May 25th 2020, Shake rattle and roll

We start our blog today with a song from the new CD from Reb Fountain, a Kiwi musician who we recently saw at WOMAD.

Eh, what do you say, no new posts for a month? Been too busy? During lockdown? Well, we actually have been quite busy.

Lockdown for us meant working a lot on the property. Nienke worked from home most of the time as well and I pitched in whenever I was needed.

What an extraordinary time, lockdown. NZ went into lockdown early. Not as early as I wanted, but early enough to spare us from the carnage that happened elsewhere in the world. Most of our positive cases came into NZ by people returning quickly before the borders closed.

Quite a contrast with the Netherlands where they chose to go into a 'smart lockdown'. This basically means that the economy is more important than the poor people and the non-productive people, resulting in a staggering loss of lives. With 340 lives lost per 1 million people the Dutch government settled itself firmly in the top 10. And because they did not test much compared to other Western countries (69th in the world ranking) we must assume the real number is a lot higher. Not exactly a success story or even 'smart' for that matter. But maybe not surprising from a right wing government. New Zealand may have been lucky as our geographical position made it easier to 'lock' the country, but we are happy to have Jacinda as PM, a female Labour leader. Our cases have not been in double digits since April 18th and the last few weeks almost every day we had 0 cases.

During lockdown I divided my time between the property and the local GP practice. The seaside fence ceased to exist in certain areas. That explained the sudden appearance of different types of dogs in our garden, usually followed by frantically yelling owners for Jack, Hunter or Rocky to return.

This was one of our best friends during the flu jab clinics I ran. Hand gel (liquid gold of 2020) was in short supply and several industries changed their production lines in order to make essentials like face masks and hand gel. A New Zealand gin company made the best hand gel and we gratefully used it. Working with gloves when you have to give multiple injections doesn't really work, it's very unhandy and results in a lot of waste of time and gloves. Because of the relatively low risk in NZ we chose to not to use gloves but use hand gel generously. Unfortunately that does lead to layers of dried gel on your hands. This gin infused gel was amazing though. It did not cause debris on the hands and smelled delicious. And at he end of the day you'd only have to dip your hand in tonic and ......

The drive through clinics were quite a success and highly appreciated. We should have combined it with drivers license tests though. A drive through is a bit like an intelligence test. The purpose of the drive through was to easily and quickly administer a jab in the shoulder through the half opened window. Still people managed to appear wearing half their wardrobe, with cars of which the window could not open, jumping out of their cars, driving into the area from the wrong side, pushing their accelerator when they got the jab (nearly driving over the nurse), one lady nearly caused a major accident turning her car in front of an oncoming truck. One man got a flat battery right in front of the exit causing a major (well, for Otaki it was) traffic jam. Funny were also the people who came in walking or on a bike. Still positioning themselves in line with the cars.

Meanwhile we had one after the other beautiful sunset. I'm not sure if the sea was so calm to taunt us (as we were not allowed to go out fishing) or because everybody was inside and people caused less trembling of the globe.

Most people in NZ really enjoyed the lockdown. The weather was great and people finally had time for that odd job that still had to be done, family time, sports, cooking, etc. A survey showed that Kiwi's were not at all in a hurry to go back to level 1. The environment really enjoyed it too. Waterways were cleaner, wildlife flourished, we even have parakeets on our property now.

Shopping was a bit of a problem. As essential workers we both were allowed to shop at certain times but as we thought that was awkward we did not do that. Nienke was our designated shopper. Because we are reasonably self sufficient we really did not need much and I think Nienke only shopped 4 times in those weeks. Supermarkets were allowed to be open, but most smaller shops had to close and focus on online shopping. To support local and small businesses I did order

some food from the Dutch shop online. You don't want such important suppliers to go under. So, reluctantly, I ordered some licorice (which mysteriously disappeared in only a few days) and some Dutch cheese (same fate I'm afraid). Anything for a good cause though.

When level 2 arrived it was finally time to go fishing again, or what turned out to be 'feeding the fish'. Boats were still not allowed, but fishing from the beach was. So I  dusted of the fishing rod, made lunch and took the box with snapper remains I had saved for this occasion and made my way to the beach.

Not that I was full of hope, but just the feeling of being on the beach and fishing again was great. Needless to say, I didn't catch a thing other that a small cold (the water was freezing). After about 3 hours I decided to put my stuff on TradeMe.

So that evening I made bapao's. Filled with shrimp, so there was at least a bit of a connection to seafood.

As we were not allowed to make a fire (that might lead to voluntary fire brigade members having to leave their bubble) I decided to attack the big pile of wood in our paddock with the chipper. Quite a dusty job. With 'Classic rock' in my ears and an old fashioned Dutch Covid19 facemask I managed to reduce the pile of wood by two-thirds. Now we have 2 big piles of mulch, we need a gardener...

Joining the ranks of people who started cooking again. Like in many other countries flower was firmly on everyones wish list, next to face masks and hand gel. This is my creation, with almonds, cinnamon, raisins and a few other ingredients. Just a few thousand more and I can start building a second home....... Just trying to figure out how to bake a front door.

Winter has introduced itself last week. The Tararua's behind us showed it's white peaks. Quite a treat with a beautiful sunset as contrast. Shot from one of our paddocks.

Never a dull moment.

I covered our new chicken area with a net to protect them from the hawks. One of the chickens decided to try to fly (I did clip her wing) and ended up on the net where it got stuck. As a reward of freeing her I got covered in chicken shit and feathers.

I finally finished the fence line on the beach side. Managed to dig out the original posts and remove all the bits and pieces of the rusted wires lying around. Put new posts in where needed and added 9 wires to it. Overdone and probably futile, but an attempt to keep the bigger rabbits out. As the local store had run out of battens (apparently I was not the only one with this idea during lockdown) I had to source them elsewhere. Luckily some good friends came to our aid and they led me pick quite a few from their premises.

Nienke busy with our blender, just before it 'exploded'. Our local fruit and veggie supplier had a lot of tomatoes on offer and Nienke happily prepared to make her own tomato sauce again. Much less sugar. Successful until the machine gave up. Although we appreciated the machine's suggestion, we decided against the idea of painting the kitchen red. With the aid of youtube, silicon spray, some swearing and perseverance I managed to repair the machine and a second batch of tomato sauce has found it's way into our freezer.

To add to the consternation of the lock down the weather decided to surprise us with a few tornado's. Not as 'bigly' as in Donalds country but still surprising. Our neighbour managed to film it just after discovering his still vacant chicken coup was shredded.

The things people do during lockdown when even 'Netflix' is becoming boring. An old friend started sending pictures of our time in uni. Mmmmm. I hardly recognise myself.

My old faithful did not want to start anymore. No, I don't mean Nienke, it was Fergie, the tractor. Now I don't know anything about cars, but I checked a few things. Couldn't pinpoint the problem. Must be the spark plugs said Dick. OK, got them out but they were clean and looked OK too.

Don't know who invented this device to undo spark plugs, silly thing. Or maybe I'm too strong. We found the problem eventually, a corroded wire to the start key. Not bad, after 73 years (Fergie turns out to be from 1947)!

'Let's get rid of the old pampus' said Nienke. Yeah, why not, so I attacked that old stuff and it added even more piles of burnable stuff in the paddock. Level 2, so time for a fire. As everything was quite moist it created huge amounts of smoke, but as the wind predominantly came from the east nobody, except for my old neighbour (as she pointed out in a phone call and mail), was really bothered about it. After a full day of having a fire I'm still not finished yet!

Great picture towards sunset. Still a fire and smoke in the paddock and an orange sky on the other side of the house.

Really pretty on the other side.

Nienke enjoying a well deserved coffee on the deck.

Yes, that's me. I could say 'you should have seen the other guys' or something like that, but no, it was no bar fight. I have been operated on 5 fingers. All at once as I just wanted to get it over with. 4 Trigger fingers and one cyst that had been operated on unsuccessfully a few years ago. Operation was successful, but not uneventful. Being the first one to be operated on we had hoped to be back home around lunch time. Because of covid Nienke was not allowed to go into the hospital. She had to wander around outside and could call to see if I was ready to go. I can remember waking up after the operation and thinking 'mm, I'm tired, I'll close my eyes a bit longer'. Suddenly nurses started running around and shaking me asking me if I was alright. My heart rate had dropped to 28/min. My heart rate was 44 when I got in and with the combination of medication they had given me it dropped to pacemaker levels. All good now again and I'm being pampered very well by Nienke who is amazing. So now I'm finally in lockdown too. Typing this blog very slowly with the old 2 finger system.

We do have time to do some walks. Last news, fresh as, we were just up when a strong earthquake hit us, 5.8 on the Richter scale. About 50 km north west of us, 37 km deep. Felt like a freight train drove into our home. No damage though, all's well. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/121612723/58-quake-rattles-lower-north-island-rattles-food-from-shelves. Still quite some after shocks while I'm writing. OK, that's it for now. We'll close with another NZ song, 'In the air' by LAB

April 13th 2020: Lock down

OK, I started this blog on April the 8th. Didn't get much further than uploading a few pictures. We've been busy.

This is one of the short walks in the Tarararua's we did with Liselot, the daughter of Nienke's fraternity club friend Hadewych. Liselot came to New Zealand and was suddenly confronted with the threat of the famous lockdown.

Confronted with the terrible fate of having to stay with two old people for a few weeks she was smart enough to get a ticket in time for a flight back to the Netherlands and thus cutting short her long cherished 3 month trip through New Zealand.

We finally managed to do a track we'd been wanting to do for a long time. Unfortunately not a loop track, so you's have to bring one car to one end first. Now, as a group, we just split and walked towards each other.

Nice little stream along the surprisingly nice Mangaone walkway.

We did something like this once before, walking the Skyline walk in Wellington, but then we managed to forget to exchange car keys halfway. A bit wiser now we both had a set of keys with both our car keys on them.

For sale, deep down in the forest. Comes with a lot of hectares and the advise that a bit of TLC (tender loving care) may be necessary. I doubt this machine will ever produce smoke again other than being set alight purposely.

With Liselot on her way to the airport (she managed to pass Singapore airport with 5 minutes to go before total lock down) we had our lock down bubble all to ourselves again. Here you see Nienke in her new office for the coming 4 weeks.

Morning briefing at the Medical centre. They had asked me to come in and see what I could do. So I started by writing a hygiene protocol. De-cluttering the desks turned out to be a surprise to many. Some desks even turned out to have a colour.....

After making lists of all the patients who were on blood-thinners and needed to have blood checks regularly, I checked all of them and confirmed a dose they could stay on for the coming weeks without having to have their bloods taken. A medical student helped calling them all. After that I organised the flu jabs to be given outside of the practice in a sort of drive through.

And the then weather changed. Was it still nice and warm the previous days we suddenly had the first announcement of winter coming.

Weather like this always comes with beautiful rainbows. We were wondering when our Bantams were starting to lay eggs. Turns out it takes them 6 months!!! Expensive eggs. We are supplying a few neighbours with eggs and pine cones for the fire. Even got some veggies back. Maybe trading it the new thing!

An empty beach during lock down. Surprisingly though, as suddenly lots of people are out there walking, cycling, running, walking dogs (for the fourth time that day, poor animals). Maybe something good comes out of this after all. Anyway, when we did our beach walk, there was nobody there.

The only thing we found were the names of the kids of my Dutch colleagues written in the sand.

We're pretty lucky to have to be in lock down in our little paradise. It won't be very straining either as we've just been in lock down together for a year in South America. No bite marks at all!

On the second flu jab day I had professionalised our drive through on the Marae (a sacred Maori communal place). Well, professional, I basically unpacked our camper van.

Even brought my Milwaukee builders radio and iPod so we could entertain the people with some good music.

Only thing missing was the sausage sizzles (a traditional Kiwi fundraiser). I could have done it, had our camper van parked close-by, so the only thing missing were the sausages.

And then when you come home you see a perfectly flat ocean in front of you. Fish are jumpin'. Darn. Apparently the earth shakes a little bit less because of the lock down. That may explain a long row of near perfect fishing days. If only....

Even at sundown it was nice and flat.

That little dot you see just above the waterline is the volcano Mount Taranaki, in a direct line 200 km from us.

Strangely enough everything quietens down. Not much work to do at the practice, besides, they split up the teams so one team can continue working when another has to go into quarantine. I made a list of the insuline patients and started reviewing them at home so the nurses can advise them during the coming weeks. So still on the front line, but now beach front. I really hope we won't get American situations here. So far not too bad in NZ, 1350 positive patients and 'only' 5 deaths. Unfortunately some tragedies close by in the Netherlands.

Meanwhile Nienke is very busy working from home in our other office. Trying to keep her team members busy, doing her own work and being on call for the Civil Defence Emergency operations centre. It's amazing how many people want to help others, but it is good to streamline those efforts.

Not everybody manages lock down very well. You have to feel sorry for families in small houses, with abusive husbands or difficult children. Also for the old people, often living alone. Nienke and I are looking after our neighbour and Nienke has set up a Sims road email group so we can tell each other how we are all doing from time to time. We meet during walks and have short talks at a safe distance. The only two dumb idiots who breached the rules were the Health minister (I have yet to meet a smart one) who broke his own rule by going mountain biking (with his campaign van, his smirky face plastered all over it, parked in the middle of an empty parking, shouting out "Here I am, the health idiot!!"). And our opposition leader who travels from his home in Tauranga to Wellington, 525 km one way. He is 'essential' he says and his (high speed fiber) internet connection at home was not very good. Of course he means there is hardly any press in Tauranga and much more in Wellington. Pathetic little Pinokkio. You have to feel sorry for him though, his competitor Jacinda Adern is sooooo good, he is absolutely no match. In soccer terms it's like Premier division compared to the lowest regional division possible, and then the juvenile version of that.

During one of my rabbit shooting excercises I noticed a few big branches had come down in the storm.

So, we got our gear out, started up our old tractor and got to work.

Pulled the biggest branch of safely with the help of three connected farm chains.

As it happened in one of the far corners of our property I had to drive 'Fergie' over the dunes. My poor spouse watching me with a horrified look on her face.

Job well done, fence saved. The danger of our pigs moving over to the neighbours and eating their flowerbeds is gone.

Proud! Since we already had so much firewood I brought this lot straight to our Dutch colleagues. Dumped it on the driveway, avoiding a bubble breach. They gave me a chocolate hare as thanks.

Normal activities as our Friday night Drink Club are a 'no no' now. So we came up with an alternative. We come together over Messenger. Of course we try to make each other jealous so we positioned ourselves with a bottle of chardonnay and crackers with blue cheese next to the fire. No need to chill the wine because we were freezing. Didn't want our friends to know that of course.

Even managed to stay a few minutes more. We just finished a pub quiz I made. All online, via messenger. Was fun and we'll do it again further down the week. We're also sharing songs of the day.

Easter weekend was destined to be a 'work in the garden' weekend. We tried to get rid of the weeds in the veggie garden (again) without using chemicals. I guess the sweat dripping from my face technically doesn't count as chemical treatment. Not very good for my trigger fingers by the way. Hope I will get that operation soon after this is all over.

Now it's getting colder all kind of creatures are trying to get into our house. We're catching so many mice and rats that even Nienke got used to it and is now brave enough to throw the bodies away herself.

I started the hot tub yesterday evening and then forgot all about it. Realised that this morning while yawning in bed, after the wind woke me up. So I made us some breakfast for in the tub! Toast with eggs and hot cross buns with Nutella! Do not say anything about Nienkes hair. I know, we're getting very close to the dangerous phase of the lock down. That moment you realise you need a haircut and your spouse is the only one that could do it....... 😱😱

Pretty windy this morning. I've got the feeling there is a separation coming in the Netherlands. The alternative Kiwi flag behind there is clearly of a better quality.
Stay safe everyone!