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Vonda and Chaz passed back through Christchurch yesterday/today, so what else was there to do to fill in an hour or so today but add to our Christchurch mini-golf course review! Today’s choice, the outdoor course at Wild West Mini Golf (I think they need some of my help with their web presence…)

And the ratings:
Course Difficulty: Medium. Some trickier holes, and a bit of scoping of angles needed, but nothing really impossible. The par score was bout 10 higher than the Pirate’s Island course, so that tells you something.
Course State: Average to good. Everything worked fine, though we missed what might have been the best bit of kit that managed to pop the ball across from a track to a vat… Surprisingly there’s not much road noise given it’s by one of the busiest roads in town. The high fences and the running water everywhere mask that quite well.
Price: Reasonable with a two-for-one voucher. Slightly more expensive than the others, but the it’s a bit closer where we were in town.
Playing company: High class, as always!

Trying to decide between this and the Ferrymead course is tricky! Ferrymead has maybe a nicer environment to be out in, but this one was a bit more of a laugh (and closer to town…)

That would be radishes from the ranch!

I’m not sure if it’s the pony poo, or the fact that we just leave them alone to get on with growing, but I’m sure that these ones grew a little faster than the ones in town! But they still taste just about the same (can’t taste any pony-poo influence, at least!).

The other veg seem to have taken off too. The butternut squash has doubled in length, and the beetroot has taken off too (boo! hiss!). But it seems we can’t seem to grow celery. At least from seed.

House-wise (as that’s possibly more interesting than a couple of veg to some folk), today they were putting on the Linea weatherboards. First time that we’d seen all the claddings on together, and they look pretty much what we thought they would.

They were also adding more of the fiddly bits of the Hebel. Not too many more bits to go. They better get on and do it though, as there’s apparently an inspection early next week that would give them to go ahead to (finally) get on and start the gibbing…

Radishes of course! From the raddish patch!

In fact the first thing I had to eat this year was a home-grown radish, but I was so keen to eat them that I forgot to get a photo. Doh! But I’ve had a few handfuls of them so far, and they’ve all been nice. Just hope the row out at the land hurries up so it’s ready when the patch runs out…

As you might have guessed from the lack of regular posting on house matters, there’s not a lot of action going on at the ranch at the moment. For those of you in the Northern hemisphere remember that currently we’re at the height of summer, and everyone likes to have a bit of a break to get a few barbies under their belts around this time. We’d hoped that everything could get to a stage that meant guys would work though to either get the extra cash for New Year’s eve, or to pay off the credit card from the rash choice of offering to pay for the top-shelf round on NY eve, but it wasn’t to be.

But that doesn’t stop us having to go and water the plants every now and then anyway. Today’s surprise was the butternut squash that had taken off and seem to have a few baby butternuts on them. So given nothing else has been going on you can have four photos of them! Aren’t you lucky!

Go on. Vote for your favourite! Then one or other of us can gloat that we took the best one…

We’ve had a couple of days now to think about whether we own up to this or not, but as you’ve been starved for anything new from us for a while we’ve decided to ‘fess up and admit that yes, we did indeed attend the 20-20 match between NZ and Pakistan.

Whether our attendance had any impact on the match we’re not going to delve into here today, but limit ourselves to the venue and the company: Both good. In fact the Tui stand provided more entertainment than the game for some of the match.

I think we might leave it there! I suspect there’s quite a few other Kiwis that might want to forget about the night too… I guess the only thing we’ve got to to feel good about was that we were there on a night when a Kiwi team broke a record!

(clicky so you can blow it up and see the score more clearly… Sigh. )

Twas the day before Christmas, and another pearler it was too! So we decided to get out and get some sun, and also continue our tour of Christchurch mini-golf courses that we started some time ago.

Pirate’s Island was the day’s choice. And Bec’s Brother Mike the day’s company.

A fairly competitive round was had, with the regular golfer whipping our butts, with Bec whipping mine. Oh well. Next time!

A fun day out, but it seemed like it was over a bit quickly. I can maybe see why they were offering half price same-day second rounds… But it kept us busy for a bit, and got us out in the lovely sun.

And the ratings:
Course Difficulty: Easy. Only a single trickier hole. Most were par 2’s, so we whipped around it really.
Course State: Average. A bit of work needed, and the water that should have been surrounding holes and flowing down the waterfall was decidedly missing. Toilets were a bit icky too.
Price: Reasonable with a two-for-one voucher.
Playing company: High class.

Consensus is that the Ferrymead course is still ahead at the moment.

I have to admit, it is quite a predictable, corny title for this post, but it was quite impressive to arrive out at the house early this afternoon to find the whole place was basically covered in pink batts. Well, pink and green batts. (The green are for noise reduction rather than insulation.)

And they’d apparently done it all in a day! Though to be fair there were quite a few of them around, apparently getting under all the builder’s feet.

I’m not quite sure how to feel about all the batts though. They hide most of our handiwork of the weekend! There are still a few cables that you can see, but the majority are now under/over/behind the bats. I hope we never have to dig them out!

And the Hebel cladding is now about 85% finished, but there’s no sign of the Linear going on yet. And until that stage they can’t get on and do the gibbing, although the gib board is all piled up in the lounge just waiting to go on the walls and ceiling.

I guess we’ll see if they can get it together enough to work over the break, or whether things will grind to a halt for the next couple of weeks.

After yesterday’s blitz at pulling cables left, right, and centre (well, for the surround sound, at least!), all that was left to do today was to secure them all, and tidy things up generally.

Well, that would have been the case if I hadn’t decided that if we were going to do this we should do it properly. So a few more runs of network and speaker cable were required before we got to the tidying up stage. But we were now old hands at that, so that was relatively painless.

I think in the end we ran 46 different cables. Seemed like more at the time, but that sounds like more than enough really!

And of course it all went a lot more smoothly today as we’d ditched Jeff and his constant waffling, and just had Kelly helping us today. (That will tell us if Jeff reads the blog!)

And I have to say that Kelly’s looming is top class!

Bec’s tying up wasn’t too bad either, but listening to her blithering on about how the purple speaker cables went so nicely with the yellow cable ties I was almost wishing we had Jeff out with us after all!

So that’s the hard work done. Was it worth it? Well, as well as a great sense of satisfaction in embedding something of our own labour in the house, I’ve got:

• a sore left leg from climbing onto a sawhorse for the last couple of days;
• a sore right leg from jumping off a sawhorse for the last couple of days;
• a slighty sore shoulder from hammering above my head all day;
• a small headache from dehydration having sweated constantly for 2 days!;
• and a bloody sore thumb from an errant hammer blow late this afternoon! Man does it hurt!

And Bec has:

• one cut toe from wearing flip flops on a building site (she got no sympathy from me when I saw what she was wearing!), and;
• a sore thumb from cutting it when cutting a cable tie!

I think I got the worst of it there! But on the whole, I still think it’s worth it! (Not to mention the cash it’s saved us in sparkie labour costs.)

Next job related to the cabling will be to terminate all these cables somewhere! Twice as many ends as cables, of course, but hopefully it won’t take twice as long! Guess we’ll weigh up whether to do that ourselves (no doubt with Kelly’s help) or not in a bit…

Today we got to do something real in the construction of the house. We got to play cable-monkeys! Yes, that’s right. We got to crawl around in the rafters on one of the hottest days this year pulling network and coax cable all over the place. And we seemed to pull a lot of cable through the house throughout the day! And let me tell you, jumping from truss to truss while you’ve got sweat dripping in your eyes is not a fun game!

The sparkies had done all the mains cabling on the right, and the white bits on the left, but all the coloured stuff in the middle was all our own work.

One of the more interesting bits was pulling a data cable through the conduit to the floor box. Fingers crossed all around that the tape would hold for the length of the conduit, which it managed to do!

Huge thanks to Kelly and Jeff who came and helped today. Although if we plug it all in and it doesn’t work, we know who we’ve got to blame! Just have to tidy the last bits up tomorrow, and write everything down so we know what’s what in a week!

Finally we’re able to slam an interior door when we need to let off a bit of steam!

Unfortunately it’s the door to a storage cupboard, so unless we also want to hide in there and sulk, it’s not going to be a very satisfactory exercise really. And the fact that as yet there are no walls on the cupboard so you can stare right in makes it not quite so much a case of hiding and sulking, but more being caged in like an angry gorilla!

But there were a lot of other doors being installed all over the place today too, including some of the the big sliders, so once again the place will look quite different next trip.

In garden related news, we had a look over the garden “fence” and what did we spot? I’ll tell you, shall I? It was a line of little-itty-bitty beetroot plants. I guess we managed to put together some sort of viable growing mix with our labours the other week. Whew!

And back in town, the leek and zucchini seeds have sprouted, and we’ll try to keep them alive long enough to get them big enough to plant out. Unlike the first batch of broccoli. Oops. Good job we had more seeds then!