Commiserations

In New Zealand we would like to offer the cast of "The Hobbit" our sincerest commiserations. After all, you could have been staying in a place like this for the duration of filming; one of the thousands of bijou rental properties and b & b's around the country.
But I guess Watford will be really exciting by comparison.

There's something about Fridays

Last Friday, my gorgeous bundle of joy climbed up to base camp on our 25 foot tall cabbage tree (there's a natural platform at around 11 feet). On the way to rescue her, I slipped and fractured my toe. I didn't know it at the time, so proceeded to climb a ladder, balance a 20' long plank to a retaining wall, and get madamoiselle down. Only Sunday did I get around to going to hospital

This evening she is once again charging around in the garden, defying gravity and making our elderly tom cat dizzy. She has just been stalking our vacuum cleaner and bringing in leaves and twigs faster than I can vacuum them up.

This was her 6pm invitation to come outside and play.

Stranger than fiction

MARTIN DE RUYTER/Nelson Mail
Quoted in full from the Nelson Mail, New Zealand

A duck that visits a Nelson bakery daily for several months at the same time each year has been named Bruffin after the business's most popular product.

Brumby's Hardy St bakery co-owner Shelley Sims said Bruffin was proving to be a real hit with customers. "Every single person who walks past comments."

The duck had been coming to the bakery for three years, usually from about now through until Christmas. She arrives each morning with "her boyfriend" who waits at the door while she comes in to take a bite from the free taster box, Ms Sims said.

"She stands right by the counter and quacks until we feed or pat her."

The pair usually stay until about 11am and then depart. Ms Sims does not know where they come from and cannot believe they manage to make their way through inner city Nelson without getting skittled.

"The really bizarre thing is she comes in every year at the same time," she said.

Fish and Game biodiversity officer Rhys Barrier said mallard ducks were "pretty good at finding out where a free feed is".

"They go away to breed and things like that – their habits shift."

But they have a "good memory" and it was likely to be the food that draws them back, he said. "They have a bit more intelligence than people give them credit for."

Fish and Game has been called from time to time to get mallards and their ducklings out of urban swimming pools, he said. "They're a breed that's very tolerant of people."

New skills

This morning she jumped onto my keyboard and activated a voice inside the computer which verbalised everything I did with the mouse and keyboard from then on. It took me five minutes to figure out where the "deactivate" button was.
Later, she had me grovelling through undergrowth at dusk to retrieve her from a narrow part of our boundary fence. I lost a clump of hair on a tree branch in the execution of my grande jette through native bush.
She is now plotting her exit via closed curtains, locked doors, bolted windows and grilled air vents.
Thank goodness she is still a baby and eventually keels over exhausted - usually in a long sausage shape, neatly tucked between us in bed.
Learning to snore thankfully is still on her "To Do" list.

Cumin's question

"You know you said I wasn't to bring anything with 4 legs into the house? Well this one has an extra 96. Is that OK?"

Twigs that Cumin couldn't bring into the house

Plimmerton, New Zealand

Conversations with Cumin

Sunny day, sat on the deck drinking lemonade, kitten about to pounce on jumping insect.

"Cumin, if you catch that cricket, you stay outside and eat it."

Kitten darts into the dining room with cricket hanging from her whiskers.

"Cumin, now you have brought it into the house, you'd better eat it."

Kitten drops cricket and darts out into sunshine. Surprised cricket jumps away.

"Cumin, bring that cricket out of the house now!"

Lonely chirp from underneath the Queen Anne secretaire.

It seems we will be serenaded to sleep tonight.........