Shed

….built a wood shed….

…it can also be used as a drinking shed…

…or…

…a phone booth/orangery….(Italian sandals optional)….

…but first and foremost it’s a woodshed.

Autumnal

…toadstool…

…toadstool…

…toadstool….

…toadstool…(blue)….

…mmm…

…nature.

When Is A Log Not A Log

 

…when it’s a female sea lion of course…

 

…careful where you tread.

 

…(much larger than the last lass to drop by near my good friend Dee’s place…but no less stinky!…mmmm…nothing beats the great smell of sea-lion in the morning….).

HarkWhatLightThruYonderWindow

…it’s not the sun…

 

…it’s the lamp by which I work when visiting my good friend Dee’s new, but badly lit, front room…

…mmmm, badly lit…..

Sealions

…this big lad at the pilot’s wharf on the Aramoana spit…

..and this “lovely” female in my good friend Dee’s Roses…

…(top left, below the purple flowers)….

….(outside toilet left in shot for scale)….

…awwww….she’s sleeping…

…no she’s not…

…crap…flight or photo…

 

…the thing with female sealions is that, unlike the males who will challenge, charge,  then stand their ground, the females will follow you for some distance….

 

…like, right to the back door….

…maybe we’ll hold off admiring the roses till next week.

Oh Crap Is That The Date

…it’s the 21st of December and I haven’t yet posted pictures of this years Xmas album display…

 

…it was my good friend Dee’s only “chore” when she gave me the afternoon off…and she did a damn fine job….

…this years Xmas record sales have equaled last years (3) and with a half promise on another, we may, for the fourth year running, be about to experience continued growing returns from this emerging market…

…speaking of “damn”… the figures for my nativity scene haven’t been as popular as I thought they would be…maybe I should stop referring to them as Xmas desecrations rather than Xmas decorations….

…(no photo of them as a group, sorry, but unlike the very well behaved cows and sheep, the my ass wouldn’t stay still for the shot)….

..(badum tisss)…

 

 

…and finally…a framed, needle point piccy from 1958, of a little dog I got from the dump as an Xmas pressies for myself….

 

 

…(yes, I have since taken the time to clean the seagull poo off of it)….

…jingle bells.

 

When The Good Friend Dee Was On Tour

…I had “nothing-better-to-do”….

…so I did some doodling…some plotting out…started a few bits and pieces…

 

…(thank god she was only gone 5 days “that” was getting out of hand).

 

 

…(hope you didn’t enlarge the photo…some of that lot haven’t been posted yet…shoulda put in a spoiler alert).

And After All That

…they had more people than they needed…so you could be excused for any ol’ half baked reason like “my good friend Dee might be real good at standing behind the counter but she can’t up-sell like me and I might starve to death or be sent to debtors prison or back to my country of origin if you don’t excuse me to go run my record shop”…

…didn’t even get half way thru that and the nice lady was already running a pen thru my name…

 

…”excused”…

…that’s all she wrote.

Orokonui Ecosanctuary On A Wet Day

…what better use of a wet day than going somewhere with an umbrella…

…and having it pretty much to yourselves…

…especially when you are approached by endangered species like the Takahe…

 

…sure look tasty , but there aren’t that many left, so they’re off the menu…

…the counter staff said we would of been lucky to see one, let alone be approached by two!!!…

…my good friend Dee is a critter magnet….

…I won’t bore you with lots of grainy, rain soaked piccys of native song birds (apart from the ones of Dee below)…but I’ll say that it has been a couple of years since we went up there and it is amazing to see what “predator-free” has done to bird population as well as what the lack of “four-legged-grazers” has done to the undergrowth…

…New Zealand, the way it used to be…

…(except for the steps, Dee, & the umbrella)…

 

…damn glad I’ve got stuff like this in my back yard…

…if you’re in the neighbourhood, check it out…

http://www.orokonui.org.nz

…then come down the shop and buy a record!

Here We Go

…the longest cartoon I’ve attempted in the near thirty years (on & off) I’ve been doing this…

…7 pages, plotted… not made up as I go along…

…and to make things really interesting, pages 3-6 are being done with a terrible cold/flu thing…

…(a recent “gift” from my good friend Dee)…

…it is episodic (the cartoon, not the disease) and will take a couple of weeks to reach it’s conclusion (I can only fit 3 A4 pages a week in around the rest of my so called life)…

…so bare with me…

…ahem-hem…

…as usual we find our “heroes” extracting a licence from a packet of their favourite cereal…

 

…oooo, cliffhanger!