Jack and Katrina's Place

Here's something you don't see everyday. This is a photo of Comet Lovejoy, in the eastern pre-dawn sky this morning. Not a very clear photo as I don't have a tripod for the little digital cmaera but  I took this with a 1 minute exposure lying on our driveway at 4:20am (and hoping the newspaper truck didn't arrive!). Quite special to see this on the morning of Christmas Eve.

Monday Morning dawned fine and clear and the snow around the house started to melt, but after dropping Katrina at work I took these shots of the district. That after noon the snow came back again and added another layer to the slush, which froze. The layer of ice up our street made it impossible to drive and even worse to walk .I fell over three times trying to get to the letterbox, before I went back to get a spade and cut som eholed in the ice. Like about half of wellington (those in the hill suburbs) Katrina didn't go to work that day.

Although it was August, the scenery became quite Christmas card-like, like really!

And what a winter it was. August brought the heaviest snow fall to wellington in 30 years or 50 or probably since anyone can really remember. It started on Sunday afternoon, Guy and I ran out to catch it before it melts, as that is how it has been on the odd winters day before. But oh no this time it was different, the snow got heavier and started to lie on the ground, and around the garden. By the time it was getting dark around 5:00pm everyone at our end of the street came out for a play in the snow.

What happened after Rarotonga? We went back to winter in Wellington of course! We left Rarotonga flying into a blue afternoon sky full of little fine weather cumulus cloud, and about an hour southwest of Rarotonga (maybe 800km) you could see the edge of the weather, as if it were a sign 'You are now leaving the tropics and entering the southern hemsiphere winter".