…Feral the cat came back – not all stories have the desired ending…still, that will teach her to pick fights with big dogs who are just trying to be friendly…it also shows that cats, like children, come back much more docile after a couple of nights alone in the bush…

It was really nice to get home on Friday to find that Carmen had put the roof on the mancave and laid the foundation of the front deck…certainly saves me some work and puts us ahead of the game to get the damn thing finished – it’s a bit dark inside at the moment til we source some windows for the front but at least the rain isn’t getting in anymore and it has dried out quite nicely….

Later on I think we’ll extend the deck out a bit further but we need something now as it is a bit of a step up to the door at the moment…when it’s done and after a bit more judicious pruning, the view will be something like:

Obviously a little more groundwork required in the foreground but the plan is that this is where steps will go down to the next level – the hill down from the house is quite steep but has been terraced at some stage so it is possible to descend from level to level…If I cut down ALL the trees you could see the Raurimu Spiral at the left of the picture…

Have also been quite busy in the garden and we finally got a vege garden underway…the soil here is not very good to say the least being for the most part an unfriendly combination of clay and volcanic ash. There used to be mega-toitoi right up to the house and we have, over the years, pushed this right back and opened up the bush. One of the unexpected benefits of getting rid of the toitoi is that where it has been is actually good rich, well-drained soil. After a few hours hammering way with the rotary hoe, we flattened out the first of the toitoi humps and, on Saturday, got a range of veges into the ground. The plan is to extend a series of little vege patches down the path visible here:

In other blog news tonight…

Cheeseburger has an account of the Sydney International Food Festival this past weekend…sounds like a great event and I too am dead keen to have a crack at the bacon jam…JB makes a point about the way that non-professional food bloggers were treated in exactly the same way as mainstream food media and I think that he is on to something: would you rather read  a review of an eatery by someone who has been paid to write it and whose palate might be somewhat picky, or reviews by normal people? I reckon I lean well towards the normalcy side of the fence. Years ago, around 2000, (yes, again, another missed opportunity to make something of myself!) I thought about posting eating reviews on a website somewhere but couldn’t find a suitable one and this whole blogging thing was then it’s infancy…I think I might kick this off again…Reading into JB’s comments about the quality of non-professional food blogger’s, I wonder if he also might have tapped into an insight for the future? Might it be that soon we will be more reliant on informal blogs (the ones we think best suit our own tastes and preferences) for information that we will be in the professional media. Could this be the start of the Information Militia…?

The Strategist has an item on the UK going back to someplace it is far more comfortable than the current war: back to the days of the Raj on either side of WW1…this has really got me thinking and I need to retire to the hammock to cogitate on it a while before commenting…stay tuned…