chicken police

Hey all,
Sorry again for the lag in posting. Sometimes it's hard to sit down and write all this up.

Anyway, we had some more visitors (Volker from SF and friends he'd met on his trip) come by the house the last week. And holding to true good guest form and bad host form we had dirty dishes in the sink when they came by the house (to our credit we sent them by the house while we were still at work and both of us were thinking they would arrive the following day) anyway they promptly did our dishes and cooked us up a fantastic feast that was just about ready by the time Drea came home after a long day at work. Hurray guests!

Drea and I also competed in the Otago Peninsula Challenge a couple weekends ago. Dave did the 24km mountain bike short course (Thankfully Drea talked me out of doing the long course) and Drea did the 18km walk. The course was brutal. I would have assumed that a mountain bike ride would be mostly actual bike riding but I think I must have pushed the bike up all but 1 of the 6 climbs. We both got to the end pretty exhausted. If you're interested you can see a picture of the course and see our results here: Otago Peninsula Challenge

The next day we went out to our friend Tom's house for a barbeque. We made another cobbler with Rhubarb and cherries that seemed to be a big hit and threw on some fake sausages and mushrooms on the barbie. Yum. Yay for our first New Zealand Barbeque!

In other news Dave's work had a painball (sorry, that's paintball) outing. And in chicken news, Puff has started getting a little cheeky with us. She's taken to flying up onto Drea's shoulders when she's holding food and then she came in while we had visitors over and promptly pooped on the linoleum in the kitchen. So embarrassing. It's been decided that the chickens are going to have to learn their boundaries. Bring in the chicken supernanny!

This last weekend was my 36th Birthday. Yay for birthday's and presents. Boo for 36.
Anyway, we went up with some of our frisbee friends to the little town of Naseby. Naseby was a big gold rush town and the landscape reflects some serious high impact gold mining techniques. The only good thing to come from that kind of thing (besides gold I guess) is a fantastic maze for making mountain biking tracks. We went on a few mountain bike rides, played some disc golf, watched the rugby seven tournament at one of the town bars, played some double disc court and ate lots of cake! I think the age of 36 has taken it's toll on my brain. On the way there I put oil in my car and then forgot to put the cap back on the engine block. Luckily we were stopping on the way out of town to pick up a friend. So it only blew oil over the inside of the engine block and didn't blow up the car. And then on the way back I left my bike helmet and sunglasses at the campsite and then my bike seat and one of the nuts to attach the tire to the bike in my friends car. Doh!

We happened across the following video's over the last couple weeks and found them hysterical...

juice box

chicken police

I'm having some computer issues so no pictures right now. Check back in a day or two and hopefully we'll have them posted by then.

We're heading up to Kaikoura to swim with the dolphins this weekend and then Dave has a course in Christchurch all next week that Drea's joining me for half of. Should be fun!

Love to all,
dave and andrea