Beach Adventures

I took this photo. There was a leopard sleeping under the water and I just walked right up and photographed it. It's all about getting the shot.

HB and I were going to go up to Matakana (it is a wine-producing... town? Province? Area? Place) today and drink some wine, but now it appears that he has shot off to Resene while I was in the shower (!) to buy wood stain (!!) and may be staining the house all afternoon (!!!), thus leaving me wineless and alone, unless I wish to help with the house staining, which I don't really but feel like I should.

YAAAAAAAY

Luckily there are lots of other things to do, like unload the dishwasher, and that is why I am blogging.

UPDATE: I did end up helping with the house staining, which was much more fun than expected - mainly because now whenever we have visitors I can proudly point to the wall and say, "Look at that wall! Isn't it good? That is the one I stained". It's also, as someone pointed out to me on Twitter, one of the few occasions where you can proudly announce, "I stained that".

I am, however, clearly at the bottom of the staining hierarchy - the three boys were working industriously away with paint pots and brand new brushes. I had an orange bucket and a paintbrush HB found in the garage, much as you would give to a well-intentioned child who wanted to help the adults. Hmph.

Last weekend we went to Bethells Beach (named after Mr Bessell, who suffered from a lisp) and mucked about climbing rocks and taking photos and racing sticks and so on and so forth.

Here it is, bethelling away

My stick, winning

It was a brilliant outing apart from the five minutes in the middle where I thought HB had been swept into the sea to his certain death (spoiler alert: he hadn't).

We'd found a little secondary bay along from the main beach, and I wandered off behind a rock to do a wee/look for shells (leading to the impossible question, "Should I pick up this beautiful nautilid that I possibly just urinated on?") and when I came back, HB was GONE.

I rolled up my jeans to the knee, straightened my Superman t-shirt, wound my kelp whip into my belt loops cowboy-style -

and set off to look for him.

He had wanted to go and look at a cave a bit further round the rocks, so I took off in that direction. The rocks were steep! The rocks were sharp! I fell over! There was no sign of HB!

This seems like a good time to mention that Bethells Beach is a notoriously dangerous 'drowning beach'. There was no way one could have made it round to the hole in the rock ("Hey, everybody! Let's go and look at that hole in the rock!") without being caught by a wave and swept to certain death.

SCENIC ROCK-HOLE OF DOOM

I was about to go back to the beach when I saw a massive chunk of kelp and realised that obviously it was HB's floating dead body.

I dashed back around the rocks to raise the alarm and there HB was, sitting on a log, making a little boat out of driftwood.

I was all "I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD" and he was all "Oh my God, you look like something out of Lord of the Flies" and I hit him with my kelp whip and we all lived happily ever after.

HB: Not dead.

Also, and this is not relevant to the story, on the way back to the car I took this photo of a dog:

I really like it.

That is all.