Phew, another week passes in a flash. Now it’s only a four day countdown until the Easter long weekend. Can’t wait to step off the executive grind for a few days and seek out some warm weather up on the East Coast.

We’re off to Hawkes Bay www.hawkesbaynz.com for some r&r with hop along in tow. Naomi is joining us to see the sights and chill out at the vineyards.

We must be getting old as we’re returning to the same place we stayed last Easter which is a cottage in a beautiful location at Cape South. www.capesouthcottages.co.nz .

It’s been a funny week with the weather – heatwave and autumn in Wellington and extreme storms up in Northland that have caused huge flooding in the Bay of Island. Not what you need just prior to the holiday weekend. Hopefully it will continue to stay fine long enough for us to get the foundations cemented in on the house.

Seems that the failures of the new BBC Castaway programme are making the news here in NZ.

Based in Great Barrier Island off the coast of Auckland it is certainly a long way from England but I wouldn’t necessarily class it as remote. Certainly not like the first Castaway Island in the Hebrides.

It seems that the 120 strong film crew are making the most of the local amenities and mixing with toursists and locals.

As a closet fan of the first series, especially Ben Fogle, I think its a total cop out by the BBC. You’d expect better standards of broadcasting but seems they’ve let them slip to appeal to the popularity of other reality programmes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/castaway/about_us/the_location.shtml

http://www.greatbarriernz.com/index.html

Plenty to celebrate this week the the bypass opened in Wellington. After months of traffic congestion when they only opened one section going one direction they’ve finally opened the other.

Reportedly traffic is flowing much better in town and it can take at least 3 minutes off the journey to the airport! Still, it will come in handy for when I do my first official visitor airport run in December when my parents arrive to see us.

I can’t take conversations about rush hour seriously here in Wellington. Generally speaking the rush is only to the coupon parking (only $4 for the day) and unless you keep milkman hours you’re unlikely to get those spots. Otherwise you may have to wait at a few traffic lights or perhaps a pedestrian crossing.

OK when it rains it does get busier on the roads, no doubt about that, but when you’re commuting time is less than 15 minutes it’s hardly anything to get too stressed about.

As all things in NZ you get used to the smaller scale. And after all, small is beautiful too!

The ground works contractors left site on Tuesday this week leaving the site pretty much as it was when we saw it last weekend. Except this time the mud has been baked and cracked in the sun.

It feels frustrating for there to be no more progress whilst the sun has been shining this last week. The big job in the next week is to peg out the house site before the foundation piles are driven into the ground. The latter is not being done to the following week so we’ll have to patient and adjust to kiwi time again for the next weekend’s visit.

Still, its a beautiful part of the world and not a bad place to just soak up the view. Which is about all we could do today. Oh yes, and admire the drying mud!

Crikey how time flies. Last time I blogged about the countdown it was 30 weeks to go until the end of my contract at work. Now the last 7 weeks have passed in a flash.

I apologise that blog has been dominated by house stuff and the interesting side of New Zealand had disappeared, I’ll try harder in the coming weeks to give you more insight into kiwi life.

The last seven weeks have been frankly too much work and not enough play. It seems that NZ Government has woken up earlier this year and it’s been full on in the office, probably not helped by having my chief media advisor off for almost four weeks. Also, work related, I’m five weeks into one coaching course and two weeks into another so that’s keeping me busy with reading, homework and being attached to the telephone for classes or coaching clients.

But at least the sun has been shining most of this time and the house developments have been fun to think about and watch. With only a couple of weeks to Easter I need to start thinking really hard about the domestic executive ambitions as I said I would declare my hand on my contract at Easter.

Just to reassure you, I’ll not be signing onto a permenant contract. That is definite. I’m still focused on coaching and consulting in between getting the garden up and running, not to mention the menagerie of animals.

So, time flies and that’s the way I like it. By the time my executive contract time is over I’ll be ready for a new challenge of a domestic kind.

After much speculation, trials and tribulations professional soccer is coming to Wellington. They will be competing in the Australian A-League replacing the defunct New Zealand Knights FC who played out of Auckland.

It was touch and go whether they’d win the franchise but after a rich Wellingtonian Terry Serepisos stuck his hand in his pocket and put up the dosh we’re now looking forward to a new home team to support.

MT is in heaven to think once again he can be a season ticket holder although I’m not sure how he’ll tolerate the other footie mad followers. The Supporters Club has already announced itself as “Yellow Fever”. Not quite the Barmy Army but am sure that it will shape up nicely as the name, colours and of course the players are announced over coming weeks.

No, this is not a picture of our building site but rather the remnants of a lahar that sent 1.4 million cubic metres of water, mud and volcanic material out of Mount Ruahpehu yesterday. This event has been predicted for many years with civil defence systems on stand by. By al accounts it was a spectacular event although now there is plenty of clearing up to do.

For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Ruapehu

If I could put these pictures side by side you’d be able to see the light and dark of NZ’s microclimates in one place. Today it started wet, dark and miserable but by lunchtime the wind had started to blow the clouds away to leave a stunningly beautiful sunny day.

I don’t think it had anything to do with the clock’s changing, more of a southerly weather front travelling up the country. For those who want to make a call to us please remember we are 12 hours ahead of GMT after the clocks changed today. It will get complicated again when the UK clocks go forward for British Summer Time. Oh how confusing it all is but at least we only have one timezone to content with in this country unluck friends and family in US and Australia that have a continuous battled to synchronise the time.

It didn’t take long for us to start to introduce wildlife to our place in Kaitoke. Here are 12 hives of bees placed there by Al who is the husband of one of my work colleagues. With the large amout of Manuka amongst the bush on our land is ideal for the bees and makes a wonderful complement to the thistles also on site.

These hives are not quite the traditional design we were expecting but on closer (but not that close) inspection it is clear that the bees don’t mind as they buzzied around doing their stuff. Can’t wait for the first lot of honey from hives on our land.

Hmm, not sure about this bit though – a quagmire of clay!

Drive and build platform, now clearly defined.

At least some of the garden is still intact.

Well a girl needs to keep here wellies clean.