Oh you are such a pretty one (Leonard Cohen)

A couple of housekeeping matters to take care of in this post as I respond to some of your questions.

1. What does SWMBO mean? And for that matter LOML? I refer to Jacky (the person I celebrated 28 years of marriage with recently) in a variety of ways. She crops up in these posts from time to time as 'She Who Must Be Obeyed' (SWMBO), and/or 'Light Of My Life' (LOML). It's simple when you know right?

2. Where on earth are you both? We now live on a 12 acre lifestyle block of land near a tiny little place called Otane (has a general store, a cafe, a few houses, a primary school,  a pub, a memorial to those who died in the First and Second World Wars and a great garden centre called Tree Guys). This is about 40 mins southwest of Napier on New Zealand's east coast of the North Island. We are also close to a slightly larger town called Waipawa (which somehow appears on the map below for some bizarre reason).

3. So how is it being back then? Well it's definitely different. The trees are all starting to change colour around us and that's a real treat again. The food on the supermarket shelves is now recognisable and the idea of having alcohol available in the foodmarket is just surreal. I'm struggling with watching Arsenal play at 1.45 in the morning and having little spare time to write blogs, read, or practice the guitar is also annoying. But balancing that are all the green hills, autumn weathers, blue skies with clouds, and other familiar things I've grown up with.

4. Samantha read my last posting and said - yeah good but what about Waffles??

Waffles (a.k.a. Wafi, Mr Waffles, and sometimes even Waffle) is our new cat.

Jacky wanted to wait until I got back to Nu Zild before going 'cat shopping' as she called it. I think it was about three days before we (Jade and Samantha tagged along as well) duly went to the SPCA in Waipukarau (a town a little further south from Waipawa - I hope you're keeping up!). They had about 100 cats from tiny kittens to full grown cats.

I'm a firm believer in cats choosing you (rather than the other way around) and a very sweet ginger cat immediately made a bee line for me and Jade. It helped a lot that he was not a young kitten so he was toilet trained and he thinks dogs are great fun.

I've named him Waffles (or Wafi for short after the Wafi Mall in Dubai) and he's turned into a very smoochy cat. He follows me around the farm all day and is pretty fearless, he took a swipe at Jacky's horse when the horse wanted to see what the ball of fluff at his feet was doing.

Waffles joins a growing menagerie. We currently have SWMBO's horses - Zen and two horses that are kindly being lent to her - Meg (for Jade to ride apparently) and Max (from whanau member Margie in Hastings); Samantha's dogs - Bazil and Dookie (although he is currently in Wellington for a few months with Jesse and Sam); and 13 sheep.



Dookie, Jade, Bazil and Fanfa



Jade, Zen, Mabelle and Max



Love and peace - Wozza