Sunday, January 04, 2009

The end of the holiday season

My all-too-brief season holiday is drawing to a close.
We have done the usual Kiwi Christmas things – eating too much in the warm weather, buying too much rubbish – but we have also taken part in some family rituals. One of those was our annual trip to Pukaha, Mount Bruce Wildlife Centre. This time we had two PhD students – our evolutionary geneticist son and his partner, a neurophysiologist – and one playwright, our younger son. The highlight was not the kaka feeding, from whence this photo comes, but the discovery of a tiny rifleman, high on the ridge overlooking the centre, at the ends of a new track.
Our other annual tradition is a beach visit, usually to Mataikona, a rugged beach east of here. The geneticist and I spent a lot of time searching in the rock pools for blue starfish, crabs, shrimps and his beloved snails. Also had some time to fly kites in the light wind.
Somehow the archive does not sound as appealing as flying a kite in the breeze…

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