Today dawned cool and grey, was warm and sunny by lunchtime, drizzly by tea, then hail, and finally high winds and cold by late evening.
First thing Steve gave me my presents - two 9v batteries. Apparently they are for the smoke alarms and "could save my life". I felt like suggesting he got out of bed quickly to save his own!
After Steve went to work our neighbours from town, Jeanette and Allan, called round with some flowers from their garden and a bench for the garden that Allan had made.
The boys played in the garden (we don't school on birthdays, although I did tell the boys that as my birthday treat I had decided I would teach them all day so they ran into the garden and kept out of my way hoping I'd forget them!) on their bikes.
I then went to do some work on the henhouse. Steve told me this was my treat for my birthday, that I couldn't just do this on any day of the year! Lucky me! He had removed some of the metal roof of henhouse and put chicken wire on, to let in more light. however, while it is chicken-wire and stops chickens jumping out of it, it is clearly not sparrow-wire. I watch sparrows dive-bomb from nearby trees, tucking in their wings at the last moment to slip into the henhouse. Yesterday I put 4 days of chicken food in their feeder, and the sparrows had emptied it in a couple of hours. I found some smaller gauge wire and cut it to size, but could not find the staples I needed to attach it, so decided to do something more fun instead.
The boys and I hopped into the car and drove 15 minutes to the nearest coast, Hook Beach. This is a shingle beach with plenty of driftwood, dead birds, seaweed, etc. We haven't visited in months. We enjoyed about 45 minutes there, walking along and talking about what we saw. We collected some driftwood to bring back for our fire. As you can see from the photo, it wasn't exactly packed!
Home for lunch, and a friend dropped round for a coffee, so it was a rushed lunch with the boys. We drove into town for my tea party at Cafe on Queen at 2pm. I had invited some friends for tea and cake and we had a lovely hour. There were 9 mummies plus 7 children. The children sat on the floor and played with Lego, and the mummies sat and enjoyed a relaxed chat. It was a lovely treat for me, and I had some lovely gifts.
After 3pm we delivered our recycling and picked up some shopping from the supermarket. We finished just in time to go to Keas. Tonight was my first night as a Kea Leader. My Kea name is Fantail. One of the little girls misheard when I was introduced and called me Fanta for the rest of the session! Tonight the Keas planted some sunflower seeds in a bed prepared for us in Victoria Park, next to the aviary.
Back home again and cooked tea for the boys. At 6pm Jeanette came out to the house for birthday cake (Edward took the photo) and had offered to babysit for the evening so we could go out for dinner. We had booked a table at an Indian restaurant in Timaru (30 miles away) but then the other doctor was off sick today so Steve was going to need to cover his overnight on-call so we couldn't leave town. There really is no good option for eating out in town so thought we would have to postpone our plans. In the end a compromise was reached that we would have dinner in Timaru and then Steve would be on-call once we got home.
We enjoyed a tasty Indian meal and were blown all the way home. As I write this the wind is gsuting down the chimney flue and the fire is raging in the logburner....
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