Nuff said.

It’s been wonderful to share the Brattleboro Adventure, and the Auckland Edition, with you over the past dozen years.

But as our transition to NZ has firmed up, our connection to Brattleboro has loosened. The name just doesn’t make sense any longer.

A few years ago, I bought the domain assortedhistory.com. I’m not sure it’s actually the greatest pun in the history of English, but close enough!

So, from here on out, the blog will continue over there. This site will stay up for some time, and eventually I’ll find a free spot to park /archive all these old memories.

If you’re reading this, I hope you’ll follow me to the new site: Assorted History. You can be notified of updates there either by following the Facebook page of the same name or by subscribing via WordPress.

After years of boringly playing the same first word every day I was finally rewarded.

Pak n Save is a discount grocery store in NZ. We’ve started shopping here more since we moved, because it’s right on the way home when we go into Auckland.

When the parenthetical gets longer than the post…

(The chain is owned by one part of our grocery duopoly, which is regularly investigated for anti-competitive behaviors but always manages to keep on trucking. Grocery prices are really high here, and are one of the reasons we elected a pro-big business government who campaigned on cost of living issues. Nutty, right? It’s like a zillionaire real estate developer with a decades-long history of not paying suppliers sitting on his gold toilet practicing his tagline “You’re fired” so that he can win more votes from working people.)

Anyway… the Pak n Save marketing tends toward the obnoxious, but I approve of the signage for Aisle 11… it can be so hard to find the unicorns if you’re in a hurry.

Dacre Cottage sits near the beach, just across the Weiti River from us, we can see it from our living room (through binoculars). So maybe 2-3km as the crow flies, but a 25km drive.

On Friday, we went to visit it in person. You have to park almost a mile away and walk in. The trail was a mix of forest and meadows…

It was a super windy day, and the wind whooshing in the trees was sometimes so loud we couldn’t hear each other talking. We cleared a bunch of branches that had fallen across the trail.

Those houses in the background of the last picture, which we can also see from ours, are McMansions sitting in a big field. Why in a land so wonderfully endowed with trees would you plop your 6,000 square feet in the middle of a pasture??

The cottage itself, originally built in the 1850s, is cute and tiny. It’s possible to rent the site and go in, but otherwise it’s all locked up. The site is pretty well maintained, I think partly by volunteers and partly by the Department of Conservation.

Lee made us a nice picnic lunch. There are some benches and tables scattered around.

On the way out, we climbed partway up the trail (which continues on somewhere) to get a little bigger view. There are some fenced areas on the beach where endangered dotterels nest.

All in all, a great little outing!

We saw an ad on Facebook for a restaurant down by the marina offering Christmas lunch. Why not?

Ripples restaurant (and bar) turned out to be a place where lots of different marina meals get served… besides breakfast lunch and dinner for the residents and time-share visitors, they serve coffee and pastries for people heading out on the water or working at harborside business, ice creams in the afternoon, and drinks all day long for the folks that rely on a little tipple to get through the day. The new’ish Indian owners are working hard to keep the clientele that the previous (original?) owners had built up.

The turkey, with roast vegetables and Yorkshire pudding, was perfectly fine. And there were plenty of people who thought so, the place was doing a good business. We giggled to see a 3-generation Chinese family come in… a perfect reversal of the A Christmas Story stereotype.

I swam from Army Bay the other day. Yet another beautiful local beach.

The more serious metal detectorists spend quite a bit of energy looking for good spots to hunt. Up to now, I’ve basically just gone to the beach. That’s working out pretty good, but still… what else is out there?

I found a 1970s map of a neighboring town online, and it showed a big empty area just at the edge of the built-up part of town. Comparing that to a current map led me to take a look at this little park, the Puriri Bush Reserve.

It’s barely a city block in size, with no trails or other facilities, but when you walk in past the leafy hedges you enter another world… there are a few big trees that would make fabulous forts, but it’s mostly palms and fern trees, so the ground is a crunchy mess of old fronds. It’s surrounded by regular neighborhood, houses and cars, so it’s doubly surprising… how did they decide not only not to build right there, but also not to tame it into a regular park with grass and paths and a swing set?

It wasn’t great for metal detecting, but it was fun to wander around in the land that time forgot for a couple of hours.

That’s us flanking Pat Mallon and a couple of her pictures. Which are now ours.

Pat is one of the founders of our pétanque club. She doesn’t play often these days, but still throws quite well when she does get there. She took up pétanque many years before when she and her late husband were sailing around the Pacific. As you do. Pat has some amazing stories to tell.

We saw her at the recent club Christmas party and Lee complimented Pat on one of her paintings that we’d seen whilst dining with another member. Before that, we had no idea she was also an artist.

Pat promptly invited us over to look at her other works, many of which were for sale. We ended up with these two.

The seagull still needs a frame, but the boy and his dog (actual title “Best Friends”) are happily presiding over a corner of the media room.

I still haven’t gotten used to all those extra u’s.

We’ve had some beautiful weather this week. The summer solstice is past so shorter days ahead. But for now, the long twilights have been great.

Sometimes it’s been cloudy, and we’ve even had a few showers. The pohutukawa that partly blocks our ocean view showed off its red flowers and pale new leaves under a gray sky… so we can sort of forgive it for growing between us and the sea.

Visiting yacht.

Joined by another.

Comes the dawn.

Taking a trot around the neighborhood today I was happy to see these thoroughly Kiwi Christmas decorations. I’m not generally a big fan of these inflatable things, but here we are.

Lee pointed out that I’d actually already seen the same ones at another house, but I was so focused on what a low profile they got that I didn’t pay attention to the actual decorations.