I went home to Hawai’i to spend the December holidays with my parents. It’s the first time in 14 years I’ve gone back to Hawai’i in December, because I usually try to escape NZ in the Southern Hemisphere winter (June-Sept), not our lovely early summer. But I had an absolutely wonderful trip, and am so glad I went home. Here’s some of the things I got up to: 1. Eating lots of fruit My parents have a tropical fruit farm, and grow pretty much every tropical fruit you’ve ever heard of (except durian), and lots you haven’t. And I gorged on as much of them as you can possibly have every day without bad things happening… 2. Throwing a 9 course Christmas Eve dinner for 11 based on historical recipes I wanted to do something a bit fun and different for my parent’s big holiday celebration (which ended up being Christmas Eve dinner), and a formal, coursed dinner is definitely a novelty in Hawai’i – even more so if it’s historical! I melded historical recipes …

A promise: this post contains images of 100% authentic cats. No dancing cats, cat boobs, bad fur, creepy CGI, or alarming plunges into Uncanny Valley. There is, however, a slight risk of uneven editing. Mum & Dad have six cats on the farm. Four of them are the most adorable, sweet creatures you’ll ever meet. One of them is amazingly not-a-disaster of a cat anymore. The sixth one is a goose. Terra This is Terra. She’s the matriarch of the farm cats: not because she’s the oldest, but because she’s the most likely to get along with everybody else, and the best at getting what she wants in the cat hierarchy. She achieves this by just doing it. She hung around the (now defunct) health food store in town. Mum asked around, and no one knew where she’d come from. She was incredibly friendly, and the farm was short of cats, so she came home with Mum. She was dubbed Terra by my sister because her coat was the colour of dirt (Mum, indignantly: “very …

This Christmas my in-laws gave us membership to Zealandia Ecosanctuary as a present, and it has turned out to be the best gift possible. Mr D and I head off to Zealandia nearly every weekend, to enjoy the scenery, and revel in the birdlife. (I revel. Mr D looks at it suspiciously and hopes it doesn’t poop on us or attack us). What’s Zealandia? Zealandia is an ecosanctuary/park/wildlife sanctuary just 5 minutes drive from the Wellington central business district (and Parliament), and completely surrounded by a predator proof fence. The fence is designed to keep out ferrets, stoats, rats, cats, possums, weasels, and other invasive pests that destroy plants and kill birds. All these pests have been cleared out from inside the sanctuary, and many species of native birds, some critically endangered, and some of which went extinct in the Wellington region over a century ago, have been reintroduced. Zealandia is 225ha (just under a square mile) and just a little smaller than Central Park, but is much wilder and hillier than Central Park. It …