That’s not actually my picture, it was taken a couple of years ago by someone else (https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/rare-sighting-of-dolphin-pod-making-a-splash-at-mairangi-bay-beach-auckland/UACFX7IR3G4LUWDL32ZIAHJSCM/). But… on today’s morning swim in almost exactly that same place, we got treated to the treat of a pod of dolphins swimming by! And we were alerted to them by a paddleboarder who was closer than we were… sort of like this… so it’s very representative of what happened to me.

I’ve only been in the water close to dolphins once before, diving in St. Croix. I’ve seen them from boats several times. Each encounter, even as fleeting as today’s was, is mesmerizing.

To the Editor,

I’m writing today to express my frustration and disappointment in the poor quality of products emanating from our Sporting Goods Industry.

Following Auckland’s five weeks of Level 4 lockdown, I was eager to celebrate this morning’s change to Level 3 with a short swim at my local beach. But much to my dismay, when I went to put on my swimming costume and wetsuit, I discovered that the fibres in both garments had contracted due to their being unused for these past weeks. Due to this poor quality, my swimming gear was uncomfortably tight, which negatively affected my enjoyment of a normally beloved actvity.

It’s a terrible commentary on our manufacturers, and these are all name-brand, expensive pieces of kit I hasten to add, that they would use materials prone to shrinkage like this after only a few weeks in storage. And I can see that this is just sloppiness on their part, because while the shrinkage was pronounced around the waist and hips, the wetsuit still fit well in the chest and shoulders… perhaps even a little looser than before lockdown.

As a direct result of the discomfort caused by these manufacturing deficiencies, my pace in the water was also negatively affected. Over a familiar course in benign conditions, I was several minutes slower in this ill-fitting gear than I had been before lockdown.

I ask you, Editor, to launch an investigation into the potentially fraudulent advertising employed by these brands, or at least their failure to disclose the uneven shrinkage of these expensive products when they aren’t constantly used. I myself may be contacting the Consumer Goods Agency to further voice my concerns.

In closing, I heartily support the concerns expressed in your newspaper yesterday by a member of the public who seems to have uncovered a pervasive defect in Bathroom Scales during this same lockdown period when so many of the public are already under stress.

Sincerely,

A Concerned Consumer

For today’s walk we decided to trek all the way down to Onepoto Bridge at the bottom of Onewa Road just before you get on the motorway.

It’s a cool bit of design, bikes and pedestrians only. Check (or Tick as they say here).

This was our longest walk of lockdown and hopefully that record will hold because by next weekend we might be allowed to go to the beach.

We saw several of the occasional themes of this blog…

… mosaic

… manhole cover

… several big lockdown bears including this guy who likely suffers from more than one of the factors contributing to homelessness.

And some other suburban stuff that we don’t usually write about…

The drive-in COVID testing station which had multi-hour waiting lines just a few weeks ago…

… a very relaxed cat

… and a tiny library in an old microwave oven.

14,000+ steps and a stop at the Asian supermarket later, we arrived safely home and haven’t done much since!

The whole “see all the volcanoes this year” quest fell off badly over the winter. Let’s see if I make it.

Here’s Onepoto Basin looking one direction… marshy wetlands, and below looking the other way… big grassy park. It also hosts a pond used for sailing little radio controlled sailboats.

Volcano wise, it exploded about 185,000 years ago. It mostly stayed unflooded until the last Ice Age, and then the surrounding lava wall was breached. The floor was raised and leveled in the 1970s to make the park.

Just because we’re in full lockdown doesn’t mean there can’t be a celebration. We had everything you need for an epic party: a good bottle of bubbly, a cake, and a blowtorch.

Sunday walk to the Northcote Point area. Got our 10,000 steps in before breakfast. We also saw…

Manhole covers. WTF is still the best in town. But today I learned it was the Waitete Foundry… I thought the W was for Waitakere. I’ll have to dig deeper on the Waitete Foundry… there’s definitely material on it to sort through.

A flock of black swans. I always thought ‘black swan’ was the very definition of rarity, but here in NZ they’re all black.

A really massive pohutukawa tree. The picture doesn’t really show how big it was, but that’s me in there for a bit of scale.

Epiphytic ferns on old tree stump. My mom used to love staghorn ferns that she grew in sphagnum moss pockets… they were branchier than these, but same idea I reckon.

We’ve had some big winds this week, and all sorts of crap got blown around. The other morning I detoured off the path to do a little cleanup on the beach at Chelsea Bay.

After last week’s supermarket terrorist attack where the bad guy grabbed a knife off the display and started stabbing people, our local branch pulled all the knives.

I don’t know if that will prevent any crimes, but I hope it makes the employees and customers feel better.

The market chain is reporting a big increase in unhappy incidents during this lockdown. Masks make some people grumpy, and lines to get in , and reduced stock. And lockdown… people are struggling more this time… it doesn’t feel patriotic any more, just hard. We find out on Monday afternoon if we get to relax a little bit.

But fine… all that. Do you have to vent your frustration on a supermarket worker???

This morning, we ventured a little further afield on our walk. We saw a sign for “Fernglen” and decided to see what there was to see.

It turns out that Fernglen Gardens is a beautiful spot down a steep hill from the main road. The first European on the land was a Mr. Fisher who bought the property in the 1880s, and over the years turned it into both his family home and a native plant nursery and garden. Several generations later, the property was sold to the city, which now runs it as a public garden.

Everything is closed during lockdown, of course, but we were able to walk in and take a look around. One of the coolest things was the motion-activated water feature… As soon as you walked onto the property, a sweet little stream and waterfall started to flow.

Lots of the plants were labeled, and it really reinforces just how many native species there are, and how varied they are. Lots of things in flower this time of year.

We left the garden and kept following the road all the way to the end. It went down steeply, about a 13% grade according to the level app on my iPhone, where the road changed its name from Kauri Road to Hebe Place. The hebes turn out to be a genus of native plants… I thought so but had to look it up just to be sure.

We climbed all the way up to the top of Hebe Place… a dead end… and admired the view. There’s a path into the bush that would have taken us back to Fernglen but after last night’s rains we decided to stay on the road.

You don’t need to drive much in Level 4 lockdown. This car has been sitting under a tree so long that some local rapscallions drew a rocket ship in the pollen!

We broke the 75% barrier for the first time since February 2019!

Gee, you’ll say. And you’ll say it in a way that lets me know the depth of your disinterest.

Well, you can be as jaded as you want, but checking Auckland’s dam levels has become a daily sport for me and a surprising number of other people over these last couple of years.

Back in early 2019, we had a drought that included the longest ever recorded stretch of time with no rainfall… over 40 days! Water restrictions were put in place, and there was a pretty intensive PR campaign to encourage people to conserve. But still the reservoirs fell.

Since then, we’ve largely returned to normal rainfall. They’ve also started taking more water directly out of the Waikato river and brought a couple of big wells into production. But even with all that, the reservoirs haven’t gotten up to their normal levels.

But maybe things have finally turned the corner… One or two rainy months now will get us to a really comfortable position for the summer. And thanks to whatever combination of sensors and an API, I’ll be able to track the whole journey in near real time!

The other day I wrote about a shipwreck that occurred 100 years ago. Although that vessel did have a newfangled radio aboard, whatever happened to them happened so suddenly or so catastrophically that they were never able to use it. Not then, and not even today, does anyone know where that ship ended up.

Times have changed. Now there are lots of radios, and lots of satellites, and who knows what other methods of tracking a ship. So I know that the ship pictured above, the Spirit of Shanghai, is heading for the Port of Tauranga and scheduled to arrive in the early hours of September 17.

But why would I care, you might ask? Well, it’s because all our stuff from the USA is on that ship. We’ve done pretty well accumulating a house full of furniture, dishes, clothes, etc. since we’ve been here. But all the stuff that really matters, all the sentimental stuff, is in a container on that ship. Fingers crossed…

Once the ship arrives, our goods have to clear customs, and then they have to go through a biosecurity inspection to make sure we aren’t importing any foreign germs or parasites or anything. Once all that is done, the moving company will grab the container and bring it right to our door, where everything will be unloaded into an empty part of our living room. And after that we can spend the next six months figuring out what to do with it all!

Editor’s Note:

The original title of this post said ‘crazy’ where it now says ‘terrible’. I never believed that this attack was the result of a mental illness. Nor did I intend to stigmatize the mentally ill by using the word crazy that way. I use that word all the time to describe things that don’t make sense, and have done so forever.

But two things have happened this week to make me rethink my choice of words. First, a bunch of people are complaining that the mental health system should have locked up the terrorist even if the criminal system couldn’t. That’s … I would have said crazy … ridiculous. Second, Judith Collins, the (overweight) leader of the opposition party called Siouxsie Wiles, a (overweight) COVID epidemiologist and media star, a ‘big fat hypocrite’ and the whole thing got turned into fat shaming. I don’t think that was Judith’s point or her intention. I think she just meant ‘a really really hypocritical hypocrite’. But still: there is fat shaming in the world and those of us with access to the media should go out of our way to not do that. And there is mental illness shaming in the world and that’s not ok either.

So. Back to the original post…

On Friday afternoon a man well known to the authorities as an ISIS sympathizer walked into his local supermarket (a few miles from me), picked up a knife from the display, and started stabbing people. He was shot dead by undercover police less than a minute later. Three victims still in critical condition.

We don’t know the whole story yet, but it was really something to see the distraught Jacinda Arden speaking to the press a few hours later. Apparently they didn’t have a legal way to keep the guy locked up, or deport him, so he had armed round-the-clock surveillance. Those surveillance agents did the nearly unthinkable yesterday… they heard shouting and ran in and shot a man dead, in the supermarket in broad daylight surrounded by civilians, in a scene that must have seemed possible but impossible while they sat outside his house these last several weeks.

I suppose these stories play out all the time, sometimes with much worse outcomes. In the US, when in-home surveillance isn’t enough, there’s Guantanamo and whatever network of black sites. In Russia, China, North Korea and other places we’re conditioned to be afraid of, we imagine an even bigger network of options for dealing with would-be terrorists and enemies of the state. In the war-torn Middle East and the parts of Africa where government doesn’t really work, I guess there’s a scary guy with a rifle and a machete and jumper cables and bolt cutters. Or a set of tires and a gas can.

But here in NZ, it seems there’s just the PM and the Police Commissioner, shaken but resolute. They’d struck an unsatisfying balance of protecting the scumbag’s rights and protecting public safety, and now they’d seen their plans go badly wrong.

From what we’ve heard, the cops did an amazing job. The gun control laws make me feel safer. And the country’s willingness to keep trying even on somebody who seemed incorrigible gives me hope.

Another lockdown morning, another chance to explore the neighborhood…

We see the Pompallier Cemetery when we drive north for weekend shopping trips. It looks pretty dramatic from the road, old gravesites on a hill. But on foot it was not quite so old, the monuments not so ornate.

Lee found this one and showed it to me. How sad that the mother died, relatively young, just a few years after her son was lost at sea.

Enter Wikipedia. The SS Canastota (it seems to be misspelled on the headstone) is the subject of a fascinating but very long article. I’ll summarize for you…

The Canastota was a bit over 400 feet in length. Built in Scotland in 1907 as the Falls of Orchy, she moved coal and other cargo around for a few years, did a little troop transport during WWI, and was sold and renamed as the Canastota in 1915. She settled into a regular run moving petroleum from America to Australia and New Zealand.

For her last voyage, she was hauling “benzine” or “case-oil”. That’s gasoline to me (and petrol to my Kiwi friends). Since there was no refining capacity in Australia or New Zealand at that time, they had to bring the refined — and more flammable — gas from America on ships. And bulk transport was in its infancy, so most of the trade was in thin-walled 5-gallon cases with tin seams.

These containers sweated and leaked (we didn’t get the jerrycan you still see strapped on the back of Jeeps until stealing the design from the Germans in WWII) . In an enclosed hold the vapors built up… boom! And, and, and… the containers leaked more when they were handled multiple times. The containers in the hold of the Canastota had been handled a lot, because this load of fuel was going back to America due to faulty refining. It had too much sulfur and so was discoloring the metalwork on the Humbers and Archers and Phaetons being driven by Australia’s smart set.

There was a maritime search, although later some said more should have been done. There was an inquiry, although again it was criticized as being somewhere between a rush job and a cover up. The Smith’s Weekly newspaper did a series of sensational stories accusing all kinds of negligence and wrongdoing, calling the ship a “floating bomb”. But the only legal consequence of this ill-conceived journey was a fine of £1 for loading the cargo without a proper permit.

And so Captain Lockie, a Master of 12 years, a dozen white officers, and three times that many Chinese (and one Peruvian) crew were gone without a trace. His mother Mrs Greenshields Lockie died a few years later. Eventually we learned how to ship flammable liquids more safely.

Whew! What a journey our morning walk turned into. Back in time 100 years, around the world many times, across the expansion of the petroleum economy, flying past two World Wars and the desperate crewmen dying in the Tasman Sea, peeking into the halls and back rooms where commerce and justice meet, and finally coming to rest aside the deathbed of a grieving mother … and back in time for tea.

Another week in lockdown…

We got torrential rains earlier in the week. Some neighborhood flooding, homes wrecked. Great for our still-depleted reservoirs. Dramatic skies and rainbows.

Located on Enterprise Street, it makes sense that this building is called Enterprise House. But we think they got their movie franchises wrong: that should be Darth Vader House.

Knockers and manhole covers.

The whole teddy bear in the window thing was so forlorn last year in the first, scarier, lockdown. Now, the Griswolds have emerged… who can have the best bear?