I’ll assume that this photo of the Beatles on the balcony of the St George hotel is protected by the sort of copyright scrutiny that doesn’t encourage bloggers to share, so CLICK THIS LINK.

A copy of it was in my hotel last week, and I said to myself wait a minute I know that place. It’s just a couple blocks from the office!

That tour was a huge deal for little ol’ NZ. Times have changed… lots of visiting acts stay less than a day, and the Beatles wouldn’t be found at the St George any more with its promise of long or short term accommodation. But that solid Art Deco construction easily withstood the last round of earthquakes and looks like it will be around a good while longer.

Well, after saying I wouldn’t play in many more pétanque tournaments … I spent the last three months practicing and this week competed in the annual Chanticleer Cup tournament between Auckland and Wellington.

Wellington held the Cup from 2019, the last time the event was held pre-Covid. And they kept it this time, killing us especially in the singles games where their consistency outshone our brilliance. Although I personally won 7 out of my 9 games (and I got a nice bar of Lindt chocolate as a reward), overall the Wellingtonians were just too much for us.

Here’s me and my partners for the triples competition held today. We won all 4 of our games, and celebrated with a little glass of pastis. They’re both way better than me, so my job was mostly to try and play according to a simple mantra… Don’t. Fuck. Up.

As with other sports things I’ve done, I find myself quite actively torn between “never again” and “hmm, the NZ open is in November and it’s close by this year.”

My Tour de Heifer water bottle, well earned in my opinion, has started to leak, so bye bye souvenir!

Normally we keep the guest room closed in winter because all the heat goes up there. But when the door does get opened up, Misty is ready to pounce… because all the heat goes up there.

Our friend Marlena gave us these beauties yesterday. And the bowl in the background has mandarins from another friend’s son.

It’s the time of the year in Auckland when — if you know the right people— you can end up with more citrus than you know what to do with.

I think this moon is actually a day past full, but still shining brightly.

And the Sky Tower was so brilliantly lit up. We’re not often downtown late to see it from this angle, because we’re old people who live in the burbs, but wow!

I got to the beach a little early today, and so I had a few minutes of quiet before the other swimmers showed up.

The bird you hear in this clip is a tui. They’re black and green mostly, about the size of a blue jay, with a silly white chin feather that flutters around when they talk. He was sitting in a tree just behind me, and wanted everyone to get up and see the sunrise.

And boy do they talk! I still remember the first time we heard one, walking through a park to the market. While NZ is similar to the US in most ways, listening to a tui is a potent reminder that you’re not in Vermont any more.

Now that we’re on the TVNZ studio audience mailing list, we get these random invites for tapings of shows that might or might not be any good. Last night we watched them make an episode of Patriot Brains, a comedy quiz show pitting some well known NZ comics against less well known AU comics so that the home team could take up most of the airtime and … spoiler alert… win the quiz.

The show was ok. But maybe our best memory will be sitting in the lobby pre-show with a bird’s eye view of the bullpen where all the actual work gets done. That’s the famously chipper and highly animated weatherman about half an hour before going on stage for his big five minutes of nightly performance.

And below, a workspace that we think perfectly illustrates the actual glamour of working in ‘the biz’. We imagine her (or him, why not??) as leading a superhero double life: an ordinary office worker geeky enough to invest in a custom keyboard most of the time… but ready for red carpet fabulous as fast as you can say ‘heels, lipstick, attitude!’

The Christmas cactus is having a particularly exuberant second bloom this year.

Would a “Use other door behind you” have been so difficult?

Last weekend we went over to Devonport for some shopping and saw a sign that the William C Daldy was open for tours. So all aboard!

The Daldy is a coal-fired steam-powered tugboat that operated here from 1936 to 1977. She’s still running and available for charters thanks to the efforts of a volunteer group.

There was a lot of very cool and very massive stuff in the boiler room and engine areas. As described in the Wikipedia article linked above, she could burn a ton of coal per hour when working hard.

There were no luxuries aboard, although so much varnished wood makes it look rather grand.

We enjoyed our quick walk through, and applaud the gang who keep her afloat… a good hobby for them and some good history for the rest of us.

Wellington, where I’ve been spending a lot of time lately, is famously windy. Here’s a piece of public art doing exactly what it’s supposed to do… turn some of that cold wind into mesmerizing beauty.

The sculpture is called Protoplasm, by Phil Price.

Quaker Oat Squares.

They were in stock this weekend at Martha’s Backyard, Auckland’s funny little American products store, so we bought two boxes which might not last the week.

We drove out west yesterday to pick up a new stationary bike trainer I found secondhand.

Which put us near Mellons Bay beach , a place we’d never seen before. It was low tide, and the narrow sandy beach gave way to a giant expanse of soft rock with all sorts of interesting formations. In the photo above it’s like the rock had been tunneled by worms or roots… no idea what the real story is.

Not a useful beach for swimming and frolicking, you’d have to walk hundreds of metres across the shelf to get to water deeper than your waist. But very pretty to walk along and feel the breeze and hear the surf.

… which must be sort of like Panic at the Disco.

Now that the owners have decided to invest, they are investing in our local shopping center/mall. They tore down one whole wing and are advertising for tenants.

Let the shopping begin! Again…