Xmas and New Year

We had a lovely Xmas day at home with my Dad (Poppa John) with BBQ roast chicken and roasted veges.  We disappeared for a few days over New Years camping up at Waipapakauri Ramp and picked tuatua's on 90 mile beach, and went paddling and surfcasting at Houhora heads.  A bit of a mixture of weather but we did have some lovely hot days.  Came home with a bit of sunburn but nothing too major.  It is lovely to be home again and not sleeping on an air bed any more!  Very late nights and children do not really go together all that well and we had some spectacular behaviour once we got home.

A friend was feeding our dog while we were away - and said she saw "Mr Rat" running from the chicken coup to the vege garden.  We have since killed at least 5 rats in the vicinity.  Yuck.  On a positive note, on returning home from holiday, we picked about 6 courgettes, 15-20 potatoes (from 3 seed potato plants) and 3 beetroots which I will try to cook up tomorrow.  We still have 7 potato plants to dig up, and the courgettes just keep on coming!  The experiment with mixed planting beans, pumpkin and sweetcorn has had mixed results.  The idea is to keep roots cool from the pumpkin foliage and the beans and sweetcorn create a self supporting structure.  Unfortunately the beans have strangled the sweetcorn and it is very prickly ferriting through the pumpkin leaves to locate the beans.  BUT, the beans are growing well, and the pumpkins are also so far doing very well - so perhaps I should have planted the sweetcorn out once they were bigger??

Mysteries of Life: why is it when I go on holiday, my hair goes weird and my skin breaks out most unattractively?  I thought that the hair thing was because I normally blow dry it, and it sort of did it's own thing while we camped - but once returning home, it styled itself perfectly normally even without the aid of the hairdryer?

I have not done any sewing since my last post.  Although I am not Catholic, I feel like I am in a confessional box admitting my worst sin.  I am counting the days until the exhibition and realising that there are not all that many left, and will need to place bomb under a certain tush to get things finished in time.  My project list of things that I was hoping to submit will need to be culled.