We did have help staying up last night. We were pretty sure that other humans, or quite possibly othe NZ life-forms with an axe to grind against “Cat” were trying to kill it last night. There were all sorts of bangs, whistles and flashes breaking through the darkness around us. We let it stay with us until the gun-toting, explosions and noise-making had died down a bit…………….and the danger had passed…………..

Much more sleep had all round last night, although not quite a “proper night’s sleep” if you know what I mean.

The NZ life-form “Cat” obviously empathises with humans, it now looks in through the door at us, looks at the door handle and looks back at us…………. or perhaps it was because we may have saved it from an all-out assassination attempt last night! When let in, it nows jumps up on us and accepts a bit of a smoothing. We thought it was also trying to contact other members of its species when it started this really strange harmonious rattling sound, but having looked it up on Google, I’m fairly sure its what is called “purring”.

We had a really nice quiet day today, feet up, reading, watching TV, drinking and catching up with people as the New Year worked it’s way around the rest of the world. We did pop out for a short while, but only to get some pizza from Dominoes. There’s lazy we are!

The Blog has developed a little problem, and I’m rebuilding it as I write!

Happy New Year to everyone!!!

Rik & Louise

xx

Well, that was fun………… NOT! Although I had backed a lot of stuff up, as you should of course, I hadn’t checked to see what environment the advertised update for the blog required. By the time it had done it, I realised that it had all gone haywire!

Here we are on the 2 Jan 2010 all back up to where I was when I wrote the note above………..

Apart from a mad rush to sort the blog out, we had a fairly quiet day, except that the sandfly bites still hadn’t gone down! I’d sorted out some cold water in a tray, with a cold wet flannel to help keep the heat down and the itching as little as possible, but it wasn’t enough. Louise was awake until about 5am trying to find something else that could help. She did! Cellotape…………..

We think it has to do with the cellotape cutting off air supply to the bite, and also stopping the bite from expanding and therefore causing the itch. But, it works a treat!

We thought it was better to keep Louise off her feet and trying to catch up on the sleep she’d been missing out on, so we had a quiet day in – me rebuilding the blog, and Louise sleeping. She woke up for tea and then we sat and watched films together until the New Year turned up. We had a couple of phone calls and Skype chats to wish people the best for the new year taking full advantage of the fact that we were in a totally different decade to the rest of the world for a short while! I stayed up with Louise until about 4am making sure that her feet were kept cool and that she could get some more sleep, and sprayed every inch of the house with fly spray so that no interlopers were set to munch some more on her! I then fought my way through the mozzie netting around the bed to settle down for a few hours myself too.