Saturday, December 06, 2008

Friday 5th December- A relaxing day

Omitted from yesterdays Blog was the fact that Jennifer had to spend about one hour cleaning and preparing all the fish caught by Noel yesterday and get it ready for freezing. The net catch weight of all the fish is about 6 or 7 kilos, and so it should last us a little while or until Noel goes fishing again.
In the morning we cleaned the rods and also the ‘eskey cooler’ and then returned the box to Gary. We then visited Valda and gave her some of the fish. The rain had arrived back and we had a few sharp showers during the day.
The afternoon arrived and Robin and Lorraine came for afternoon tea and biscuits and of course some carrot cake. We did not have fish for dinner tonight as we had bought some pork shoulder chops earlier in the week from our excellent butcher and they needed to be eaten.
The rest of the day was really spent just ‘hangin out’ and very pleasant indeed whilst Noel was feeling the aches from his fishing experience.
While watching TV in the evenings there are many advertisements for Christmas. There are of course the usual products such as Lingerie, perfumes etc but what is interesting here are the adverts for Garden furniture, BBQ’s, lawnmowers and kids pools. These products reflect that the Christmas period here is an outdoor time as it is mid summer and the schools are closed for the summer holidays, two celerations in one. Takes some getting used to.
NZ has not so far been affected by the global credit crunch as much as the rest of the world. The markets have fallen and the NZ$ is not performing too well but there is little sign of increasing unemployment as is the case in most of the western world currently.