An eventful fortnight

This'll be a quick one cos it's Oskie's birthday tomorrow.

I've done the balloons and Niki's iced the cake but there's still presents to wrap and streamers to put up and it's getting on for midnight. It's a particularly big occasion for him not just because he's three, or because he's finally getting a skateboard (and talked about nothing else for the last three months) – these things are big enough, but today was the day he gave up his dummies. You know, those pacifier things; all 5 of his beloved dodies were traded in this afternoon at CheapSkates for an outrageously oversize lime green skateboard. Bless him, he can't even look at it without falling over but he gave the man his precious rubber teats without so much as a grimace and went almost straight off to sleep tonight without them. And he wasn't well; he's had a nasty cough for a few days and went to bed with a bit of a temperature. His last words before drifting off were, predictably enough, "but I want them!"

Nice one, Calpol...

It's all big events round here at the moment. The Festival of Lights was a sight bigger than we expected, the town completely choc full of people on the final night, kind of like a sedated Spanish Fiesta Major complete with stage entertainment and even a churrerira stand. The churros were ok, considering the distance the recipe had to travel and the Brazillian-French team that were running the stand. Typical Kiwi catering. Wacky food was everywhere, involving fundraisers for local schools and a mulled white wine which completely erased my memory of everything else on offer. All in all it was a pretty spectacular event for a little harbour town. I've put some pics up on the LosNemo gallery site.

There's news on the job front too. Niki's been making progress with local schools and, as predicted, the best leads have come from personal contacts. She had a few days relieving work (that's Kiwi for "supply teaching") at a big city-centre school, full of brutal pre-teens but still miles better than the one she was at up north... and an interview at a Catholic school in New Brighton that turned up some interesting part-time possibilites. It's looking like a combination of part-time and relieving will work out best (and probably best-paid) if only because the real prize – promised sessions of Spanish teaching at the local Steiner school – then remains a viable proposition. Fingers are crossed. Me, I'm still not absolutely sure what's going to come my way but it's currently looking like construction work might be looming on the horizon again. And not just any old construction work: I might have an entire house to build before too long.

I've been saving the biggest event til last, even though it actually appeared first. See that view over the harbour in the photo? Nice picnic spot, no? Just above where we're living at the moment, too. Well, we might have just accidentally kind of bought it, sorta thing. We were chatting with a neighbour who mentioned the land was up for sale, said she'd had her eye on it for some time, dropped a very big hint that the owner was extremely keen to offload it, so we put a daft offer in. Which he turned down of course but we still ended up getting it for a really good price. The rest of the month has been a meetings and drawings and plannings and overall, a slowly-kindling hope is evemrging that we might be able to get the whole thing off the ground by the time we come to move out of the place we're in now.

People we're talking to are speaking of a council planning department suddenly free of backlogs, presumably (like everywhere) due to the lack of building going on in the region, able to turn what used to be an 18-month approval process into something much more immediate, for the right kind of application. If we can keep it simple, within known limits, the fact that our land already has outline planning permission means we might even get it down to so many weeks. Naturally, this has me thinking we can possibly afford to push our luck... we'd love to build something out of the earth, rather than just pour concrete all over it. Wattle and daub? Almost... there's a long, fairly strong tradition here of rammed earth construction, just like poured concrete but using compacted clay-based soil instead: exactly the sort of soil we have here, in fact. As our place will be quite conspicuous, we're keen to make it blend in as much as possible and you can't get much more incognito than a mud hut on a hillside.

Will the town planners like the idea? Well, the nice thing about this place is, you can just walk into their office and ask them. It's way more open and informal than anywhere else we've ever lived. You meet these people and they're just incredibly personable and helpful, plus it's such a small town; you get to know a proper local and they just seem to know everyone and go out of their way to introduce you to the right people. It makes the idea of building here much less intimidating and living here a genuinely positive, exciting prospect.

We'll see. We haven't even paid for the land yet...

I did mention the new album in the LosNemo gallery earlier but it's becoming customary to include a link at the end so here it is: Link. You'll want the "Late June"album for the most recent pics. Finally, a solemn promise to post up the birthday party pics there. Like, as soon as possible. Hey, c'mon, I've got a lot on my plate these days...