demiurge: "Another Beautiful Day in Paradise", Christmas in Tuateawa

After a few days of hostel life, we were picked up by Bexie's friend Jon, a conservationist who has a spot of land that he's been working on, planting native trees and creating a home for volunteers to come and work on it.

There's a shanty and some storage containers on the land, and Jon was still waiting for approval of his house to come through, so the first night we camped out. It's a beautiful place, right next to the river, surrounded by native bush.

The next day the deal came through, and he got the keys to this place. It's a cool house, an upstairs (the girls floor) for Bexie and I, and an open kitchen and communal space. Bexie and I were instantly excited to be able to "move in" somewhere. This will be the house the volunteers will be living at, when Jon's program starts in early January, and goes through the summer.

Our first dinner in the house--the quirkiness of this picture is fitting, as everything was still jumbled and packed, but we managed to cook anyway.

After working that day, we drove over the hill to Coromandel to pick up Aron the next evening. So good to see a familiar face in New Zealand--the first time since leaving in August! We were all smiles as we drove back, and captured this photo..

It didn't take us long to make ourselves at home, and to madly decorate for Christmas. Jon even went out and cut down a little pine tree (they're an invasive species here, and everyone hates them, so there's no grief about cutting them down. I still like them, but I'm not a native Kiwi..)

Here's our day trip into Thames, before Christmas. We spend a lot of time in the library there, because there was free internet, but we also managed to get a lot of grocery and Christmas shopping done too.

Guys, this is a golden kiwi. I don't even know if you can get them in the U.S., because I had never heard of them before I got here. But they are waay good.

Bexie spoiled me again, and baked me a birthday-cake, and we had a combined house-warming/birthday/Aron's arrival celebration. And I got to blow out more candles :)

This cake is so good, chock-full of seeds and fruit, it's a total treasure hunt to find everything in it.

Another lovely evening, I was popping popcorn to string on garlands, as we watched Star Wars and ate brownies.

Christmas day! Jon woke me up early in the morning, because I had volunteered to help him collect the fish from his net. I hung out on the beach for an hour as he paddled out and back, and then, before breakfast or festivities, we had to filet it. Goo and blood and bones later, I learned how to do it.

I mean, who doesn't want to filet fish on Christmas morning?

Then we gathered around our Charlie Brown tree and opened the gifts. The package from my mom was packed with warm gear, lovely bits, and candies. Aron gave us each affirmation bracelets, and Bexie knitted me a headband, and Jon gave me socks and chocolate! Apparently, the goal of Christmas is how many things you can adorn yourself with. We played charades and drank champagne and had a lot of fun.

Bexie in the socks I knitted for her from the end-bits of the other socks:

On Boxing day the weather was fine, so Jon decided to take us all out for a paddle. It was beautiful, we hugged the coastline of cliffs and crumbly rock formations. The rocks were volcanic, and we called the "chocolate chip rocks", because they were made up of lots of light and dark little pieces.

We stopped in the middle at a little rocky cove to swim and sit in the sun and snack, then checked out a mussel farm, where Jon collected the ones growing on the edges, before we paddled back--and some penguins swam up to say hello! It turned out we were gone for 4 1/2 hours, but it didn't feel like that long!

In between working and adventures, there's been a lot of reading and knitting and playing games. There's been a few evenings of Settlers of Catan, a game of trading and building empires-those games can get pretty intense.