This plaque sits in the entryway of a nondescript building in Newmarket that I walk by every day. It’s quite high on the wall, not very noticeable in the scheme of things. But it has a solid Ayn Rand vibe, I think, strong-handshake men building a city out of nothing, with a little gold changing hands down at the bottom.

Preparations underway for next month’s centennial commemoration of the end of the war to end all wars. Pics taken over a few days.

I’ll admit to fairly often buying wine based on the label, but beer not so often, maybe never.

It’s quite nice beer… or maybe I’m just easily suggestible.

The stained glass window panels are done and dusted, and it was a totally fun experience. They have pride of place in the study window (which is arguably also a dining room or living room window because our house isn’t very big).

Based on glass class, we were inspired to make this ‘koru’ motif mosaic kit. The koru is a prevalent Māori design symbolizing a fern frond opening up, aka a fiddlehead. It’s presiding over our random collection of Kiwi trinkets…

In just over a year we’ve watched this building go from a hole in the ground to where it is now.

Auckland is booming, more or less. In this neighborhood we live in there are half a dozen projects of this scale or larger. The whole suburb is transforming from 1-3 story retail and light industrial buildings to 5-8 story mixed use. Three side-by-side bungalows on the main street just sold for over $13 million. And so on.

I think this boom will generally continue until somebody starts a very large war or the Chinese stop buying milk (https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/new-zealands-two-way-trade-with-china-more-than-triples-over-the-decade).

A boatie’s life for me… shots from a Saturday morning trip down to the Wynyard quarter where all the big yachts are.

Flexible solar panels

Dry stacker yacht storage… this is really popular here. You call up an hour before you need the boat and they get it out and put it in the water.

The natural and man made environments…

Both are correct as it turns out.

Today’s edition of Sunday Drives Around Auckland took us an hour north to Brick Bay Winery and Sculpture Trail. It was recommended to us by Alicia and was totally worth the trip.

We got there about 10:30 AM, but the restaurant was (supposedly) all booked up (although it never really seemed full). Nonetheless, we got seated outside and had a great lunch and a glass of the local cépage.

Then we paid the extra ten bucks to take the sculpture walk. There are almost 70 works of art along maybe two miles of path.

At first, I did pretty well at predicting the descriptions in the explanatory brochure. For the red folly above I got the dual nature of concealing and providing a vantage point. I got the juxtaposition of the natural and man made worlds, easy. Art words are a lot like wine words… you don’t have to have a lot of verifiable meaning. In fact, the less the better.

But soon enough i had to admit defeat. The brochure writer was clearly operating at a high level: the exploration of negative space flowed effortlessly into a field of dynamic energy, all framed by references to indigenous culture. The sublime was suggested in form, colour and movement, where I only saw one of those triangle snake toys you buy in the educational section.

There were sublime moments, like the medieval music projected into a grove of trees. My brain filled up rapidly, and by the end it was the work that subverted art world norms and challenged the viewers notions blah blah blah that I most enjoyed.