Hina evil ogress!

We have a new dog, Hina, she's a feisty little black puppy, we got her a bit over a month ago now, in late august. The poor little thing was skinny and petrified (but fierce!!), now she's put on weight and has a shiny coat and follows the girls everywhere....

Legend has it that Hina was a witch/ogress who lived in the mountains in Rurutu, she had long unkempt hair and long fingernails, she feasted on unsuspecting children sent to collect firewood on the plateau. When she was eventually found and captured, living in a small cave beneath the ridgeline of the highest mountains here, the people of Rurutu found that she had decorated her cave with woven mats made from pandanus, and it is Hina who taught the women of Rurutu how to weave, before being put to death for her wicked deeds! Our dog is not quite this despicable but she is a flip-flop stealing menace, she's partly house-trained (our beautiful oblong peue got piddled on last week!). But she's also got the makings of a great little guard dog, much
better than Maroro the old softie.....

Where did september go?

I apologize to those of you who have been waiting for the next installment all this last month. We've been busy with the september rush, and somehow I just never got 'round to updating. So now I'll give you a bumper edition. September is always a fun month, the start of the month is full-on whale season and as it's not yet the school hols so we get an interesting variety of international guests, here especially for the whales, among them Dutch, German, Czech, Japanese and Canadian visitors, it gives me a welcome opportunity to practice my English! Not to mention the metropolitan French and Swiss contingent. We celebrated Tuati's birthday with a BBQ with Pascal the Dutch anesthesiologist and Marek the Czech mathematician. Towards the end of the month we made a quick dash to Tahiti for the salon du tourisme to meet our public (three-quarters of our guests are already based in Tahiti, so it's worth the hassle of a 48h stop-over before we get back into the half-term fray), we bust a gut trying to get some rosewood bowls ready for display. I also launched my new soaps and sold out of jam whilst there!
In between, Matotea got a chance to hang out with some other girls at the guesthouse, and even did a horse-trek with Papa.

 

Heimana is transitioning into a 'terribly cute terrible toddler' (who said anything about two years!). We have the tantrums and everything, we're pulling Matotea's hair and giving as good as we get, if not better!

Work in progress.....

 Here's a  breadfruit  bowl that  we're working on at the moment. It 's not quite finished, but I think it already looks quite nice.

Tuati's birthday cake

Sunday is Tuati's fourteenth birthday, we're plunging deeper into the troubled teens. He's actually been good as gold, thus far, though there are clearly some small currents of angst swirling there beneath the surface. He's gone very anti birthdays, that's just for the little kids! And as we're going to be busy with guests I wanted to do something a bit in advance, so today we made some pre-birthday profiteroles this afternoon.......they turned out a bit funnny 'cause I had to go off to the airport in the middle of it all, and the roles got removed from the oven before they were really ready and then re-cooked! But we still managed to eat them with guava syrup....YUM!

 What could possibly go wrong with my exceptionally

talented sous-chef here at my side!