Finally got a snapper on the kite

More christmas photos

Connor making the sign for glasses.

More photos

Connor signing "Helicopter"

Chirstmas 2008

Connor got up around 6:45 this morning, so we got a lie in. So far he's opened one present, and has finally sussed out what this wrapping paper thing is...he has never really shown an interest.

Here's some photos..

Connor asking for help (patting his chest)

Connor saying that the present is a train (with "Choo Choo" noises too)


Connor just playing with the new train

Five hours and many many steaks

This morning at around 8am, I started skinning the deer and after we butchered it. Yesterday we weighed it out at 50Kg gutted, and this morning we weighed 49kg of meat and bone, about 9.3kg of bones, and the rest as either steak, mince, casserole meat, roasts, and a bit of dog food.

This one was a lot more tender than the stag.

Hanging Doe

Another deer

The last stag was pretty tough to eat, so this evening I went out and harvested (not really hunting) this yearling doe. She was shot at around 180m (which is my longest shot yet), and it went though the spine above the heart. so little meat was damaged.

Hopefully she will make some tender steaks, and the stag will be turned into meat patties and some venison sausages (oh and maybe a salami)

Anyway since it's 12:22 in the morning, and I've got an early start tomorrow (well Connor always wakes up around 6am), I should go to bed.

Connors Vocabulary

Here is Connor's current sign language vocabulary (50 different signs and counting)

Food
Cat
Dog
More
Finished

Tractor
Bike
Ball
Goat
Sheep

Cow
Bird
Rabbit
Deer
Chicken

Drink
Water
Milk
Hot drink
Biscuit

Please
Help
Shoes
Bath
DVD

Fire
Hot
Dragon
Spider
Horse

Monkey
Aeroplane
Helicopter
Train
Toilet

Telephone
Sleep
Doing teeth
Glasses
Pig

Nose
Bubbles
Book
Boat
Hi/Bye

Tiger
Fish
yoghurt
light (illumination)
baby

There are probably more, but we can't think of them at the moment.

So Cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel (well a stoat actually)

One of the cats brought this in for us the other day (probably Jag), so now it is hanging in the garage drying out after being skinned and salted, should make a nice pelt once finished, not sure what to use it for though.

Christmas is on it's way

Well, as usual recently it's been a long time between posts, it's not for the lack of things to blog, but I think it might have something to do with every time I'm at the computer in the lounge (when Connor is around anyway), I have a little munchkin climbing up to help, oh well..

So now I'm hiding in the office, I can try and catch up.
Since that last water fight I have tried numerous times to upload a video of Steph and Connor, each with a hose pipe, getting one another totally saturated, but for some reason the universe is against this video being uploaded, maybe one day!


A few weeks ago, Steph and I did a NZQA course on fencing, we built the other side of the bottom paddock race fence, it looks really cool, and we learnt how to tie knots in high tensile wire and snap it with our bare hands, no more fighting with fencing pliers, much easier once you know how.


On the grass front, since that one bit of rain after sowing, we didn't have any of note till yesterday, so it still has germinated :-( but fingers crossed that now it got a good dosing it will pull away, or we're looking at a really bad spring for weeds in that paddock.


I've started dismantling the plough, and have the three point linkage all back to bare metal, and hopefully this evening I'll get a coat of undercoat on it. We're painting it traditional grey (not Fergy Grey, just machine grey). Hopefully it will only take a few weeks (I've got a fair bit of time off over christmas so it shouldn't be hard).


Oh, took Steph on her first rabbit hunt this weekend, there is a farm up by Mum and Dads that have a bit of a rabbit problem, and I go up and make a very small dent occasionally, this time we recovered 64 bodies, probably another 10 escaped with fatal wounds, and a good proportion were lactating does, so that will increase the count too. It was nice to spend some time with Steph alone and out of the house. She also enjoyed it, and was especially proud of the shot where all she could see was the head and ears of a rabbit, so she shot (and hit) it. In another paddock, she got all 4 rabbits in 4 shots. I was very impressed with her breathing control and style, spot on, so now once some funds become available I want to get her her own firearms license, and maybe a nice .17HMR. After that trip it brought our rabbit kiloage to 11, which is enough for sausages, so that went into the butchers on Monday, so hopefully on Saturday I'll pick up the rabbit sausages. I was shocked how much rabbit costs to buy in a butchers, $20/kg, and there I was if the rabbit wasn't full grown, I fed it to the dogs, or just tossed it away, shame I can't sell them, does mean that Steph and I have expensive tastes.
Talking of meat and tastes, I organized the freezer the other day, found about 40Kg of venison, 2 cardboard boxes (about 60x30x20) full of bacon (I thought we had run out), another couple of goats, trillions of sausages (ok about 300), a few pork chops and a small handfull of lamb chops (along with a few kg of rabbit and hare). I guess Steph and I live on venison for the next few months, and to top it off we're trying to cut back on our meat consumption, so I think I might be doing a BBQ soon.


Over Christmas this year, we're not going away, or having anyone visiting, so it's going to be very quiet, we've even discussed that since celebrating Christmas in it's true sense would be hypocritical for us (due to our religious beliefs), and celebrating it otherwise would be just feeding the machine of commercialism, whether or not it would be a good idea to celebrate Christmas as a different holiday, but kind of in the same spirit as the Christian festival (Steph did suggest being a bit more original and celebrate the summer solstice instead, but since it would be the height of the fire season, having a bloody big fire and buring the yule log would probably get us in trouble), it seems like a good time of the year just to celebrate family and friends, that way Connor doesn't miss out the celebrating thing, all we have to suss out is how to handle it in relation to Connor and Father Christmas,school activities and peer expectations, but thankfully that's still a few years off.


I've finally finished tanning the two goats, Connor has the kid skin under his cot which he loves standing on and patting, and as for my rug, it's at the foot of our bed, beside my deer skin. When I brought the big shaggy goat skin in on Friday Connor sat down beside it, patted it and made the sign for goat! That boy knows what a goat looks like in a paddock, hanging up ready for butchering, and what they look like as a rug, I guess I can be certain he won't grow up not knowing where meat and fur/pelts come from!

Connors first water fight

Perfect timing

Whoohoo. Just sowed some grass seed on the paddock, thinking that we might have left it to late for any rain to get it started, and low and behold it's raining! Might put paid to this evenings hunt, but I rather the grass grew!

Oh in other news, we had some one through the house today, and they really liked it (so much so they spent 10 minutes at the end of the driveway discussing it after they left!)

Things ticking along

Well, spring is almost over, and it was late this year. As from the last blog entry, you can see that we've recently ploughed a paddock over, and we're nearly ready to resow it, just waiting for the seed to arrive. I'm hoping that we'll get it in this weekend, otherwise it will be pushing it too close to the dry season, and the grass won't grow.
Other than that, Steph, Connor and I succumbed to some viral infection a few weeks ago, and that really knocked the stuffing out of us, but we're on the mend now. Steph still has a croaky throat, Connor's nose is still running, and I'm quite phlegmy (yuck!).
Last weekend, I abandoned Steph and headed up to Mum and Dad's place for a hunt, as they have a friend with a rabbit problem, 100 acres and I estimate about 1000 rabbits (and that might be an underestimate). Well after a few hours of spotlighting and a hunt in the morning we culled out about 50 bunnies, and several hours later I had the good meat removed (about 8kg, which went to about 6kg once boned).
We're planning another trip up there in the near future once the rifle is suppressed, and we'll also take the crossbow, should be fun!

Plouging paddocks

Yesterday, Steph and I headed up to Lake Taupo to pick up a plough for the tractor whilst Amy looked after Connor. It was quite cute when it came time to drop Amy back at the train station, as she left the car, Connor burst into tears and was reaching for her, so we ended up waiting for the train and waving goodbye as the train pulled away.

Today, after a night which saw me up for an hour coughing and being sick, I decided to give ploughing the paddock a go. As you can see from the photos, I won't win any competitions, but it does work, so now in a few nights time, I have to rotavate it.

Connor 'n' Boots

Goat hunting gone wrong

It all started a last week when ScubaFella asked if I wanted to go out for a hunt
this weekend, initially the wife and I were supposed to be heading to Taupo to collect a plough, so with a quick rearrangement of days, Sunday became free. Then later that week, the whole family came down with a really nasty stomach bug, and I was thinking that I wouldn't be able to make it (that was if the weather was even suitable). Anyway Sunday came and my stomach was settled enough for a hunt, and the weather looked good. ScubaFella said that he basically wanted to knock something over, so we figured goats were probably the best option, and once the Muka Muka came to mind (also it meant gentlemans hours, not a crazy 4am start).

8am SF and I met up in Featherston, and we loaded up into the truck and headed down to the coast, on the way down there were rabbits galore, but we were after something bigger. After a few fordings going along the coast road that "cleaned" the underside of the truck, and then used the trailer as a grader we got to the small fishing village near Corner Creek, and proceeded to unload, and transfer equipment (well most of it) to the bike. With guns and day packs loaded on, we set off. with a reasonably uneventful trip to the mouth of the MukaMuka, we turned up the river and started bouncing our way towards the forks. Within a few minutes, I misjudged the depth of one of the puddles, and with the extra weight and it's placement (and my mistake of reading the track), we almost put the quad on it's side, but we managed to recover from that and slowly but surely picked our way up the river bed.

20 minutes later we arrived at the forks, and start to prepare the rifles. I open my bumbag, pull out some ammo, load 4 into the magazine, put the bolt in and then I hear SF curse. He starts emptying his bag, checking his pockets, but to no avail, he just can't find it..SF decided to bring good luck to the goat hunt be leaving his bolt somewhere (somewhere other than in his bag). We ditched the idea of heading back to find it, and just hid is rifle under a tree and decided to hunt on.



Normally I would take the one on the true left, but someone mentioned on a
previous post about an area just past the waterfall on the true right fork, so
we headed up there. 30 minutes later and some very wet trousers and boots we got to the waterfall, and found the "rope", a thin piece of yellow cord tied to a
rusty bracket.

We both had an attempt at finding a way across the rocks, but we both decided that it was too slippery, and the water too deep to warrent trying. Bugger, that's about an hour of the morning wasted. Whilst walking back out to the forks, we did explore a spur leading up, but there was no sign or anything. Getting back to the bike we decided to head to the same place I shot the goats the weekend before. It starts off with a reasonably steep climb along a goat track along a ridge before it opens outs. Since SF was rifle-less, I gave him the 308 to carry for the walk around here since there is normally heaps of sign, and hence a good chance of seeing something. We sneak up the ridge, noticing that the sign was thick on the ground, including one that we didn't recognize (looked like big Jaffas albeit the wrong color). Reaching the grassy bench we spyed over the edge to the clearings on the other side of the river, but as usual, nothing was there. For a change we decided to head in the opposite direction to which I normally go and headed around to head up the bench above the center fork. Stalking like a pair of elephants we didn't see anything, and around 12ish we sat down for lunch. After lunch the rifle was passed back, and we proceeded stalking along the bench, and lowly the sign got less and less. I suggested to SF that we pick the pace up a little, as there is no sign. So there we were walking through the bush, paying little attention to foot placement, chatting, with the wind up our as when all of a sudden I saw what looked like a bloody reindeer (first thought). I quickly put my hand up to silence SF. First he thought it was a goat, then he saw the antlers! About 5 metres in front of us, the big stag stood up, and still in a sleepy haze, turned it's head to look at us. "Bugger, it's all velvety" I thought, but soon after the thought was replaced with "Hmm, venison" and the decision made. The rifle was quickly loaded and raised (none of this statues stuff) and I lined up, aiming for the shoulders I squeezed of a round, instead of the normal "Kabooooom", there was a "click"...shit...Safety...fumbling the safety off, I line up again on this dumb founded stag who is just starting to think about moving. Again, I squeeze the trigger, and this time "Kaboom", and the stag ran away. We kept him in sight, and quickly moved to where he headed off, blood....lung but still he was very mobile. I lined up again and squeezed of another. He still kept going. Where we were, there was thick bush up to our right, and a bloody steep drop to our left, if he left the bench he would be lost. One more shot and he dropped (but still bloody alive). I slowly moved closer and but one in the back of his neck shattering the spinal column. He was dead.
I could hardly believe my eyes, in front of me was a bloody huge stag (unfortunatly in velvet), but all the same, a good haul of venison. After reliving the last few minutes a few times, we started the mandatory photos, and a quick count of the points, 9 developing, uneven though. We let him rest for a while and then started removing the back steaks and hanging the legs in trees so we could start boning him out. A couple of hours later saw us both ladened up with meat, SF with the shoulders and I had the backsteaks, and 1 and a bit legs (one of the bullets went through the leg and made a real mess of the bone. At that point we started the hike out to the bike, I had about 20kgs on my back, and SF had another 10, and we threw away several due to blood and bone damage. Didn't take us too long to get back to the bike as it was all down hill, and pretty easy going (until the game trail running along the ridge). About 45 minutes later, the bike was loaded up, and we started the trip out. Upon getting back to the truck and trailer, SF finally located his bolt, sitting in the trailer!

On the way up we saw this, and didn't recognize it for what it was, know I figured it was stag sign!

Hunting the Muka Muka

Well, this morning the rain rader showed a fair bit just to the west of Wellington, and it looked like it would hit the Wairarapa south coast at around 9am, so the hunting gear was loaded into the truck, the bike and trailer attached, and off we went. First I had to drop the wife off at the train station so I didn't get to Corner Creek until around 8am, but now worries..20 minutes later I was cruising up the big Muka Muka.
After parking the bike, and quickly going over the plan for the morning, I set off, first up the gully then onto the bench that runs along side the stream (albeit 30 or so metres above it). I got to the base of the gully and noticed a small game trail that headed straight along the ridge line, and it seemed easier going than my previous attempt of bush bashing.
Following the the track for about 2 minutes, I saw some bushes moving. "Bugger me" I thought, there were three goats right in front of me. Three shots later, 2 down!
Since it was still quite early I carried on, but alas, not much else to report, I bumped into the third goat again (only to lose sight pretty quickly as it bounded down the bank), and as I got further up the valley the drizzle strengthened, and it is quite pleasant to walk in the drizzle, but by that stage fatigue was setting in (not sure why, no where as taxing as the cone hut walk, but then didn't get to bed late, and didn't have a good breakfast). I had a few slips that ended up with me in the stream, and quite worried that if I carried on, one of those slips might claim an ankle or something, so I turned around and headed out to collect the two goats.
Would I hunt in the rain again, yep, beats getting way too hot and sun burnt.

Cone Hut walk

Today, Steph, Connor and I decided to head up (up being the operative
word, 300m in less than 1km) the track to Cone Hut, as I'm heading
into the bush for a three day hunt shortly and I wanted to see what
the bush was like, and to try and break in the boots.

All in all, a good time was had by all, Connor is knackered (not sure
why, he spent most of it on my back).

Amy knows what this track is like (she's walked the first 10 minutes,
and that was easy!)
Anyway, here's some snaps from the day.

Oh, the swing bridge is the largest of it's type in NZ, being 92m
long, and 35m above a pretty strong river!

Me and Connor inspecting the map