The middle of Waimate

Jan 28th: A sunny day but with a cool southerly wind (they're the ones that come up from penguin-country!). We schooled this morning and then the boys had a swimming lesson. We still had some maths to finish after lunch and then the boys played with bows and arrows in the garden. Our free twice-weekly Waimate paper arrived telling us that we are now under a hose-pipe ban. But nothing is really banned in NZ, it seems, and in fact when you read the details, we can now only use our hoses during daylight hours on odd days of the month (because our house number is odd), and the even-number houses over the road can use them on the even days of the month! We harvested another cabbage for dinner, but it was so big we shared it with our neighbours! We had some very soggy bananas so I cooked three different banana cakes and used up another 5 eggs (still 5 in the box, though!). The photo is of the main street, Queen Street, from the south end. The clocktower on the right is of interest. It's over 90 years old and the clock is of a pendulum design. It chimes the Westminster chimes every quarter hour, and bongs the hour. When we first moved here it was a poor timekeeper, and as the week went on it would get further and further behind. Once it was 10 minutes out someone would go and change the time. One Sunday I was walking into town and the clock bonged 3 o'clock. It was spot on the hour, but my watch said 2 o'clock. I got into a panic as to what the real time was, but soon confirmed that it was an hour ahead, and remained so until Council staff turned up for work on Monday morning. It has recently been refurbished and is now spot-on all the time.