Exploring the Land of the Long White Cloud

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!