I went out for a lockdown bike ride yesterday along my favorite road by the beach. One section is closed to cars for a few days while they replace and widen a section of bridge. It will be a real boon for cyclists because the old bridge put us right in the lane with the cars and buses and it was a bit scary.

I took this picture last weekend at school. I’ve just started my second semester, it was a lovely day on campus, and I was glad to be in NZ where even the city is bucolic. That’s not social distancing, that’s just wide open spaces.

But now it’s back to COVID-19 lockdown.

Ugh.

The Warehouse is NZ’s answer to Wal-Mart. Arriving here with few possessions, we spent a lot of time at the Warehouse as we set up housekeeping.

Most of the cheap crap they sell is just that, although we’ve also found plenty of things that we’re perfectly happy with. They’re open all the time, the staff are generally friendly, and the stuff is cheap.

Since we’ve been here they’ve been threatening to close down the store near us. Our new house in Birkenhead is…was… in walking distance to a Warehouse, so we thought we were safe.

But no. General retail trends, an aging building, and finally COVID-19, have conspired and our Birkenhead branch closed even before we got the chance to move.

This closure is part of a bigger move they made, closing stores around the country. The company overall made healthy profits over the past years, and so now some people are angry they’re closing stores. But what are they to do… lose money now because they made some before? It’s sad for people who now have to drive to a Warehouse (in our case about 3 miles), and of course for the people who lose their jobs. I don’t know that there is any answer that makes everybody happy.

The Spiritualist Society has provided me with a chuckle since I moved here. Now, as we get ready to change neighborhoods, so do the Spiritualists. Most of the block they’re in (for the last 55 years!!) was demolished a few months ago to make way for something bigger and grander.

And so, like all good things (except consciousness, if you’re an adherent of the Spiritualists), their tenancy comes to an end and they’re moving to Onehunga.

We’ll still get to see them, however, because their new place is on one of our favorite thrift store and Saturday lunch streets.

We celebrated the 4th of July with a weekend at Tom’s Tutukaka house. It provided all the beautiful scenery we could hope for.

We hiked up to the Tutukaka lighthouse in a howling wind. No actual light anymore of course, it’s all radio beacons and GPS these days.

It had been raining, which made for slippery footing, which combined with artfully draped tree branches to make a very “impactful” impression.

As we were sitting around playing Bananagrams later, all of a sudden the setting sun popped out from the clouds and lit up the trees on the headland… spectacular!

We had a little drama with the solar system, which needed a reboot that none of us knew how to do. A few phone calls later, and all was well.

Tom our host had a nasty cold, which I got, so the memories of the weekend lingered for a couple of weeks… almost entirely better now.

I’ve had an emerging idea to do a complex series of posts here, and it’s been blocking me from posting anything at all. So I created a separate site (not visible yet) where I can unload all that. Hopefully that mental shift lets me get back to the random little thoughts and updates I like to post here.

My former colleague Sandy exhibited her paintings at the Mairangi Bay Art Centre and we went to the reception.

The Art Centre itself is pretty cool…

From a recent walk…

Lee made this beautiful pear clafoutis a few weeks ago.

All I really know is that this is a first year (dark color) and an older gull. But I’d like to think it’s members of the family that nests here every spring.

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything on the blog. We’ve made a big life decision, and I felt a bit superstitious about announcing it too early. But here we are. And as of mid-September, there we will be.

After looking at a lot of houses and waffling back and forth about what was truly important to us, we took a second look at this one… once before lockdown and once after… and it just felt like home.

It’s in Birkenhead, on the other side of the harbour. That means we will both have a commute of up to hour if we take the bus. But we got a lot more house for the money on a quieter street, and we decided it was worth it, particularly as we move to some amount of working from home thanks to the virus.

The closing is pushed out till mid-September so the current owners can find a new place. The market is all over the place thanks to the pandemic so it will be some time before we know how our investment will pan out. But interest rates are insanely low, so we won’t be paying much more than our current rent each month.

It’s the biggest commitment we’ve yet made to the idea of staying here permanently. But with the USA literally and figuratively on fire, that choice is easier than ever. In 30+ years together we’ve amassed a large body of evidence that there ain’t no such thing as permanent, so it would be silly to start making predictions now. Let’s see what adventures come our way.

Now begins the shopping…

Our rubber tree, which sits outside our courtyard right at the sidewalk, produced this surprising flower or fruit! I looked online and can’t find another example on a rubber tree.

It looks for all the world like a weird little stuffed bear with a body inexplicably shaped like a donut. We’re going to watch and see if it ripens or produces a seed pod.

Having emerged basically unscathed from the first wave of the pandemic, New Zealand’s attention now returns to “anything else.”

One thing is a drought affecting big chunks of the country. Here in Auckland the reservoirs got down to around 40% capacity, enough to trigger modest restrictions on water use. In some of the agricultural areas, it’s been much worse, with the harvest essentially ruined for many farmers and lots of livestock slaughtered before they starved in the fields.

I took this picture of a lush lavender hedge and a bright green lawn under a drizzling sky thinking how it can be hard to juxtapose the statistical, long-term, and remote reality of the drought with the immediate evidence of our own eyes. Doesn’t look like a drought to me, what’s the problem? As long as there are snowballs, global warming might just be a hoax.

And so it is with the pandemic. I’m at this pool party in Missouri, and I’m not sick, and that hot girl over there isn’t sick either. In fact, I don’t see anybody sick at all. What’s the problem?

Is it the same with racial violence? I’ve never killed anyone, and that black guy with the Mercedes seems to be doing all right. So what’s the problem?

And is it the same with dictators? First they came…