping, in my tracks. Bad stoat, no doubt heading off to eat baby native birds. Bad, bad stoat, but kind of pretty.

2. The first time I saw California quail was when two ran across the driveway and flew up the hill as I was setting off for work daylight-savings early. They are lankier than the Brown quail I'm familiar with. These Californians are crowned by lovely curly quiffs and decorated with white flecks on their dark grey feathers. I hope they have babies as cute as brown quail babies- nothing, but nothing, is cuter than those marble sized balls of fluff.

Waro Rocks

After visiting four Hikurangi open homes within an hour and 500 metres of each other (three of them asking almost exactly the same price) I drove up to Waro lake with my lunch.

I've written about Waro before when I paid my first visit out of geological interest over a year ago. That time I was too shy to climb up the mound and explore in amongst the dense hill of rocks that was a lake floor 25-30 million years ago. The Karst formations are so imposing, so grand, so special that I felt that my human presence would be an imposition. I don't know the Maori stories about it but I feel sure it must be considered tapu.

But on this balmy Sunday afternoon there were several groups of people wandering about and so I realised that it is frequently visited. Venturing up a few rough tracks I found myself in a series of magical places. The rocks have been weathered over 5 million years into sensuous curves, ripples, stacks and holes. Trees and bushes have grown up between them and in some cases through them. There are secret rooms, caves and tunnels. There are open air chapels and cathedral towers.

Sadly, aside from some DoC interpretive signs there doesn't appear to be any management of the place. It could be a wonderful tourist attraction if it was tidied up a bit, the noxious weeds eradicated and the surrounding area mowed instead of grazed by these interesting shaggy long horned beasts! The picture is a bit blurry because I didn't feel it would be wise to get too close to those serious horns, and my phone-camera has a limited focus.

Home Ownership Aboutface

Since I sold the one house I've owned (Dunedin, fifteen years ago) and blew the profit on travelling, I've been a strong advocate of renting (or recently, house sitting). My antipathy to homeownership is the daughter of my financial situation and my priorities. And for various reasons my priority of late has been to not work full time, a lifestyle I have funded with savings that might have been a house deposit in other circumstances.

I recently helped to convince a friend that she shouldn't get over her head into debt to buy her first house in a town where she doesn't really want to live. I dusted off all my excellent reasons to not buy a house. I summoned rationales based on widely known economic discourses such as 'home-ownership is out of the reach of most NZers not already in the market' and 'the bubble must burst, leaving heavily indebted owners with no equity' etc.

But since then I've become slightly obsessed with wanting my own home. It's something to do with the transience of my past couple of years, with finally getting to live in the part of the country I've longed to live in while quixotically* falling in love with a long distance sweetheart, with rediscovering the pleasure of gardening and with a year of living in other people's homes. How often do I aboutface on my strongly expressed positions? Pretty often but don't rub it in. I like to think that I am a flexible, agile, dynamic and responsive Sagittarian Firehorse (thanks, E) rather than a fickle, unstable, unreliable, untrustworthy dilettante.

*I intuitively wanted to use this word here even though I've never used it before, didn't know how to spell it and wasn't sure enough what it meant to publish without double checking. The Consice Oxford definition is such a good description of what I wanted to express that I feel my intuitive vocabulary vindicated. It means (like an) "enthusiastic visionary, pursuer of lofty but impracticable ideals, person utterly regardless of his (sic) material interests in comparison with honour or devotion" (after Don Quixote).