This framed hole in the wall is over one of the urinals at the Lumsden Pub. Be sure to zoom in and read the caption!

Newmarket sunset last month

We knew there was sort of a soft spot in the floor of my office. What we didn’t know until we had a builder in was just how precarious it was. Turns that there’s tile under the carpet, except in the spot where the old wood-burning stove used to live.

Over the years, water must have run down the chimney and rotted the floor and the beams underneath.

All fixed now!

5:30 AM in the airport lounge… Starting my new job today with a 3-day orientation trip to Wellington.

On the one hand, I haven’t missed business travel all that much. But on the other… there’s worse things than a nice buffet breakfast and a few minutes of breathing in the carefully curated aroma of money and power.

Before and after photos of our new back steps, part of the work we’re having done around the place.

That’s me and a couple dozen of my now former colleagues posing with Peter the t-rex at my leaving party last Tuesday. Peter is hanging around the Auckland Museum for a few months and made a fitting mascot for the end of my HealthLink era.

After a week of RnR, I’ll be joining the NZ Ministry of Health where I’ll help design and implement a new National Immunisation Solution… sounds impressive! And hopefully it will be.

Although the time was probably right for a change, the story here is one we’ve become all too familiar with… a recruiter found me on LinkedIn and made an attractive offer. But even before we got down to details, I was sold after reading the job description… it’s like it was written just for me. Very excited!

My first official duty? Get on a plane to Wellington for a 3-day orientation. Koru Club, here I come!

Everyone involved in this picture is exactly as close to the hot tub as they want to be. I’m in it of course, and Misty is able to doze (meditate?), keep tabs on us, or spring up to chase a bird, all without fear of getting splashed.

When we are in the tub at night, Misty often sits with her back to us, as if guarding the perimeter.

No Toto, it’s not Pasadena, frozen in time like you remember it from the 1980s, but I can sure understand why you might think so.

These whale tail sculptures have been scattered around Auckland the past few months. Each is decorated by a local artist, and each has a story.

(I will say in passing that until this exhibit, a whale tail in my mind was something that occasionally appears below a tramp stamp. But clearly the world – or at least Auckland – has moved on from such puerile and sexist thinking.)

They follow a similar campaign of owls a few years ago, and it’s all modeled after the famous Cowparade idea. At the end of the exhibition period, there was an auction, and civic-minded bidders could plump down a few grand for some worthy cause, keeping the piece for permanent display.

If only Captain Ahab had had ApplePay and a pickup truck… things would have been much easier for him, not to mention millions of 11th graders.

I’m not surprised that this set of shot glasses ended up in the thrift store. I tried to imagine the scene …

“Sweet cheeks, I just know in my soul that you are gonna go fetch me and the boys some more of that Jäegermeister cuz you sure don’t want your lover man drinkin and drivin. Now that’s what I call marital harmony. Ain’t that right boys.”

Here’s that kingfisher I missed the other day, preserved for all to see on a utility box.

Just seconds before I took this picture there was a very nice kingfisher or kōtare sitting on that piling. Need to be quicker!

The wind and tide were in our favour today, so the Round North Head swim was fast! Although I swam off course at one or two points and performed badly compared to others in my group, I still beat last year’s time by about 6 minutes so I’ll take that. Almost as fast as I’d been in a wetsuit.

And I most definitely wasn’t in a wetsuit, as this is the swim with the “freedom division”. You swim out to a boat, take off your togs, carry on in the buff, meet the boat at the end, and exit the water in perfect modesty. The water was clearer than last time, but even so the scenery wasn’t as stimulating as you might expect. I have a feeling that might be true of many au naturel events… most of us probably look at least as sexy in our clothes as out.

Our Bay2Bay swim club was well represented, particularly in the freedom division. As a mark of always being your true self, Jono on the far right (fresh off his epic Poor Knights swim a few weeks ago) told us he couldn’t stay for coffee after winning the nude division… because it’s his wedding day. There was much discussion as to what his fiancée really thought about him racing today… but we all agreed that she wouldn’t be with Jono if she had a problem with him wearing what he wants and swimming a lot.

Our local shopping centre is making a real effort all of a sudden, and that’s a good thing. We want our little piece of Auckland to stay busy and vibrant.

Their latest promotion went like this: spend $20 anywhere else in the mall and get a $10 voucher for the dollar store. We each got surprisingly good chair massages that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, and then trundled over to Chocka Bucket (saying something is “chocka” or “chocker” to mean full up is a common thing here). So, the promotion worked… the mall businesses got more money.

But what to buy? It’s not quite fair to say everything at Chocka Bucket is cheap Chinese crap… but almost. Their wares span the range of things you might find at a Wal-Mart, only less choice, poorer quality/condition. We ended up with a bunch of little things including those pictured above.

And then comes the political/ethical question. The Chinese juggernaut rolls slowly outward, recently engulfing the Solomon Islands with a new military agreement. Should I be taking some stand against Sino-hegemony?

And more nuanced: is there a difference between the box cutter, which is what it is, and the other items which blatantly rip off Western IP? If it hadn’t been “free” I wouldn’t have touched it… but of course it wasn’t actually free and I did touch. What allegiance do I owe to Gillette and Kiwi, and the specific flavour of capitalism they represent?

Now I may look better with my smooth chin and my shiny shoes… but how will I feel?