Back roads sheds

An old half round barn

A newer version

And one built long before half round barns made an appearance on our farms.

Linking to The Barn Collective.

Apostrophe police

I heard on the radio about the self styled grammar vigilante in Bristol, England who has spent years changing offending shop signs in the dead of night, removing errant apostrophes and adding them where they are missing.   If he'd like to go international he might like to visit Waikiekie.  I have a little job for his 'apostrophiser' - said to be a broom handle laden with two sponges. 

I'd stopped short of this shed thinking now that I'm blogging regularly again I might re-join Tom, the Back Roads Traveller and his Barn Collective.

As I was driving on past it something caught my eye, a flash of white paint.  I thought it said SLOW.  I'd been following three young bucks on very loud and very fast motorbikes down the road.  I say I had been because they had quickly disappeared from sight somewhere near the brow of this hill.  Thinking the message was from an irate local towards noisy road-users, I was intrigued enough to stop and walk back for a closer look. 

It actually says, "Slow, watch for my cat's"  My cat's what I wondered?  The dreaded apostrophe strikes again.

Not far away, propped against a tree, right beside the road was a much quieter (and much older) bike.  I wonder what's the story behind its presence.

Waikiekie is an interesting place.

The far hills of home and a quick flood

One of the good things about living near a mountain range is you can refer to them in the distance to get an idea of where you are (when you've been idly driving just looking at the countryside and not taking a lot of notice of which road you are on).  All I can tell you is this photo was taken out the back of Waikiekie somewhere.  I'd stopped because I liked the look of the farm track threading its way through the land.

Fortunately for us we weren't in the direct path of ex Tropical Cyclone Debbie when she finished rampaging down the Queensland Coast causing so much heartache and destruction, then crossing the Tasman Sea to whip her tail at New Zealand.  What a monstrous beast she was.  Although only a shadow of her former self she still has the power to wreck havoc on communities.  (At the moment a small North Island town of 2,000 is being evacuated due to flooding and she has moved south to the South Island.)  She dumped a terrific amount of rain on us in a very short time and the many little streams running down out of the mountain turned into raging torrents.  In little Pikiwahine Stream which runs through this farm she took a bridge with her, uprooted trees and flattened everything in her path.  In ten years we've never seen so much damage along this little waterway.

I wonder if this is the last photo I will get of this little farm bridge that is down along the road a bit.  It has been slowly disintegrating with each flood.

This is a photo I took of the same bridge after a flood in April, 2014.

Yes, we live in an area where it does sometimes flood.  The price to pay for living on the banks of mountain fed waterways.   But it has been ages since the last one, so it's not all bad.