Here’s Pat, one of the founders of the Northcote Petanque Club, on the occasion of her 90th birthday celebration down at the clubhouse (which is still in the process of being restored after January’s flooding). Her living situation these days frowns on her having a glass of wine, so we were happy to pour her one while her daughter obligingly looked the other way. Richard the club president gave a nice speech in her honour and several of the members who no longer play made the effort to join in the festivities.
She has many good stories to tell about her years sailing around the Pacific and raising her kids in Papua New Guinea. And she still throws a mean straight ball, although if it’s an especially long one she does struggle a bit.
And so… let’s all aspire to be like Pat, still going strong at 90.
Our local butcher shop closed down, the owners unable to find a suitable buyer. It’s always been hard to run any retail business. New Zealand’s constricted food supply chain is further hindered by a supermarket duopoly who work real hard to buy all the good stuff ahead of the local guys and can then sell it for less. Then there is a tier of smaller, mostly Asian, stores that also process a lot of meat. And with so many restaurants trying to stand out, it must be harder than ever for a butcher to differentiate themselves and find enough discerning home cooks to make the business attractive.
There’s the Sky Tower all lit up to celebrate the opening night of a touring company production of Wicked.
We attended, having gotten access to opening night seats because we bought tickets over a year ago for a date that was cancelled due to COVID. As a consolation they gave us early access to the rescheduled premiere.
Although several of the songs were at least a little familiar to me … they’ve made the leap from the stage to any number of other venues… we’d never seen the show. We did read the book way back when it came out.
With both the book Wicked and the original Wizard of Oz books, I remember feeling a real sense of strangeness. The Land of Oz is a profoundly weird place, and scary. And the Wizard of Oz movie preserves at least some of that strangeness, or at least that’s the impression I got watching it as a small child. I mean… little people!
But the Broadway show? It felt so rigidly conformant to the expectations of the teenage angst story that Lee in particular didn’t really enjoy it. I did enjoy the show more in the moment, fully caught up in the singing and dancing and flying. In retrospect, though, I too may be over the basic Broadway plot.
We snapped this shot going over the Harbour Bridge the other evening. It must have been club racing or something like that.
Auckland is nicknamed the City of Sails, and it’s always lovely to see the yachts out on the water (yacht in Kiwi = sailboat in American). But it sure still seems like most of the boats in the many marinas around town never go out at all. If they did it would be complete gridlock out there on a Saturday afternoon.
We were invited to the birthday dinner celebration for our friend Susana held at Kika’s West Brazilian BBQ across town in Henderson.
Just as we Americans pine for a decent taco, so Brazilians lament the lack of decent meat. It’s surprising since NZ has a robust BBQ tradition, but for the Brazilians it just ain’t the same.
And after eating this meal, I have to agree. We got the combo platter for two and wow. Melt in your mouth, spicy and delicious. Felt nearly comatose afterwards, and there was enough left for breakfast AND lunch the next day.
This silver birch has been sickly for years and our neighbors finally decided to take it down. They’d been holding off because a bunch of birds seem to enjoy perching in its bare branches, including morepork (owls) and kereru (wood pigeons).
On the day the arborist came, even with the chainsaw idling ominously, the kereru came by for one last look around.
We donated a little bit so we could attend the recent kickoff fundraiser for our local MP Shanan Halbert. We’ve appreciated his relentless community engagement, we agree with his Labour Party ideals, and we admire the path he takes being proudly Māori and proudly gay.
The event was billed as black tie but only a few people actually wore tuxes / gowns (including our neighbor Gordon who looked fabulous). The most (‘best’ being debatable) dressed for the occasion was the drag queen emcee, a particularly pleasing choice given all the anti-drag nonsense in the US at the moment. They did a great job, plenty of good fun and kept things moving along.
We stayed through drinks, speeches, auction, and dinner, seated with a member of the local district council and some other randoms like ourselves. Shanan came by every table and spent a few minutes chatting with us. I think the most surprising thing was him saying that his entire campaign fundraising target was $45,000. It seems like there might be contests for high school Secretary that cost more in the US. When the band kicked off with a too-perky “Big wheel keep on turnin’” we made for the exit.
It will be a close election this time, a contest mostly about whose priorities get addressed first… can well-off whit’ish people have all the things they want the government to provide without more government spending and the tax increases to back it up? And will they still want all those delicious government goodies and tax breaks if it means clawing even more out of the mouths of less well-off less-whit’ish people? Or will they be ready to accept whatever strings are attached to cash infusions from the global equity markets or sovereign investment from China and the Middle East?
From where we sit, a more egalitarian country that focuses on lifting the bottom 20% is preferable to one that focuses on further enriching the top 20%. Go Shanan!!
A work colleague performs in the improv troupe at Covert Theatre, which I wouldn’t have guessed until he put out the invitation a few weeks ago.
The show’s premise was clever, start on the bridge of the USS Enterprise, and then incorporate the random audience ideas from that point.
As always with this kind of thing, some bits turned out better than others. But it was cool to see another, unexpected, side of someone, and to discover a new venue.
On the plane down to Wellington a few weeks ago, the flight attendant got on the PA and said we were joined by the cast of Red White and Brass, who were flying to Welly for the movie’s world premiere. Cool, I thought but meaningless to me. The next morning I happened to walk right by the theatre and snapped a shot of the poster.
Then just a couple days later I saw an ad for a screening of the film, with a Q&A, just down the road at our nearby artsy cinema. Ok, since I’m old friends with the cast, let’s go.
It was very sweet and heartwarming. And I got to meet the writer Halaifonua Finau (who thankfully goes by Nua) as well as cast member Suzy Cato, who for years hosted an after-school TV show and so is sort of an institution to a whole generation of Kiwis. The most interesting parts of the Q&A were about getting the movie made. It was mostly funded by the NZ Film Commission, so that part was sorted, but still… making a movie must be a labor of love and a giant gamble. I hope they do well by it… maybe it’s the next Hunt for the Wilderpeople!
We took this picture to submit to PlantSnap for an ID, but I wasn’t really happy with its first suggestion… I don’t think it’s a dendrobium! But number 3 in the list is Chinese indigo, and one of the plants on that list is probably right. PlantSnap is impressive… bring on the AI!
A couple of weeks ago, at the instigation of our expat friend Emily, we saw Madeleine Peyroux at the Holy Trinity Cathedral (just up the street from our old house in Parnell).
Before the show we had a nice dinner at Non Solo Pizza and then walked to the church. It was the first time we’d walked along that road in over a year, and it was striking how many shops had changed. And there are a couple of new construction projects underway… more apartments. But our little Superette store was still there, which was comforting.
The concert itself was sadly ho-hum. We had seats in the back, which may have contributed to our feeling disengaged. The acoustics weren’t great… we could hear that her amazing voice was doing Billie Holiday things, but we couldn’t really hear those things in detail.
Madeleine herself seemed tired, as I suppose you would be at the last show on the Australasian tour. Let me go home and curl up in my own bed please. You already know my politics, which I will work into a few jokes, which I’ve been telling now for like 30 years. And no, we’re not really tinkering with the music, because we know that this works… there’s a reason they call them “jazz standards.”
We went to dinner at the Alliance Francaise a couple of weeks ago. Now that we’re on their mailing list, we are impressed with how many events they have. We tried to go one other time, to a breakfast, which we thought would be a big food truck type thing. But it was a sit down affair and basically over when we got there. So when this dinner popped up we booked right away, and it did indeed sell out.
On the night, a guy who makes his living as a private chef cooked up dinner for about 35 right there at the Alliance building, a former private school, all 1920s bungalow charm. We ate at long tables and everyone tried whatever level of French they knew. The menu was supposed to be from the Basque country but I’d say that was more an overtone than a strict rule. The duck was tougher than it should have been, but the not-so-Basque chocolate lava cake was divine.
I don’t know how often we might go back, but it was a nice experience.
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 