Friend Brian in town for work last week. We couldn’t get a table at our first choice restaurant so went to Gerome’s where we’d had a good experience one other time. Not so great this time but the conversation more than made up for it!!
Don’t Stop Believin’
Two shrines on the wall at a Vietnamese restaurant … which one imparts the more important lesson?
Shoo flies
It’s great to live where it’s a nice temperature to leave the house open all summer. And even better a place with surprisingly few biting bugs.
But we do get flies in the summer, and they’re annoying. So we went to the store and bought all the methods to kill them.
Sprouts
One of our regular vegetable sellers was absent from the farmers market this morning but phoned in with a pretty good excuse.
Happy birthday Lee
We had a nice little Sunday afternoon party… a semi-surprise.
The need for speed
I walk by this plaque most mornings on the way to and from the pool but I’d never stopped to read it until now.
Pip Gould’s record in the 200 only held for a few months, and the time has dropped steadily since then. The current record is 2:04.06, set by Missy Franklin in the 2012 Olympics.
Pip is 78 now and still lives in Auckland according to Wikipedia. Maybe she’s one of the ladies I see knocking out laps in the next lane over.
We support the monarchy
This was our first butterfly shortly before she came out of her chrysalis.
And a couple hours later, although we missed the actual event.
Because the caterpillars were being eaten very effectively by wasps and other predators, we took steps to bring some inside. The upstairs shower is now a caterpillar nursery with an expected crop of up to 20 butterflies over the next few weeks.
Caterpillars poop a lot.
We did get to watch one wriggle into its sleeping bag, though.
I haven’t really thought about the whole butterfly life cycle thing since learning about it in elementary school. But now that we’ve taken this little step to plant a couple of milkweed plants… it’s amazing!!
Weather or not
The summer weather has been great the last few weeks. But we did have a storm pass through the other day, and that means more dead umbrellas.
First flaps
Flying is hard! This young gull spent a few days hopping and flapping before finally getting out of the nest, probably by accident. Apparently it’s pretty common for them to fall out and finish growing up on the ground.
All three of the babies are now hanging around in the Moonies parking area, flying a little better each day, and eating a proper seagull diet of whatever their parents bring and what people feed them.
Cryptic-mas
I know a lot of what I publish in this blog is cryptic, idiosyncratic, an inside joke. Sorry not sorry for that. I like that kind of thing.
This little whiteboard was in the window of a construction site — well after Christmas — and even I found it to be especially mysterious.
Raspberry Beret
The kind you find in a secondhand store grocery store parking lot.
Ride toward the light
Auckland’s Light Path cycleway is a very visible downtown feature. It’s built on an old motorway ramp, and features interactive lights in the evening.
We finally rode it last weekend, pretty neat!
New Year’s Road Trip Stop 5: New Plymouth
Our second and final night on the road was at New Plymouth, on the West coast.
We got in about dusk and went for a walk to shake off the road. One of the first sights we saw was this eerie light hanging out over the water.
It turns out to be Len Lye’s famous Wind Wand, one of several cool pieces of public art around the downtown area. Art takes money. New Plymouth has enjoyed some influx of wealth due to offshore oil and gas exploration. The current government, with its Green Party coalition partners, has stopped that program, so things are a bit tight at the moment.
We saw more Len Lye art at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery… like a lot of more recent art that appeals to me, these pieces are conceptually so simple that I say to myself “I coulda done that,” but then I find myself saying “But I didn’t and I’m glad somebody else did, because it’s magical!”
We walked around town for a while, had lunch, chatted with a blind clarinet player who was busking on the town square, and thus inspired picked up a couple of Django Reinhardt CDs for the drive home.
On the way our of town we stopped to see the Te Rewa Rewa Bridge and walk along the seaside track.
Mt. Taranaki looms in the background. It’s a ways from NP, but the road passes relatively close by, and it’s the most amazing mountain I’ve ever seen, as big as most Rocky Mountain peaks, and just sitting there all by itself.
Of all the places we saw on this quick trip, I’m most excited to go back and explore the New Plymouth and the Taranaki region in more depth.
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 