It was a bad summer in that Felix's illness and the building project coincided, so we had no time for the poor old plants.  The garden has gone to shit in autumn and now lies, unsightly and betrayed, awaiting a pretty nuclear winter cleanup that I am not looking forward to.  Armfuls of mouldy and worm-squirming mush dripping into your shoes as you dump them on the compost heap, etc. etc; fuuuuuuck.   

R managed to get a few nice shots regardless, so I thought I'd share as part of warming up to regular posting in the near future.  Jesus christ I am a lazy bitch these days.  Well, lazy and depressive; I might as well use the old mental illness shit as a crutch and get some fucking value out of it.

R made this nice little triptych after catching the bird feeding on this, one of my favourite plants.  Bellbirds and Tuis also visit the blooms.  Waxeyes are not my favourite birds because the little fuckers tend to ruin a lot of fruit with their incessant pecking, but they do make pretty cool pets when hand raised.  

If you dont get too much frost, I highly recommend the Canary Foxglove; it flowers almost year-round here in NZ and is fairly unfussy as to soil as long as the drainage is good.  I have three or four plants now and would happily install 20 if I had the room.

I love this Globe Thistle for its obnoxious singularity.  It really does follow its own star, as much as any plant can.
​Must get the white version.

Losing Felix was a throat punch from hell.  I just can't overstate how hard it's been for us these last few weeks without him to make life worth getting out of bed for, but you've probably lost your own dogs and know only too well how that feels.  It suffices to say that things have been bad.

We began looking at NZ poodle kennels just to get a feel for how long we'd have to wait for a pup from a reputable breeder (don't buy random/backyard dogs, people).  We would like to have taken a rescue poodle, but there aren't many suitable candidates around.  We also love the breed in particular and don't think it's unethical to support the people responsible for maintaining it in good standing; it's pretty glib to condemn show kennels when they seem to be the only ones who give a toss about genetic testing, appropriate matings and breed integrity.  Those things matter.  While some dogs are definitely being held to ridiculously extreme and physiologically deleterious standards, many more of the canine strains we love are with us today only because of the diligence of dedicated breeders.  I just wanted to say that because they get a lot of hate from some quarters, much of it founded in ignorance.

We liked Inchcolm Poodles for their black miniature-only program and emphasis on health and confirmation, but we were resigned to waiting months.  As it turned out, one little fellow was looking for a home and we were overjoyed to give him one. 

These pics are about a week old and he's grown so much in that time.  He had his first big boy haircut in the last couple of days and looks so much like a tiny adult that people stop and stare, unable to decide exactly what the hell is going on with him.  Like most poodles, he is freakishly- some say malignly- intelligent, inherently militant and hero-worships the long suffering Hamish, my mother's Bichon/Maltese/Schnauzer veteran who has had enough of his shit already.  

He sleeps in the bathroom (toilet training necessity) and brays like an angry helium-huffing werewolf when placed there.  Fir shows great promise.

Wonky panorama taken on a phone from the central balcony.

The Regent is a late Victorian baroque extravaganza and apparently the only intact survivor of this idiom, at least in the southern hemisphere.  I know all the ones in Chch were knocked down in the 90s and the remaining, partial stragglers were taken out by the earthquakes.  Which makes me sad; you'll never be full feral til you've sat through Wild at Heart or Anatomie de l'enfer amongst that particular kind of feverish, moulting grandeur.  It's like tonguing a lollypop in the lap of a benevolent if superannuated courtesan with mercury poisoning.  There may be odours, but you learn so much.

The Regent was infamous for rejoicing in special arse-punishing seating; I remember writhing my way through a screening of Metropolis and swearing never the fuck again, so it took a lot to tempt me back to watch Romeo and Juliet (free tickets fuck yeah).  Despite the original coccyx-compressors having been replaced in a recent restoration the new seats are just as bloody hard on the buttockal region in an entirely new way.  Goddamit.

It was fun to watch all the flinty, thirsty ballet mums trying to out-alpha each other, less fun seeing more than one nascent ED in their anxious offspring.  The Royal NZ Ballet was mmmokay (Juliet was awesome); special mention for set and costumes.  No pictures of the performance because people who do that shit need to die in a fucking fire.

Our garden is home to a small, slightly battered looking but incredibly conscientious and very tame blackbird cock called Daddy.  He nests around the house with his baby mother and keep us company while we're in the garden, so much so that we practically have to shoo him out from under our feet.  A weird wind emptied their last brood onto the ground a couple of weeks back and I managed to save one before the local (unbelled and totally unconstrained) cats found it; we raised it successfully on kitten food, conditioning mix and meal worms and now Chicky resides in the aviary, probably awaiting release since he/she seems to have decent feeding instincts.

I know they're not native but we were please to be able to help out.

Still on holiday setting, will drop some more photos soon.

We picked three kg of gooseberries and got a shittonne of jam from that, then R decided to go crazy and pick the other currants, which we usually leave for the birds because laziness.  The hot month before xmas has turned them into something worth bothering about so we rounded up every remaining Ribes for committal to jars.

​Thought you might like to see them since they are so beautiful.

I personally burn to crayfish red in about five minutes in this kind of UV, so Felix gets the best of it.
​R's not really a beach guy.  He won't take his shoes off, which I find both pitiable and disturbing.

Brilliant silver Mullet, like shards of lustre glass, surf the glossy little breakers about 5m from shore.

The dunes manage to both erode and stubbornly persist, but no one knows for how much longer, realistically.
​They are clothed in spiky grass and feral flowers.

Millions of snails gave their lives for this pointless tableau.  The fine sand buffs the pastel crust from their outer whorls, revealing their flayed, roseate nacre.  I could shoot them all day.

This sort of stuff is xmas for us down here.  Northern tourists seem to forget the season and slide back into summer sloth, which must be nice.  Cooking a full roast on a day that might have fallen out of Satan's arsecrack, complete with fully-operational blowflies and beer bloat isn't my idea of festive.  Lots of people just chuck formality and get pissed at the beach with some ham and salad.

Yes, I know we haven't posted much recently- we've been super-busy trying to get shit sorted in the garden and developing new areas before building of the new studio finally gets underway for real.  That, and houseguests have kept us from blogular greatness but we have a lot of images to share and that will be happening some time this week.

Personally, I'm wishing this year would jump into a tyre fire and spare us all the xmas horror.

At least Felix is still with us.  He's back to being a 24 hour party person, so that's positive for now.

This lovely ginger felid didn't like our selection of dog, but is otherwise one of those largely smoochie but slightly conflicted creatures who likes to miaow at you to join it underneath the hedge.

Felix has always been a beautiful dog with elegant proportions which amplified the already janky dissonance between the necessity of the procedure and the potential psychosomatic fallout (for everyone involved).  If that sounds like vanity, it really isn't; all animals rejoice in the power and efficacy of their own symmetry and taking that away from another beast is no small consideration.  Taking him in to the clinic on the day of the operation was one of the hardest things I've had to do.  It goes without saying that seeing him in a piteous daze on a mass of blankets in his vet cage post-op was a horrible, chest-crunching impact, and I didn't consider myself squeamish.  But Alison at Humanimals Dunedin did a thorough, careful job of this awkward, late-stage procedure and the result is neat and utile, for which we are very thankful.  Thanks also to our friends who ferried us back and forth from the vets, and to everyone who gave a shit and wished him luck.

This pathology was able to sneak up on two relatively well-informed people who were very engaged with their dog, so don't be like us and dismiss the warning signs I will enumerate in a forthcoming post.  Seek a medical opinion of any change to your animal's condition that persists for more than a week.  Just fucking do it.  We didn't, and all of us paid for that dismissive attitude, especially Felix.  We feel a lot of shame and anger at ourselves for that.

To anyone trying to decide between subjecting their furred friend to such a major procedure vs euthanasia- don't let your own negative presumptions get in the way of a good decision.  Keep your head where it needs to be- in your knowledge and best interests of your animal instead of buried up the arse of your own speculative fears.  Sometimes you have to let your friend go because it is best for them.  Sometimes they aren't a good candidate for a change in their physical status and you must weigh the pros and cons.  Felix is intensely physical, lives for his motility and we were deeply concerned about his post-quadrupedal morale.  Would his new condition be enough for him?  

We hoped yes, and I think that was a good decision.  All of these images, bar one, are of Felix after losing a leg.  Within two weeks of losing that leg.  I know not every dog will (literally) bounce into their new state like he has, and he's not out of the woods by any means.  But he really is a happy little fellow, far happier to be pain-free than trapped in some malfunctioning idea of 'entirety'.  Our fears are not their fears.

​His joy is our solace.  Long live Foofie.

​courtesy the Lovely R

They're about twenty dollars a fucking kilo but we love them long time and are reminded every winter of their glorious idiosyncrasy.  Their flavour is almost impossible to characterise; cool, wet, vaguest suggestion of  umami, a hint of tomato, a touch of one of the whackier melons, maybe the tiniest suggestion of passionfruit with a sprinkle of the blander strains of durian.  They are neither sweet nor sour and yet somehow both.  There is a narrow band of optimal ripeness in between unpleasantly vegetable and soppy blandness which might account for their niche appeal but definitely try one.