Christchurch Pettys in December 2014

Wooded Gully Campsite (There is a gully too!)

Yay, I’m finally catching up. It is now 7^th January and in the last two days I have written October and November. And now for December!

After my eventful month of November, December was pretty quiet. On Monday 1^st I stayed in Christchurch, but visited a school. Then on Tuesday I flew to Dunedin for a teachers’ conference where I gave three workshops, which were all well received. It was a beautiful day in Dunedin and I went for a walk around the town before our ride took us to the airport.

Jonathan played for the Seniors’ Christmas party, and did a great job as usual. I made a green salad. We put up the tent in the backyard to make sure we had all the bits and had some idea of what we were doing. It only just fit, as it is a 6 person tent, with three rooms.

We went to Hiraina Carran’s funeral. She isn’t much older than we are, and had cancer for about ten years. I spent most of the time in the kitchen with Rayleen and Jessica.

The Sentra has never been this full!

I visited another Christchurch school. We have employed William again, part-time, to work on videos for us. Our hope is that he will get another part-time job and be able to work around it. We met with the accountant, and all feel rather more buoyant about the business. When people ask, I say, “We have gone from cautiously optimistic to quietly optimistic.” Until now our videos were available for free on YouTube, so many of the teachers just used those without signing up. So we are now moving them to Vimeo, where we can restrict access so they can only be viewed through our site. Because the videos are very popular with the teachers and students, about half the schools in NZ are signing up. We hope that this will encourage the students also to sign up as individuals. Fingers crossed for next year!

In the second week of December, I came down with “crashing fatigue”.  I could barely get out of bed in the morning, and slept a lot! It lasted for about a week, before I felt like myself again.

Mark has been really busy at work, and consequently we are getting William to take Jonathan to the gym three days a week. One week, Mark worked nearly three times his normal work hours. His offsider was on holiday one week, and Mark did all his work as well as his own. The money will be handy!

I tend to get anxious around Christmas time, no matter what we decide to do. This year we had presents only for Seth, though I did get a Bopit for Jonathan. The tent was for Mark and me. It was good not to spend. For lunch we invited my mother over and had chicken burritos with all the trimmings and homemade ice cream with boysenberries.

Our tent looking like its going to take off. Mt Thomas on the skyline.

We had a day with Jessica, William and Seth, making a Lego cinema. And another day we all went to the beach for a swim and to bury William in the sand, as is customary.

Our main summer holiday was five days at Wooded Gully in our tent. Jonathan stayed home, which he prefers, as do we, and William got paid to stay with him, and used our 3D on the TV. So it was win, win, win, win! One afternoon they came out for a swim in a river, which was pretty nice. Most of the time we just lay about and read and prepared food, ate food, cleaned up from eating food and had an afternoon nap.  We were most fortunate with our weather, which was mostly dry, though a little windy one night, which I found scary. I had downloaded a gear list, which was SO helpful to make sure we had everything we needed. We have quite a big air-mattress and pillowtop, with down quilt, so our bedding takes up a lot of space.

We finished the old year out in a tent at Wooded Gully at the foot of Mt Thomas. It has been a challenging year for me, so I’m pretty happy to turn the page to a new one.

Yay and I'm done!

Happy New Year to all who read this, from Nicola, Mark and Jonathan.

A great outlook from the door each day.