I warned the baby if he was late at all I would spend his college fund on a new computer. Well, he's currently 5 days late and counting, and here I am with my new iMac! I've been after one of these for a while and whilst it's a bit of a learning curve at the moment (I've always been a PC girl) it is so worth it. I've worked on macs before, just never owned one, but there's still lots of bits and pieces to get my head around. Look how good it looks on my desk!





Oh, that teddy card is a Happy Pregnancy card from my mum!

Poor Steven has done a lot of the installing and updating for me on this new machine, and since its the first time he's ever used a mac it was a frustrating process! Ugh, rather him than me, I prefer the fun part of playing with software once it's all set up for me.

In the meantime I've been trying to insert (very expensive) eye-cream into Nails the dog's eyes (he has conjunctivitis). I have never come across a dog more determined to avoid this fate... two grown people, four hands between us and still the eye-cream is mostly on the carpet.

Not ones to waste any time, after receiving our permission to build in the post on Saturday... today we started building! Well, we started digging actually. And it wasn't us digging, it was Wayne the digger man. He's back tomorrow, but pretty much the ground is all ready for the house pad, and we've chewed about a metre down into the bank to make it level. The top soil is being put aside for my potato patch. This is the view from the barn (its a shame I didn't take this in the morning actually because the weather was SO hot and sunny)...





Meanwhile, inside the barn, we are all ready for the arrival of baby Jenkins. There's not much space upstairs but just enough for his baby bed and his tiny little clothes...





And since its now officially spring here in Dunedin, a between-the-showers rainbow, ahhhh:

No I haven't had the baby yet - but look what arrived in the post today-





Yes, our house plans have been approved and we can start building! Honestly, its taken so long to get to this stage, we haven't always been confident our quirky little straw-bale house would make it past the council censors. Thank you Council! My faith in government departments is restored! Well, for a while anyway. Steven was so happy to see this approval today he danced a little jig, and he's not really the dancing type.

Here is the downstairs, its small(ish) and open plan:

I almost wasn't going to post this blog entry, simply because part of the reason I have a blog is for clients to get to know me.. and I know at least 3 or 4 people who won't like the image below because they are vegetarians. I didn't want a potential client to come on here, think "she's a callous murderer!" and then not book me. But that's silly. There's no point not being honest about our lifestyle here. We are meat eaters, and intend to have free range animals on our land that we will eventually eat. And as a meat eater, I want to know that whatever I'm eating had a happy, humane and stress-free life.

 

Chicken brothers Reggie and Ronnie (Hussein's sons) were named after the Kray twins since their main hobby in the chicken lair was to peck and bully everyone else. This weekend we killed Reggie and ate him for Sunday lunch. I say "we" but actually Steven did the former and I took care of the latter cooking part. Just before I put the chicken in the oven I remembered that we ought to get a photograph of Steven with his first home-butchered chicken!

 

 

 

I collected all the fluffy down feathers so I could make a pillow out of them at some point.. but whilst we were busy preparing the chicken.. the dogs got hold of the bag of feathers and tore it apart, spreading chicken feathers EVERYWHERE. There is one in my car, even though I don't remember opening my car door yesterday. Considering the luxurious lifestyle I treat the dogs too I wasn't impressed with their behaviour. Here they are relaxing on the front step in a pile of their duvets after a stroll on the beach:

 

 

 

 

Anyway, Reggie was very tasty and provided enough for a roast dinner for 4. Plus if I'm extra housewife-keen I might make a chicken stock out of him too. For those who've been reading my blog awhile, I just want you to rest assured that Hussein is pretty safe for the meantime since he's such a gent.

 

I have a list of things to do before the baby arrives, and to my satisfaction I'm actually getting through it. I've done all the nice things on there - photograph editing, organising baby clothes (some baby clothes are so small you can only fold them in half! Not quarters like you would an adult tee-shirt!), buying photograph frames.. etc etc. and now I'm getting to the end of the list. Lurking down there are items like "finish tax spreadsheet" (UUGGGH), and other banking/admin type tasks. Hence, here I am on my blog! I really dislike admin, and when I am rich and famous I'll have P.A. who does that for me.

These are some shots I did for Joseph Jones Designer Florist in Dunedin. They saw the photographs I did for Rebecca and Sam's wedding in April (Rebecca's bouquet below) and got me in to do some modern shots for their website.





Joseph Jones are the people you go to if you want a really classy, cutting edge bouquet. I love all the cute, trendy papers and ribbons they work with, and the fact that they get their flowers fresh, everyday (which means when you buy a bouquet it lasts for ages). I don't have any arrangement to plug them at all, I was just really impressed with the work they do... Since this is a wedding/portrait based blog I will post up some of the arrangements geared towards weddings:













And a standard bouquet that I really like..







These are yet to be uploaded to the website (incase you visit for a look). Actually, what I must do is some organising of my own website. That definitely takes precedence over the tax spreadsheet. And then I'm sure the dogs need to be brushed too.......