McCallum family portraits

On Christmas eve I had the pleasure of photographing the McCallum family in St Clair. They have 3 super cute dogs and this baby so I was in photography heaven! Look at those eyelashes!





He has the most expressive laugh!





Awww..



We had a stroll on the beach, and captured baby Ollie (who lives in the Uk with his parents) enjoying some time with his grandparents, who adore him.









I'm such an old romantic...





Two sisters:



Thanks McCallum family for being so friendly and hospitable. If anyone else fancies a portrait shoot in the Otago region just email me at sineadphotography@yahoo.com. You can choose from a print collection or a coffeetable album.

Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas everyone! I'm used to cold wintery Christmasses by the fire, so it still seems a little odd to have Christmas in the heat, but I'm not complaining - the sun is out! Here's a couple of shots I took over the last week. I'm going to save the barn building photographs for another blog post.

Hopefully next Christmas we will have a lovely new house to celebrate in. x

The Barn, and a Cheese Thief

Here are the barn posts, all ready to be made into a barn - how exciting!!



And for scale, here is a little miniature me sitting in the middle of it...



No, thats a joke actually! Although it is BIG. Are you allowed to show off about how big your barn is and not come across as a very annoying person? I mean in the same way that its not cool to say to people "I have a very large house"? Lets presume its okay, in which case, we will soon have a HUGE barn. Woohoo! It'll be bigger than the house, and we also can store lots of useless junk in there.





What's Steven doing here? Well, he is preparing a... box thing.. to hook up our electricity!! Isn't that great news?!!! Tonight we will plug in for the first time!! Its SO exciting! Today I bought a hairdryer to celebrate, and tomorrow, I'm going to blowdry my hair! With the new hairdryer!! We're even thinking about buying a kettle! And a fridge! You can tell how excited I am.

It is good though, becuase soon we will be in the barn, and I will be able to work from home. Things are happening a lot slower than I thought, but what it does mean is that when we are all set up (soon!) then we will be extra grateful.

The barn building should be happening this weekend, and then next weekend we can get the steel cladding on. I will photograph the process as much as I can. Thats if it doesn't rain.

Chicken news:

Yesterday Hussein stole a large chunk of cheese from inside the tent. He ate some and then gave it to Mavis. How can I punish this behaviour? I can't even catch a chicken let alone explain the basics of theft to it. Anyway, Hussein is such a gent I can't bring myself to tell him off. When we get the barn up we are going to try and hatch some eggs. Either by letting Mavis sit on them or by buying an incubator. I can't wait to have little fluffy yellow chicks!

...Sniff!

I saw a cute doggo today that looked a bit like Max.





*Note to my family - I miss you too. You just don't look as cute on my blog.*

"Like being on holiday all the time!"

We're having so much fun on the land, and this week the barn is starting to go up - how exciting! I've got my vegetable garden started, we get 2 eggs from the chickens every day, and on a clear day you can gaze out to see and see the waves twinkling. It's great!

One thing has surprised me though. And that is how many people say to us "oh, you're living in a tent - it must be like being on holiday ALL the time!". At least 5 or 6 people have said that exact thing to me! Someone else told me it must be like a "CONSTANT holiday!" They are jealous of my holiday lifestlye. I used to find this slightly strange -I'm definitely having fun, but I'm not sure why life is more fun if you live in a tent. That leaks.

But then again maybe I'm wrong..... Maybe I am living a life straight out of a glamourous holiday magazine and I don't even know it! Lets see.... we can take today as an example: I got up in the tent, fed the chickens, filled the bucket for my shower, mopped up some mud, washed the dishes in the rain, made some phonecalls, dumped a couple of wheelbarrow-loads of clay onto the barn foundations, ate a tin of spaghetti out of the saucepan (saving on more washing up in the rain), drove into town, sat down to do some photography related work, and studied some tax issues. Later on I will take part in some more popular holiday activities like wheelbarrowing a couple of loads of cow poo over to my vegetable garden. In the rain. And buying kitchen roll, dental floss and bin bags.

Hmm, actually the more I think about it, the more guilty I feel at living this luxurious holiday lifestyle when some people have to put up with the tedium of solid housing and electric lights. In a couple of weeks we will be finished living in the tent. It will all be over. But now I'm feeling bad that here we are being on holiday "ALL the time" and we haven't even appreciated it.

Next time someone tells me how jealous they are of my constant holidaying I am going to tell them about a golden, dream-like place in the south of the United States... where people live in trailers... not just for 2 weeks a year, but ALL the time! Like a constant holiday!

:)

PS - I am going to take a photo tonight of the beginnings of our barn. Which, be warned - is massive! Our own little blot on the landscape.

Sitting in the clouds

It turns out the land we are building on is in a cloud forest. How cool is that? In the evening after a rainy day the clouds settle and disperse over the hills and it looks amazing. At the moment it is quite mild so you can just stand outside and breathe in the atmosphere. This is Steven enjoying the view:





(those are our barn poles waiting to go up in the foreground). And this is my lovely husband:



We've started a new fence that stretches across the top part of the land. The idea is that it marks a boundary between our house area and then other/farm area below. You can just see the fence posts in the image below. Rhys from next door put them in using his tractor, with Steven's help. Infact you can assume from now on that any tricky farm type work that takes place on the land has been done by Rhys. Even if you thought that it was me who put all those fence posts in...



Okay this is slightly freaky. I'm new to owning chickens, and our chickens seem perfectly normal and healthy in most respects, but surely all chickens are not this needy. This is what happens with ours - I feed them (in their coop) in the morning, then they peck about a bit, I go inside the tent... and they stand outside. For as long as I'm in there. And they don't just stand around - they STARE at me. All day. Is this normal? Sometimes I look around and they pretend to be cleaning themselves. Otherwise they just stand there.. and stare in:



Shooing them away or throwing things at them doesn't work because they just pop right back - they don't seem to learn like dogs or cats. Oh and the other day it was pouring with rain, and rather than go and hang out in their coop, they stood outside staring at me IN THE RAIN! They were soaked through. I felt guilty which was silly because they are there of their own free will!

Very odd. When I'm gone they behave like normal chickens and peck about at things. And I probably need to point out that I'm gone most of the day doing things.

Last weekend we hired a rotary hoe to dig our vegetable garden. I assumed as a machine I would simply stand back and let it do all the work. Its the 21st century after all! Unfortunately that wasn't the case and you need arms of steel to operate the hoe for more than about 10 minutes. Which was as long as I lasted. Luckily Steven came to my rescue (after a morning of pouring concrete into the barn pole holes), and he spent the next 3 hours rotary hoeing our veg patch. I was on hand with my camera to record things. Oh, thats Steven in the far distance doing all the work. And on my head there you can see my makeshift cap. It was soooo sunny on Saturday.



This morning I made up for my lack of work on Saturday - I had to empty the barn pole holes (that the giant corkscrew made) of all the rain that had filled them up over the last few days before the council inspector arrived. Steven has a new job in town. I tied some rope to a bucket and hauled out the water and did that for about 3 hours. There are 17 barn holes and each hole contained about 10 bucket loads. Ow! luckily we passed the inspection, possibly because I looked so bedraggled by the time the inspector arrived.

I'll leave you with a photograph of Steven looking out over the sea at the peninsula on Sunday. Its either pouring with rain, stormy or very very sunny here!