Transformers, more than meets the eye.

3 Feb

MAD garden: suitable for a wild rumpus

Changing a property is a big project. Especially when you want to “make it your own” and your life purpose  is to “delightfully inspire others.”

When it all begins to take on a snail-like pace, we remind ourselves

  • how far we have come
  • to celebrate what we have achieved in the past
  • to stay excited and remember the goal is to transform our place  into the great home and gallery of the future.

Our ancient struggle isn’t one between two extraterrestrial clans. It’s more about the struggle between what we know we are capable of achieving, and the actual time and monetary restraints it takes to achieve them.

Our New Year’s focus saw us Continue reading →

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Baby pig celebrates first birthday.

2 Jan

Not so baby pig.

This Christmas Day, Giggles the pig turned one.

There’s an upside to sharing a birthday with The Baby Jesus. There’s a lot of guests at your party, kids to play with, lots of laughter and excitement, and many, many morsels of  interesting food.

Giggles had her own present to open from her favourite human cousins which she was very excited about.

Baby pig opens birthday present.

And the present was a super soft pet bed.

Needless to say, you might have guessed that our household menu is pork free. The only kind of Christmas ham in our kitchen looks like this:

Pig in the kitchen.

Thanks to the helper monkey over at WordPress headquarters who kindly gave me my 2011 site stats, I found out today that the most popular two words that brought others to my site was baby pig. Technically, turning one might take her from being a baby pig, to a toddler pig, but after visiting the gigantic - Old Lady Lucy pig over at Moon Over Martinborough the other day  – we think Giggles can safely still be called a baby.

Martinborough Unmasked

13 Oct
Martinborough Vineyard Pinot tasting

Martinborough Vineyard Pinot tasting

Once upon a time back in July, Gretchen “the very clever” Bunny pulled  one out of the hat when she came up with the ingenious idea of creating a spectacular  Spring event in Martinborough. Her aim was to entertain fans of all flavours  (from here and around the world) for the two days after the biggest weekend in Wellington in ages. The sporting event – “the one that shall not be named,” (lest anyone gets sued) is the one where the guys are hunky, the ball is odd shaped, and they do things like touch each others paws.

Now Ms Bunny was already VERY busy running her enterprise – www.march-hare.co.nz  so after she had conjured up the whole brilliant idea, she blurted out her key concepts and then Continue reading →

Crafty pigs and other critters.

29 Sep
Munchkin nephew with Giggles the pig

Munchkin nephew with Giggles the pig

When spring lambs began popping out everywhere in surrounding paddocks and the slowpoke veges in the garden decided to have a spectacular growth spurt,  it suddenly became impossible for me to resist the urge to start a new project. With a thousand sensible projects, in many stages, already on the go around here at MAD I  felt as though I might just pop if I didn’t go a little wild and make some art.

Those sensible projects are a part of our bigger picture and they are super duper important and the Wolf is working his wonderful butt off every waking hour turning our barn into a  fabulous workshop and gallery to showcase our artistic wonders in the future, so I felt a teeny bit guilty leaving him neck deep in Continue reading →

Lord Snowed In.

29 Aug

Giggles in the white tasteless stuff.

We had a dusting of snow on July 25th that was exciting and nutso and unexpected. (It last snowed in these parts in the 1920’s.) We were delighted and distracted by falling flakes but it was more of a spectacle on the surrounding hills than the winter wonderland that was yet to come.

On Sunday evening, August 14th we excitedly anticipated a big snowfall. This time I optimistically packed The Wolfs suitcase for his return to work in the big smoke, but this was a polar blast that had been predicted. A polar blast! Surely that’s  a humungous amount of snow, perhaps enough for polar bears to have a blast in? Sadly we don’t have polar bears but we do have Dusty and Lulu, (crazy in a good way) neighbours who we know will chomp at the chance to be towed around our MAD olive grove behind the quad bike, at squealing speed.

So, just before midnight we abandoned all hope of The Wolf leaving the Mad house and cancelled flights because the Rimutaka Hill Road would probably close. And, indeed it did, for days and days. (Well from Monday to Thursday.)

So, The Wolf temporarily declared himself Lord Snowed In, banished from work, trapped at home, bleating something about Continue reading →

This is the pig that shares our house.

21 Jul

Giggles the baby pig

When bedtime comes, Giggles pretends that she is happy to go outside, then she takes one look at the frosty grass, hangs her head in disgust, swivels her lovely butt in the other direction and scrambles up the back steps, through her pig door into the warmth of our human house. She has a house of her own. It resembles a playhouse that any little Princess would be proud to play in. It’s filled with cushions and blankets (or straw depending on the mud factor) and it’s fully lined with pink batts. She slept in it just fine until the single digit temperatures arrived. Just like other first time parents of pigs, we made some mistakes with our first remarkable pig Squiggles that we vowed to remedy with our second piglet.

Our last pig Squiggles.You can read all about Squiggles over at our friends post: http://wp.me/p1zlcq-1k

  1. Buy from a better farm and get a healthy pig who will live forever
  2. Build a warm outdoor house
  3. Never feed from our hands
  4. Make sure that food and water are placed outdoors
  5. Have really good escape proof fencing
  6. Get two piggies so they can love each other
  7. Go on vacation before our days are consumed with a dependant bubba

So we did just fine with numbers one through to four. It was the Wolf that couldn’t help himself. It was he that Continue reading →

Higgledy-piggledy.

22 Jun

Some say that the word higgledy-piggledy is derived from a pig’s ability to create mess and disorder. The only mess and disorder our Kunekune pig Giggles creates is if her big  bottom collides with our things. Things that bulge from the seams of our far too teeny tiny MAD house. Oh, and if I fail to greet her at the back door in time, to wipe wet winter mud off her adorable nose, hooves and undercarriage. Continue reading →

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