Again this year I joined the Devonport Swim Club’s Around North Head swim.. 4th time I think.

This is the one where you have the option of swimming out to a boat with your suit (togs in NZ, swimmers in AU) on, stripping off, and retrieving your clothes just before exiting the water. And again, despite keeping my eyes peeled as carefully as any randy teenager, the reality of all that nudity proved way less R-rated than you’d think.

Normally this swim is one of the earliest summer events, but this year it was postponed due to a massive sewage leak. Our new government’s answer to the country’s problems— to everything actually — is to cut taxes for the wealthy, so I guess we’ll see how that translates into billions of public dollars to repair Depression-era infrastructure.

I was extra slow this time due to inconsistent training and a lack of killer instinct in the crowded spots, but I had a good swim anyway. And because I forgot to start my watch, I wasn’t fiddling with it for the finish line pic like I usually am!

Our friend Isabella celebrated a milestone birthday with a big mix of friends and family last weekend. The invite featured a picture of Iris Apfel (who sadly died before the party), so it was game on for bright and big and bold.

Isabella lives busily in several worlds of work and hobbies, old friends and new, family born and built, and she did a wonderful job of bringing them together. She — and we — reveled in the connections and conversations among all these groups. And ate cake.

Happy birthday, and many more!!

On a walk the other day we came across the most elaborate fairy village we’ve seen in our neighborhood…

How fun for that kid or those kids!

We’ve got banana trees at the petanque club, and seemingly overnight they produce these giant stalks of fruit. Then, it takes a really long time for them to ripen. Once ripe, they’re delicious and creamy. But it turns out an unripe banana is not good at all.

We said “until next time” to our Facebook-turned-real-life friends Emily and Brian the other night. They’re off to greener pastures down south. (And as an aside, the Sky Tower was lit up for the P¡nk concert, which apparently was wonderful.)

When we moved from Albuquerque to the middle of Missouri in 1993, we desperately wanted something similar to what these guys are aiming for: some acres, some animals, dark sky at night. I think they are better equipped to succeed in that lifestyle than we were, but even so I think our tastes would have changed.

Now, it’s urban life for us, with a strong emphasis on walkability and convenient access to the things we like to do.

Another late summer weekend, another pétanque tournament. The National Triples tournament started out dry, with the rain falling somewhere else to give us a little rainbow. I partnered again with club mates John T and Christophe.

But the forecast was accurate, and we had a shocking downpour around lunchtime on Saturday. A few hardy souls got out with rakes and shovels to dry out the grounds as much as possible and we resumed.

At one point in the qualifying rounds we were ranked as high as 8th out of the 28 teams, but we lost a game we shouldn’t have and slipped back down.

By the end of pool play we were 17th, top of the third group of 8. We then had quarterfinal, semifinal and finals games against the rest of that group.

We hung on to win the division, which yielded us a tiny little trophy. Given our base skill level, relative lack of experience as a team, and lax practice habits, that was a good result.

One of the highlights for me was to meet this guy, Andre Deramond, who is one of only a few internationally qualified pétanque umpires in this part of the world. He was over from Australia for the week doing some umpire training and helped officiate the tournament. We chatted a bit (any excuse to practice my rusty French!) during the tournament and he even gave me my first yellow card warning. I made a relatively obscure mistake (which didn’t make a difference to the outcome) which he happened to see. He gave me a warning and explained the rule and that would have been the end of it. But the guys on the next lane over saw me getting away with only a warning and put up a joking fuss, so I got the full over-dramatic yellow card treatment. All in good fun… a single yellow card doesn’t carry any penalty. There was much laughing and back-slapping between our team, who are more social players, and the other guys, who take their shot at a national championship a lot more seriously.

Ayup.

That’s the view from somewhere up high in the PWC building where I attended an event the other evening. A magnificent view, although the Deloitte building between them and the water kind of blemishes it. But maybe if you’re a PWC partner you don’t mind looking down on the other guys every day. In fact, maybe you need to look down on the other guys for motivation to get out of your coffin, sharpen your fangs, and tap into the government jugular.

That’s a picture from the same PWC building, looking out the other side. When we first moved here we toured an apartment in that Quay West building. At that point, PWC was just a hole in the ground. The apartment was tiny, but oh the view! Well, not any more.

We have tried a few different modes of living: multiple flavors of suburbia, out in the country, small town. But never downtown high-rise. Maybe one day.

This sailboat (yacht in NZ speak) was beached here at our primary swimming beach for a couple of weeks. Not sure exactly how the skipper managed to do that… there was no weather or other obvious excuse. But however it happened, the keel was well and truly stuck in the sand.

The owner lives aboard. Nothing wrong with that at high tide when the boat was upright. But by low tide (every 12 hours and 25 minutes) the boat was heeled over to about 30 degrees or more and bounced up and down by every little wave… not great for sleeping, or anything else!

The owner is well known in the community and to the authorities: the sort of person referred to as a “colorful character” until he does something that gets him in real trouble. We saw him a couple of times waist deep in the water fooling around with a shovel, but that boat wasn’t going anywhere without a tow. Finally the harbormaster came along and dragged him off the beach.

The whole episode caused all of us swimmers to engage in some good discussion about life choices. Living on a sailboat sounds like the most romantic thing in the world… until something like this happens. We all agreed that — at least at our stage of life — a fixed address was a good thing.

Our local Bunnings home center is now a Hammerbarn to celebrate the cartoon Bluey.

Curmudgeon alert:

I’ve always loved cartoons. I credit cartoons for teaching me a lot of stuff, especially the old Warner Bros ones loaded with references to Hollywood, literature and classical music. The animated short films that would get packaged up for theatrical release in the pre-internet days were mind-blowing! Bullwinkle and Underdog were totally subversive and hilarious. The Simpsons. King of the Hill. Even South Park, although that was about the limit for me.

I tried to watch a few minutes of Bluey, however, and found it utterly content-free. I fear for the younger generation.