Because of the heat and my own laziness , I’ve spent less time outside than usual in my visit to downtown Phoenix. But what I’ve seen so far is hard to fall in love with.
The streets are too wide, making Salt Lake’s famous team-of-oxen standard seem puny. And empty… even at morning commute time everybody seems to be somewhere else. And the buildings are too big, giant concrete boxes that take up the whole block, often without street-facing shops and windows.
And did I mention it’s hot? Without watering, even the presumably desert-hardy plantings aren’t making it.
I think there are interesting manhole covers still to be found.
I think of the story of the phoenix mostly in terms of rising from the ashes. But I guess it first has to burst into flames and die.
With temperatures in the 40s next week, I will be unusually happy to be (mostly) stuck inside for the HL7 Working Group Meeting in Phoenix next week!
As an aside… I’ve never actually experienced 45 degree temperatures since I started speaking Celsius. But I know it’s really hot thanks to Midnight Oil. Who says all that time spent watching MTV was wasted??
The stereotypical New Zealand hamburger has way too much stuff on it… imagine an American burger with the usual trimmings and add a fried egg, a beet slice, and an odd chutney or two.
But it’s also a land of very very simple sandwiches… as in this example from the take-away cabinet at a cafe we stopped in on the way down to Palmerston North last weekend.
My second year as a member of the Chanticleer Cup team came to a successful conclusion last weekend as the Auckland squad trounced our evil Wellington rivals over two days of fierce pétanque to bring the trophy home.
I felt quite pleased to make the team this year, and I got a lot of good coaching out of it, particularly from a couple of the more experienced players.
Maybe more importantly, I got to know some of my teammates … who will be rivals at the next tournament we all enter… better through all the time we spent training and traveling down to Palmerston North. Having a closer connection to these pétanque friends makes the whole thing more fun.
One could write a much longer story about all the experiences we had, but, well, not that interesting unless you were there. For instance, it was cold down there on the prairie, so some of us warmed the boules in hot water for an hour or so before going out to play. There was some debate over whether that was clever or a sign of softness. Whatever… it felt nice and we won. There must be a dozen more tidbits like that. And of course recounting the action could take as long as doing it in real life… the drama, the close calls! Ken Burns himself couldn’t hope to capture it all in one of his puny 40-hour films.
But regardless of how much I spare you the details, trust me that it was altogether a fun weekend and something I’d probably do again next year… unless I’ve shifted my focus to an even bigger tournament…
On a recent trip to Wellington I found myself at a meeting in a hotel conference room. Hardly surprising… that’s pretty much what I do on work trips. One of the guest speakers gestured out the window behind him and said that his first NZ forebear is buried in the cemetery there. I’m always up for a good graveyard, so the next morning on my constitutional walk I visited the site.
It’s a beautiful spot, just a couple of blocks from Parliament, with a nice brochure from which you can learn about various historical figures. Several of the important colonial figures are buried there, names that are familiar to me because most NZ towns have a street or park or both named after these men.
The story of how the site was cut in half in the 1960s to put in the motorway was interesting, and the commitment of the Wellingtonians to preserve the history of the place was impressive.
It’s probably not on many of the Wellington must-see lists, but the beauty and the (very accessible) history lesson make Bolton Street Cemetery well worth a visit.
For a long time, Lee has had this question: what is it about truffles? We’ve had truffle-infused and truffle-sprinkled things from time to time, but it’s not like you can just sit down and eat a truffle to really understand the flavor of the thing. And to the extent you do taste the truffle in your food, does it actually just taste like dirt?
For answers to these questions, we booked into the truffle hunt and truffle lunch experience by Te Puke Truffles and Kitchen Takeover.
At the truffle farm, about a half hour from Tauranga in the smack dab center of kiwifruit orchard country, we met Maureen and Colin, above, along with Jed the alpha truffle dog, below.
We’ve been on guided foraging walks before, and that’s kind of what we were expecting here… but it wasn’t like that. Instead, the dozen of us guests sat on their back patio for about an hour and a half presentation about the farm, about truffles, dogs, and so on. We got coffee, and a little sample of truffle scrambled eggs, truffle ice cream, truffle butter (smoked and not), truffle honey and truffle salt. It was informative and quietly entertaining… they’ve done this talk a few hundred times and it flowed well.
After that, we got a demo of the younger dog, Sam, practicing his training. Under some of the flower pots is an old film canister with truffle in it, and they lead him around sniffing each one. If he smells truffles, he sits and gets a treat. Going in, I was really expecting something closer to slathering dogs setting out after wild boars, Game of Thrones style, but instead it was this sweet poodle mix clumping about on his leash and sitting down from time to time.
And then on to the main event. We walked through a couple of paddocks, past the sheep, ducks, and beehives. The truffière is about an acre, with 200 oak and hazelnut trees planted in a grid. We had to stay behind the fence lest we contaminate the holy ground.
The trees were inoculated with the magic truffle spore before planting (17 years ago) and the soil heavily amended with lime etc to replicate the conditions most favorable to truffle production. DNA analysis is undertaken regularly. Books have been read, and many farmers and ag experts consulted. But still there’s as much art as science in this… there’s a lot unknown about how to make the magic fruit appear. It took 7-8 years for the first truffles to appear, and each season is quite different.
Jed the dog meandered along for a few minutes and sat down. Could it be, after all the expectation-lowering warnings we’d had due to the ridiculously rainy spring and summer???
Yes! As you know from the picture at the top, they found a smallish truffle and then another. At between $1 and $3 per gram wholesale, even that little harvest represents a good day. But Maureen and Colin made it clear throughout the morning that this is a hobby that helps pay for itself more than a way to make a living.
We dutifully bought three little jars of honey, salt, and butter on the way out. All in all, it was a lovely morning, if a bit less athletic and grubby than I expected. We thought back to our own country living adventures in Fulton, MO, 30 years ago (!!), where we imagined a lamb and raspberry ranch. If we’d stuck with it, maybe we’d have something on the same scale and as pleasant as Te Puke Truffles. But man oh man, what a lot of work they’ve put in. I admire Maureen and Colin’s efforts but am satisfied that farm life wasn’t the path for me.
Next stop, back to Tauranga for the truffle lunch.
The lunch was at Sugo, which was just a block or two away from our hotel in a little dining precinct. We’ve seen the same thing everywhere in NZ… there’s a pedestrianized block or two full of restaurants. It always feels a bit too planned by a civic improvement committee, but I bet the formula works. Every visitor can go there and find dinner.
Anyway… the food was great, very truffley.
Considering it was the end of a holiday weekend, we felt pretty good about only spending about 20-30 minutes in heavy traffic on the way home.
Weekend before last we drove the three or so hours south to Tauranga for an overnight getaway. Above is the boutique hotel we stayed in… the old Post Office building. It was quite nice. We appreciated the mocktails in the beautiful lobby bar as our Dry July experiment continues.
Google recommended this fish n chips place. We were warned of the wait, which made it slightly easier… but still it took a looong time. The food was good, but actually, we’ve never had fish n chips that was any better or worse than any other. One’s perception of fried fish in NZ might be all about the day one is having, I think.
We walked around downtown, sleepy on a Saturday afternoon in winter, even if it was a holiday weekend. Some pics…
And then we had a good Vietnamese dinner that nostalgically reminded us of the surprisingly good Vietnamese restaurant near Bradley Airport that we used to go to sometimes.
But Sunday was the main event… a truffle hunt! Next post.
I got to go to the MedInfo 2023 conference in Sydney the week before last.
After all the rain we’ve had in Auckland, the sparkling blue skies were very welcome. I did get in some good walking around.
The highlight of the trip looks a lot less glamorous in pictures (since I haven’t mastered the exuberant selfie)… seeing a whole bunch of colleagues and colleagues who’ve become friends. But here’s a shot anyway… people I worked with in the Philippines and haven’t seen in person for six or seven years. It was so nice to catch up!!
And one of the conference organizers was just finishing her doctorate at U of Utah when I started there 25 years ago. She now lives in Melbourne… making the world seem small and huge at the same time.
I can’t say I miss traveling for work all the time. But it sure beats 8 hours a day on Teams calls!!
I’m headed home today after a successful week of standards development in New Orleans. I did manage to get morning and evening walks most days, and I ate and drank well all week. No complaints at all.
But the Spanish moss and wrought iron pictures just weren’t happening for me, so I reverted to type and snapped pics of the vibrant and varied access covers. So many!
This one was everywhere A torrent of water metersThe old (left) and the newSomewhere in betweenGas meters often painted yellow My old friend the Neenah FoundrySewer Jones USA Pride. For some reason I’m reminded of Donald’s mental fitness exam a few years ago. In addition to Western Union, there are old Bell System and AT&T covers, as well as newer Cox etc, all representing the communications infrastructure. Best nameThe sewer ones are unadorned Crescent? Central? Cajun? Electric Light and Power CoCompare to the previous one. This must’ve been end of shift, got tired of lining up all the little treads.
So much history, or at least stories, are represented here.
Another May, another HL7 Working Group Meeting. This time we’re in New Orleans, which ranks as one of my favorite venues for this kind of thing. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be here repping NZ and I look forward to the rest of the week.
For all our time together, Lee has impressed on me the importance of NOT moving to Texas. The weather is certainly one of her reasons for that stance.
But you can’t choose where your family lives. So when I have a stop-over chance to visit them in Houston, I take it.
It was hot for sure. But I survived my 40 hours on the ground and got to see the whole clan. And ate a lot, including a delicious dinner at Ninfa’s on Navigation.
Brutalism is a style of architecture… that much I knew already. And when I saw this building in Wellington a few weeks ago, that was the word that jumped into my head. But is that really how to describe this building?
Luckily, I can just dial up the Wikipedia article on brutalism… and so now I can say with more confidence: yes, that’s pretty much what brutalism looks like, although there are more extreme examples. Unfinished concrete, geometric shapes, minimal ornamentation… check, check, check. Brutalism often makes the building’s inner workings more prominent, like having the elevator shafts on the outside or otherwise exposing the building’s intended purpose. I didn’t see that done here, although it will be worth a return trip to look again sometime.
Brutalism has passionate followers even today, but has largely gone out of fashion as being soulless and making you feel like Big Totalitarian Brother is looming over you all the time. Certainly I would hesitate before venturing into National Office with whatever civic problem might bring me there. To quote The Living, an excellent movie I saw this weekend, “in the meantime we’ll just leave your petition here, it’ll do no harm.”
That’s Andres, and he sells the best tacos in New Zealand under the moniker Hot Like A Mexican. I was so glad somebody in our Expats Facebook group posted about this place, just a hole in the wall in Wellington.
I wonder if I would get the friends and family discount here?
Lots of bright lights! And one difference from when I was last here… pot is legal here now, and a LOT of people were enjoying a smoke as they strolled along. I can’t say I enjoy that… although saying so makes me feel old and crotchety.
For this week’s HL7 meeting we’re in Henderson NV, about half an hour from the Las Vegas Strip. That half hour equates to a $60 round trip to do much of anything off the resort. And the resort is mostly shuttered because it’s the deep off-season. So let’s go for a walk…
Those bighorn sheep adorn a roundabout… it’s a helluva roundabout for being basically in the middle of nowhere.
Insert housing development here.
Across the road from the resort is this pretty rushing river. It turns out not to actually be a river, but rather something called the Las Vegas Wash. Go figure. Still, very pleasant spot with pretty trails, lots of birds and desert plants.
The resort tries to channel the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.
These coyotes, who were just exiting the resort proper when I saw them, looked pretty well fed. Later, I saw a manicured lawn teeming with bunnies and quail. That made me think the coyotes have plenty to hunt. But on reflection I’m betting the coyotes eat even better by raiding the dumpsters.
Our group’s planners made a conscious decision to not be on the Strip, and I get that. But being captive on the property may not be an improvement… can’t please everybody, that’s for sure!!
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 