Category: Auckland

Mine, mine, mine

Misty has been a bit moody the last couple of weeks. After strewing the laundry around, she settled in on a blanket that she recently appropriated.

In this picture, she was hanging around the office (and bike storage room) one day being a pest, something she doesn’t normally do. I gave her my swim towel/poncho and that made everything ok.

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Excess baggage

New Zealand’s phased removal of single-use plastics continues to take effect. Grocery bags went away completely a couple of years ago, and things like straws and cotton swabs more recently. The latest damaging product to be removed is produce bags.

Paper is available, but we bought some (plastic!) reusable mesh bags. I wonder how many uses they will need before we start actually reducing plastic usage.

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Hail, hail!

I know it doesn’t seem like much if you’re from the American west or any number of other places… but this baby-pea-size hail was pretty unusual for here!

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FIFA Women’s World Cup

Last weekend we got to join Emily and Brian for a Women’s World Cup game at Eden Park.

It was the USA vs Vietnam, and the outcome was never in doubt. You know the phrase “they never had a shot at winning”? Well in this case it was literally true… the Vietnamese team never had a shot on goal. The American players were all a head taller, sometimes head and shoulders taller, and sometimes more like head, shoulders and sternum taller. And proportionately bigger. And more experienced, and so on.

But even if the game was a bit boring, the afternoon most certainly wasn’t. I haven’t seen so much starring and striping in a long time. These two ladies took it upon themselves to lead our section of the stadium in song throughout mist of the second half. The wave was very successful a couple of times. The Vietnamese fans were out in big numbers, and ready to get into chant wars with the Americans.

We ate a lot of junk food, but still went out for tacos and a scoop of Ben and Jerry’s afterwards.

Tonight, the NZ Football Ferns drew 0-0 against Switzerland, meaning they’re out of the tournament. But the USA is still in (as expected), so now we can root for them with undivided loyalty.

Thanks for the tickets, guys, we had a blast!

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Dry July

That picture is from my recently deleted Untappd profile. 351 distinct brews over the last eight years… and that’s just the ones I actually recorded. Some of them are ranked among the best in the world. Others are deemed ordinary at best.

And it doesn’t count the cocktails and wines.

Lee’s story is similar… more wine than beer but otherwise the same. Every occasion includes a tipple of one sort or another.

So, time for a considered pause. Dry July is a thing here. Sometimes people use the occasion to raise money for a worthy cause, and others, like us, just use the catchy name for motivation.

So, we packed up the entire liquor cabinet and gave it to our housekeeping team, who were well pleased. So pleased in fact that they brought us this beautiful cake, complete with a cute spelling mistake. (although I’m not normally the kind of person to touch things that you shouldn’t, there was just something irresistible about that purple icing which turned out to be a lot more smudge-prone than I expected)

We’re two weeks in today, and so far so good. Hopefully we can last the whole month, and then we’ll see…

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Rats!

I woke up the other morning to find the cat acting a little strange. Normally, when she brings us a live present, she’s chasing it around and meowing a lot. But this time she just stared fixedly at a corner behind a bookcase.

Sure enough, the morning’s entertainment, an awfully large rat, was hunkered down, trying to catch its breath. I fished it out with a stick, and the chase was back on.

Man can those little guys run, and climb, and jump! Even with me and Misty coordinating our efforts, we chased it around without success for half an hour before I finally figured out to open the door and shoo the poor nasty creature outside. Whew!

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Taonga for Jono

To celebrate Jono’s big 100k swim, the Bay2Bay swim group took up a collection to give him a Māori carved greenstone pendant or taonga. Taonga means a lot of things, but the most common translation seems to be “treasure”.

You see these pendants fairly commonly in NZ… they are traditionally a symbol of respect and esteem, and are to be gifted to the wearer rather than bought by them. Greenstone (pounamu) was important and valuable in pre-colonial Māori life both for making sharp tools and weapons and for jewelry.

Jono’s taonga is carved in the form of a hammerhead shark. That creature symbolizes any number of big-predator virtues: strength, speed, leadership, etc. I’d say Jono has all those things… without being the least bit predatory!

Because of its cultural significance, there are strict rules and customs attached to any greenstone artifacts. You’re supposed to deal directly with the Māori landowners, only use properly recognized carvers, and make sure that the proper blessings are offered along the way so that the stone’s connection to the earth is honored. The picture below shows the blessing ceremony that was held a few weeks before the presentation.

Scott, who is doing the presentation and took a big role in organizing the whole thing, has Māori heritage and is active in Māori life. He had the connections to make sure this taonga has all the right vibes.

On the one hand, it’s a lot of silly hocus-pocus. But on the other, I’m super-glad we went to the extra trouble (and expense). Jono didn’t put himself through the madness of swimming for 33 hours just to show off his big lats… he wanted to use his loudest voice to remind us that we must regain a closer connection to the non-human parts of the planet.

Amen.

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Dragspil

There are any number of foods that divide the world in two: fruitcake, okra, minty peas, haggis, durian… you love them or, mostly, you don’t.

And in music, it’s the bagpipes, penny whistle, and those pan-pipe things played by Peruvian buskers. But the king of divisive instruments must surely be the accordion.

I’ve always had a fondness for accordion music. I mean, not all the time or anything, but I find accordions to be very expressive and versatile instruments. And I like fruitcake too so maybe I’m just wired differently.

Last month, the Auckland Philharmonia put on a concert featuring the work Dragspil by NZ composer Lyell Cresswell, featuring James Crabbe, for whom it was originally written 30 years ago. So we had to go (or rather I had to go and Lee is a good sport).

Overall, the concert was fine. But from where we were sitting in Auckland’s Town Hall, we couldn’t really hear well enough to know what the accordion was doing. The music is very complicated and very modern, and of course completely unfamiliar to us. So I kept wondering was that an accordion flourish or some oboe thing that was supposed to be in the background? Dunno.

Glad we went of course, but like other ‘special’ tastes, the classical accordion will require more study in order to be fully appreciated.

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Before and after

Yesterday’s winter solstice swim… no wetsuits allowed! Like last year, it was rainy and windy and not great for swimming.

Afterwards, we warmed up as best we could. We eventually did get the last few people in the spa and drank a toast to the lengthening days.

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