Little caviar on cucumber bites, Prosecco, and yacht racing on the iPad.

We had not one but two great Saturday dining treats…

First was Chocola in Glen Innes. We learned about Chocola because we bought a used patio table from its owner a few weeks ago. He is charming and we absolutely had to go try the food. It was amazing! Thick Mexican drinking chocolate, ceviche, tacos, enchiladas… That picture is me, doing my best to “look natural”.

After some more enjoying the day with shopping, driving around, etc., we were parched, and stopped at the Stafford Road Wine Bar. We had a pitcher of white sangria and a cheese plate… magnifique!

A volcano that’s been mostly quarried away. The concrete structure in the foreground is left over from the quarrying.

Now the land is in limbo… the long term plan says it will be turned into a park.

Another day, another volcano. Yesterday an earthquake off of New Caledonia resulted in a tsunami warning for Northern New Zealand. I think there were some small waves and strange currents, but nothing significant. Nonetheless, I took the opportunity to go to the highest point in Auckland for a few minutes, just in case.

On my lunchtime walk yesterday I saw two pieces of litter more interesting than the usual.

First was the top of the package of a kid’s toy… the Pixel Sword! If your enemies are made of pixels then I can see the value of a pixel sword, but in real life? Well of course not… kids use toy weapons to pretend, not to fight. Which led me to the very meta idea that kids today play at acting out video games.

A few minutes later I saw this loveseat that had been left under a highway overpass. It’s been tagged, and the investigative team is on the case. Unlawful trash dump inspector… Now there’s a job I would like to know more about!

Updated 14/2…

Newmarket where I work is hardly the Auckland suburb you think of in association with the phrase “Black Power.” It’s a place where independent fashion designers wrestle against— and try to be noticed by — the big chain stores in the huge fancy new mall. It’s in the prized “Double Grammar Zone”, so aspirational boys and girls can live there and go to Auckland’s most prestigious public schools. It’s on the train line just a stop or two from downtown so a salaryman can take a miserable flat and work too much. Newmarket has parks and high-end retirement complexes and software businesses.

But this plaque with its clenched fist sits just at the entrance to my parking garage, next to a ramshackle fence bordering a vacant lot awaiting its inevitable mid-rise building. I don’t have any idea why or how long it’s been there.

What a bleak picture I snapped. The washed-out sky makes the whole scene look downright gritty, but the adjacent cupcake place and designer sushi bar (nasturtiums! purple rice!) would certainly disagree. If I were in a mood to ponder I would be thinking about the enormous power — and associated responsibility — of the journalists and Instagrammers we rely on to tell us how it is.

There is truth in this picture… that Black Power fist lives in that place. And of course, racism is a problem here like everywhere. But it’s not the whole truth, and it turns out — on this day of acquittal — that matters.

The fourth (fifth? hundredth? augh I’m already overwhelmed) of my 53 volcanoes.

This one’s just a wet hole in the ground, so I had to hike down a long staircase instead of up a grassy trail.

As always, the field guide was full of interesting facts about eruption, the lava flows and so on. But the most interesting fact about this particular volcano is that it is home to the Auckland Water Ski Club… This picture was literally taken from Lee’s office.

I took a lunchtime walk from the office to the top of the inner cone of the Auckland Domain volcano on Tuesday.

The guidebook is full of facts and natural history. More or less the same as all of the other volcano facts and natural history I’ve read so far. Although I’m not too worried about whether my readers find this boring or not, regurgitating too much of this volcano trivia is a bit geeky even for me.

This picture, from atop that inner cone, is of Auckland Hospital, which is where Lee worked when we first got here (actually she was in a separate building down the hill, but all part of the same complex). It was that job that gave us the visa that allowed us to come to New Zealand in the first place. The hospital itself, and behind me the Auckland Museum, are situated on the ring of the outer cone, much larger, which had exploded and settled before the inner explosion happened, creating a little island in a giant crater.

Just to the left of where I was standing when I took the picture is a special tree, special in the sense of being important to Māori culture. It has some carved wooden things around it, and a fence. When I was there, a middle aged Asian man was practicing his trumpet playing right there, blowing directly at the sacred tree.

Two down, 51 to go.

My volcano field guide lists some special points at each site, which is cool. Since this peak was only about a 5-minute hike, it’s important to squeeze in as much meaningfulness as possible.

Among the notable features here at Taurere is a grove of trees that might be descended from some trees mentioned in Māori oral history. A) we didn’t actually seethe trees in the map location, and B) that particular note could perhaps have been a bit more descriptive.

This terrible photo is of a scissor lift, the kind you use to wash a second story window or change lightbulbs in a ballroom chandelier. It was parked outside the other night as we were walking home from somewhere.

This lift is owned by Accessman, who rent out all manner of tall things. I like their phone number, and even more their willingness to stake their whole marketing effort on a gag.

And the Accessman logo is also a reference / gag / pun: an A inside the astrological Mars symbol, used to mean “male” in medical shorthand and by people who focus on gender, pointing straight up.

Well done Accessman, you’re really reaching new heights!

I’ve decided to embark on a quest to visit all of Auckland’s 53 volcanoes this year. I’m already a bit behind, but several of them are easy to walk to from work and several more will be two-fers, adjacent peaks I can bag in a single trip.

I’m guided in all this by a handy field guide to the volcanoes. Lots of interesting facts, and insight into how one goes about studying volcanoes. Spoiler alert: lots of core samples.

My first official volcano visit of the quest (because pics or it didn’t happen) was to Ōhinerau / Mt. Hobson last week. It boasts a couple of reservoirs and was the site of a US Army field hospital during WWII. And nice views…

Sticky toffee pudding was one of the ways Lee got to celebrate last week.

Today we got to go out on workmate Mariie’s boat to see the yacht racing. It’s the Prada Cup, in which the USA, Italy, and the UK are fighting to see who will take on NZ in the Americas Cup in March.

But while almost everything is perfect in New Zealand (sorry, don’t hate me because I’m beautiful), we haven’t yet learned to control the winds. Today’s light, patchy conditions made for poor racing, and especially for Team USA, who got thumped in both races. In the photo, America is on the right heading to the third leg, while the Italians are a full length ahead and in the home stretch.

Despite all that, a bad day on the water is still a damn fine day. We drank Prosecco and ate sandwiches, chatted about anything and everything, and generally had a great time.

I work these days with people who grew up all over the world, but I’m the lone American.

It was a sharp sad bitter feeling to have people from places I’d always considered unstable or poorly governed come up to me and say “so sorry what’s happening in your country.”