Exploring the Land of the Long White Cloud

Here we are again another year has gone by. Things are definitely ticking along for us here and 2017 has definitely had its ups and downs. I really enjoy having a reason to sit back and reflect on the year. And having you along as well for the ride to listen is lovely. We filled up on delicious fish and crayfish for Christmas Eve dinner last night: And the dogs enjoyed their gifts this morning (we're dog-sitting and they sent along those to keep the pups happy): But, back to reviewing the year... So January saw us come home from Canada. We got lots of snow and packed in as much visiting as we could. As much as those of you in Canada don't want to hear, it really made us appreciate where we live now. We both hit the ground running as my client list was growing quickly and Dustin was straight back into the bushes to work in the park . Through the next couple of months I was having great fun networking and building my business. We went up to Auckland with friends

Considering that 90% of the photos I take are of Porter, I figured I should at least share them! He sqiurmed himself into a sports bra I left on the floor. Then he was kind of distressed walking around with it on.

Fun fact: Dustin and I went on our first date on Sept 26, 2000. (White Rock, Luna Loca.) And although we don't still celebrate that date as our anniversary, earlier this week we both realised it was our dating anniversary so we decided to go out for dinner. The craziest thing - we were seated and what song came on over the restaurant's speakers? This Year's Love by David Gray, our "first dance" at our wedding! So, it turns out we've now spent half of our lives together. This is both mind-boggling and totally not mind-boggling. It's hard to imagine what life would be like if we weren't together. And looking back, it's also amazing how quickly seventeen years have gone by. I am really appreciative that we have had the chance to "grow up" together from our late-teens and to really choose how we want to shape our life together. So, here's a short video of Porter, when Dustin took him to work in July when he was building a deck.

I haven't been writing as many blog posts in my head lately. I used to often think of how I'd share an experience or an update and what words I would use - usually I didn't remember them exactly by the time I got to writing but I was thinking of it a lot. But as we get more and more embedded in our lives here, it feels like the updates are a lot more mundane! Also I think my head has been very full this year and there hasn't been room for pondering my posts here. It's been a very up-and-down journey trying to get the right balance with my business. My tendency to say yes a lot and to want to help a lot had my weeks extremely full. Too full and even though I've been open to sub-contracting some of my work, it's been tough finding the right person or people to work with so I haven't been able to offload much. So last month I made a conscious effort to scale back my work days and have had mixed results in sticking with it but I'm not really acceptin

Dustin was very busy early last month, as they were preparing for this... He built the stairs they were walking up and down! And a friend of ours was very much involved in the event - she's in the video, her name is Emily!

What would "summer" be without a beer fest to attend? On April 1st we headed down to the sportfishing club to go to the Mountain Ales Beer Fest. It's the third year it's been on here and we've been each year. The setting is awesome and we got sun again even though the norm lately is rain. Overall it's a good event with lots of breweries participating. This year though, the variety was pretty much pale ale, IPA or APA. There was supposed to be a porter but the keg didn't arrive :( Must just be the trends but we found most of the options to be pretty similar. At least it was generally quite good. The highlight of the day was winding up the night with kareoke! Never fails to please me :)

The last 4-6 weeks has been busy busy busy. We're both going full steam at work (me mentally and Dustin physically) and there have been social events on weekends and even on some week nights. So, this Easter weekend, we made a point to not have any plans (and even turned down a camping trip) to just stay put and do nothing. Dustin woke up with a bit of a cold so he's been doing lots of napping today and yesterday. There were massive weather warnings on Thursday for cyclone cook but for our region, nothing much materialised, which is a good thing really. Lots of power outages and flooding elsewhere though! We've been getting sun and rain which is making it tough to stay in doing nothing but then as soon as the rain comes back again it's easier. And hanging out with this little pup helps too!

Dustin has been getting more helicopter rides over the last couple months. They had an over-nighter and often the supplies they need require a helicopter to drop them. So, they usually get a ride in and walk out or get picked up. He spent the last couple weeks digging out a track to put stairs in so they could r elease the North Island robin last week . It sounded like pretty intense work so he's been pretty exhausted these days. The birds waiting in their boxes. But now he's off for a week and a half so the next projects might be around the house instead of the mountain!

So one of the projects Dustin has been part of at work was changing over the marker poles on a very popular summit track on Mt Taranaki. They stayed overnight on the mountain and the helicopter dropped them off at the top with the gear and they worked their way down. He was taking photos through the day and one of them got in the news! That's his boss (and our mate) in the photo. http://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/89969367/installation-of-new-poles-on-mt-taranaki-to-benefit-all-mountain-users And already, the purpose of the poles has been put to use - they are GPS-marking where each one is and they are numbered so that if someone is lost they can find one and tell search and rescue where they are and then they have the co-ordinates and spend less time hunting for them... and a lot of people seem to get lost and injured on the mountain. http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/90007874/Man-injured-on-Mt-Taranaki-is-flown-to-hospital?cid=app-android Just another day in

It was announced many months ago, we were looking for a fun summer concert to punctuate the season so we got our tickets and made our plans and finally last weekend the date came around. Bruce Springsteen was in town. (Not our actual town, but Auckland was closer than Christchurch.) Now, some of you will remember, we saw Springsteen back in 2014 - almost on a whim in a way. That show was so incredible that we hardly thought twice about going again. So, with friends we drove up to Auckland on Friday (when it's five hours away, we usually don't consider going the day of a concert!). At least we found some things to keep us busy Friday night - a food truck market for dinner and a free outdoor screening of the Richie McCaw story, Chasing Great. The movie was great and it was pretty inspiring to see that he wasn't necessarily considered the fastest or the best but that he was determined, focused and knew how to use attitude to get where he wanted to be. I definitely recom

I started a chapter of Dance Dance Party Party here last month! There are a few of you that used to attend with me in Vancouver - it was just an hour of dancing fun at a rec centre and it was such good fun. You could be a DJ for a night too! So I thought it was time to try to get it started here so I could get my dancing fix regularly. And, for a little promotion I went on the radio show that I visited in December too. You can listen below! The first one went off without a hitch! We had a handful of gals who were keen and next time I expect there will be a few others. We're planning to run it monthly so it should be fun times!!

So, in case you don't know, we live within walking distance of the rugby stadium.  (Side note, the All Blacks are coming to this exact stadium in September. We've already secured our tickets - lucky!!) Sometimes other events happen at the stadium - a few cricket matches a year and then the random things like Nitro Circus. Dustin went with a mate a couple weeks ago and boy did the crowd go wild. (Usually you can't hear much of the events from our place but I could hear the roars - and from the stories the boys regaled me with, well it sounds like the roars matched the increasing daredevilness of the night.) It turns out they even pulled volunteers out of the audience at one point and did a backflip on a motorbike with 4 people on it (3 were the volunteers). Wow. Sorry, the videos didn't really work and they are so short it's not worth uploading to youtube... I guess you'll just have to head to Nitro Circus when it comes to your neck of the woods! (Ignore

So we're getting close to finally being done our renos. Yes there are still 2 bedrooms (the office and the craft/beer room) but everywhere else is pretty close. Maybe a couple finishing touches for most other places. This has got us thinking about what we want to do next. The idea of paying down our mortgage has come up as quite appealing to us. Maybe a bit boring but kind of one of those short-term pain for long-term gain kind of things. So we were running some numbers over the weekend as our mortgage is up for renewal in a couple months. We're thinking of making a better effort to pay it down. The first year we had the house we were able to put a bunch of extra money on it but then the renovations began in earnest - and the expensive projects involved! Then keeping our sanity with time away and going to weddings of friends, and the visit back to Canada... it all adds up to not putting extra money on the house. Neither of us have ever held debt that wasn't to our paren

Countdown is on! Five more sleeps until we see Bruce Springsteen again!! We're heading up to Auckland on Friday with Bridget and Andy and the concert is on Saturday. We've been watched a couple of docos about him over the weekend, he's such an incredible artist. They had footage of them recording the Darkness on the Edge of Town album and it was amazing how everything is in his head and he won't stop until he gets the songs sounding just like that. Very cool. Summer has been coming in one-day doses but it seems like this week is finally going to have a few days in a row at least! Which meant a very hot and sweaty Zumba class tonight. We had a long weekend in early February and spent it building a shed. It's so close to being done!!  (This picture is not the current state). Porter helped too! We just have a couple things left on it! Dustin's been busy with lots of work trips - a couple nights up the mountain and a day out on the sea!

So going from winter to summer is much easier when summer hasn't really started! We got in and have had a few days of rain with some sun so far - hopefully it gets here soon! We survived our trip but we've definitely been happy to have 3 days to slowly get back in action before work begins. We were kind and left ourselves laundry to do on top of the tons we brought back. (Good news though, we didn't have a beer spill on 1 of the 3 legs of the journey! Dustin brewed with a friend in Surrey so we were bringing some back to NZ but lost one on the way to San Francisco! Also on the way to Canada, we lost one of Dustin's home brews he was bringing to share! Eeek.) The trip was one of those ones that was actually only a couple weeks but felt like a month - probably because we packed so much into it! The couple days in San Francisco were no exception even though it was wet and windy - apparently the worst storm they have had in ages. We spent one day walking all over the ci