Flu

We've been a bit sick lately.  I (Jean) spent most of the last week of term in bed with the flu.  Thankfully the kids are old enough to keep out of trouble.  Eva did find a couple of boxes of hand downs and probably tried on half of them (leaving them on her bedroom floor afterwards, of course), but that was no big deal.  The girls, especially Bryony, did a lot of meals. Everyone has had a touch of it, with sore throats, headaches and phlegm, but Daniel and Renee are the only ones who seem to have the actual flu - until a couple of days ago when David came down with it too.  He's had a couple of days off work and is not feeling that flash.  We've been playing a lot of boardgames and watching a few DVDs and generally taking it easy.  When it snowed a couple of days ago, Andrew was the only one who felt like going outside to play in it.  At least it's the holidays so there's no pressure to do anything except sit about and keep warm.

Botanic gardens

We went for a mid-winter trip to the Botanic Gardens for a run and to see the glasshouse plants.  

There is a big pile of long skinny stones in the background of the cactus garden.  We have some of the same kind of stones in our garden.  The arrangement here makes me wonder if they come from the Organ Pipes, a basalt formation near Dunedin.  They are the wrong colour though...  There must be a lot of these kind of rocks around Dunedin somewhere for them to show up in our garden and here as well.

They have a nice selection of carnivorous plants, 

including some very healthy-looking sundew.

You can ask at the Information Centre for a free bag of feed (crushed barley?) for the ducks.  The pond was frozen the day we went and it was funny to see them slipping and sliding on top of the water.  Most of them stayed on the footpath and mobbed us.

It was freezing up North East Valley and the ice had pushed the soil up as it froze.

We talked to the parrots (some of which talked back) then went home to warm up.