This hanging crystal and I arrived in Lee’s life at the very same birthday/housewarming party. Now, over 30 years later, it’s hanging in its 10th sunny window. I’m so grateful that we are still enjoying its tiny rainbows together!!
The Johnnies and the Mehmets
This is a memorial to the Auckland Regiment, on the edge of the cricket playing area in the middle of the Auckland Domain.
On the back of the memorial, with Auckland Hospital in the background, there’s a lovely quote from Ataturk about how all the dead boys buried at Gallipoli are the same, whether Johnny or Mehmet.
September showers bring…
You can tell that I’ve manipulated the colors in this wisteria picture. They’re not really this purple. But they make such a vivid impression that I wanted to convey, so I added drama…
This tree, on the other hand, really is as yellow as this.
These flowers are really common landscaping plants. You can’t quite tell from the picture how large this tree is. It has 4-5 main trunks, growing out quite horizontally, and each one is the size of a normal “big tree.”
I’ll take a kilo of kumara…
And a tiny little bit of representation.
Neither of the two big parties won a majority in Saturday’s election, so now the wheeling and dealing is underway to form a coalition government.
The King Under the Mountain
The “mountain fountain” sits outside the Holy Trinity Cathedral at the top of our street.
It was cool to get a peek inside the other day while maintenance was underway.
Sky Tower
As part of my birthday week, we went up in the Sky Tower. Our dinner plans were foiled by their stupid online reservation system, but it was a nice consolation prize to do the 53rd-level observation tower thing.
Home, work, and most of our daily / weekly routine is somewhere in this next shot…
Reprises
Here’s an assortment of pictures from the past couple of weeks that follow up on previous posts. With New Zealand being an almost entirely cashless society, my opportunities to find money in the street have gone down dramatically. In fact, I haven’t found a single penny since arriving here, although Lee found a $5 bill the other morning. Still, there are plenty of things to keep an eye out for as I walk around…
Dead umbrellas:
A cute little car… actually a Daihatsu Copen, which turns out to be a Kei-car:
And another utility box:
Pub Quiz
Pub quiz is a thing here, and being American definitely helps… there are plenty of pop culture and current events type questions that are more obscure for a Kiwi than for us. My work team has a hard time getting enough people together, but last week we had a good turnout thanks to a couple of spouses and an ex-employee. We managed to come second, leading right up until the last round when another team nailed 12 out of 12 Māori place names. Sheesh.
The whole phenomenon of NZ pub quiz got a big boost a few years ago thanks to a locally produced TV show called Nothing Trivial, a sort of Friends / Thirtysomething all set around a pub quiz team. We have binged our way through all three seasons, and were really sad to watch the final episode last night.
Two hours of sunshine
We got a little break in the otherwise rainy weekend to start taming the jungle. I think I might fall a bit in love with container gardening and a no-freeze climate.
And PS – that big silver planter in the middle is a reclaimed washing machine tub. We are actually the Beverly Hillbillies.
Ethnic Eats
We have experience with only two NZ workplaces, so maybe this is representative or maybe not. But, both have surprisingly well-equipped kitchens. Which is cool, so hopefully it is representative.
At my office, we have a monthly cooking club called Ethnic Eats… each member cooks every 3 or 4 months and we share and it all works out great. Last month, it was “spicy for winter” and my enchilada casserole was a big hit. This month, the theme was “mum food,” as in the food your mum used to make. As it happened, all the cooks this month were Indian (which is the modal software developer here as I think everywhere). So, biryani, dhal, etc., and a lively discussion about the details of Indian cuisine… saying “Indian cuisine” at all is apparently a giant lumping together of things that are actually quite different.
It’s a jungle out there
Our patio was a blank canvas crying out for some decoration. Luckily, we’ve discovered the local equivalent of Craigslist, actually a hybrid of Craigslist and EBay, called TradeMe.
After some nervous bidding, we won a mixed lot of pots and plants. Our little jungle was helpfully delivered by a guy called Ian, who luckily avails of a truck (a “ute” in the local dialect) and trailer. He’s friends with the seller, who it turns out is moving back to Germany and so her plants needed a new home.
We have many happy gardening weekends ahead….
What phone box???
Just in time for spring and the rose garden down the street to start blooming, the utility box in front of our building got a cool new look.
Our house is the middle one in the picture, with the low planters in front of the gate.
One pill makes you larger
I’ve now been to a few meetings at the Parnell community centre, which for most of its life was the NZ Institute for the Blind.
The door handles in this room are still baffling. Short of being confined to a mechanic’s creeper, there’s just nobody who needs the doors this low, as demonstrated by my colleague Alex.
If it’s not ready in a weekend, you’re too old
I had a blast volunteering as a mentor and pitch coach at the Summer of Tech hackathon last weekend.
About 50 students split into eight teams and spent the whole weekend building web or mobile apps. The rules were pretty simple… basically you could do anything as long as you used a New Zealand data set somehow. Coming as I do from a world of big server software that takes multiple years to build and a whole team to maintain, these little apps were all the more impressive, partly a testament to the kids’ skills, and partly a demonstration of how far the Internet ecosystem has matured.
I showed up on Sunday afternoon to help them with the 5-minute speeches / demos they had to give to win the big prize. More importantly for me and my business, I got to meet some of the talent who will likely be applying for jobs with us in the near future. So, my volunteer effort wasn’t entirely altruistic.
The kids were great, and I learned as much as I taught. I found myself channeling the Voice coaches…. I didn’t really try to tweak the bullets on the slides, but I did talk a lot about passion, connection, meaning. You’ve got five minutes, and you’re an engineering student… perhaps not a native English speaker. How can we make people love you and love your app?
Most of my advice was taken to heart, which was unexpectedly rewarding, and the best teams won, which was reassuring, and I got a nice bottle of wine and a T-shirt.
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 