At Tawapou farm in Tutukaka where we’re enjoying a couple nights with Tom and Isabella. Honeybees hanging out on the hive in an attempt to keep the interior cool is known as ‘bearding’.

It’s not really that hot, but I suppose in the direct sun it gets stuffy in there.

This sign was recently installed, and turns out to be A Thing, the latest and largest work by artist Martin Creed…

It has felt a little weird to be renting at this stage in our lives… grownups own their homes, don’t they? And besides, we like looking at houses, and moving, decorating, etc. We should buy. Or should we?

We’ve mostly gotten over the initial sticker shock we felt at Auckland housing prices. Economists will say the market is overvalued, but that doesn’t change the facts on the ground: you gotta pay a lot for a house here.

So this spring we’ve been looking at more open houses, including the apartment in the picture, which is literally across the street from us. It wasn’t right, but on another outing we did for the first time find a place that was both (kind of) in our budget and livable. It had a good layout, enough room, enough privacy, not too far from work… and the price is lower due to a steep driveway… but that’s something we’ve dealt with before, in places with actual snow and ice. Should we make a bid???

Luckily, cool heads prevailed. We put all our MBA powers to work and calculated how much we “throw away” in rent vs how much we would be throwing away in mortgage interest, the cost of selling if we had to do that, and everything else we could think of. Given that we still don’t really know how long we’ll be here, what that overvalued market will do in 5 or 10 or more years, etc., it didn’t actually make quantitative sense. If it were only a few hundred thousand less.

But oh the temptation…

No matter how scary a time you’re going through, and no matter if your imaginary friend is a campy Hitler or a walleyed old Jedi, you will suffer great loss (e.g., your mother, your best friend, and your innocence) but someone is even worse off than you, and somehow you will get through it.

Oh, and government leaders are evil.

Nothing says Sunday afternoon like margaritas on the porch.

Last weekend we went to see King Lear at the Pop-up Globe theater. This particular show was actually the class project of the various youth training courses the theater does, and one of my swim buddies’ daughter was in it.

The players ranged from middle schoolers trying to get out out of gym class right up to over-18s trying to make a career out of acting. In order to give everybody a go, they switched actors frequently, so each part was done by multiple actors of various ages… and genders. Awesome idea for the parents, utterly incomprehensible for us.

The weather was unsettled that night, so at first we couldn’t tell if we were hearing real thunder or the kids on stage crew… but when it just kept on thundering, we knew. It’s impossible to not just keep shaking that big sheet of metal. And although the Kiwi accent lends itself to the Bard’s iambs quite readily, the natural limitations of an unamplified theater, the ‘thunder’, and the kids’ developing pipes conspired against us… we might as well have been watching a play in Farsi.

We bailed at intermission.

The theater itself, supposedly a fairly accurate representation of the original Globe, was awesome, and it would be great to go back and see a production where we could hear/understand more clearly.

The pohutukawa tree is one of the best things about living in Auckland. In the spring, the new leaves come in almost white, followed by even whiter buds… all the snow we’ll see. Then the red bottlebrush flowers come out in time for Christmas.

But if there’s a windstorm…

We went for a walk down around Hobson’s Bay today and came across a whole bunch of old shards of glass and pottery. I reckon they got dislodged by the construction of the new staircase. People have probably been tossing their junk over that cliff since there have been people in the area.

If you dig through yesterday’s garbage it’s a combination of sad and creepy, but 100-year old garbage is somehow okay. And 1000-year old garbage is archaeology!

Or at least that’s how it felt this morning…

New Zealand has lots of fabulous native plants and a strong culture of preserving that natural biodiversity. But there are wonderful plants that grew up elsewhere, such as the jacaranda tree, and I’m glad they haven’t been voted off the island.

Ok, no candle. And no actual bell, nor the book you were probably expecting (how does a Unitarian child even absorb religious phrases like ‘bell book and candle‘? Well, it turns out to have been a movie, and other things, so not so surprising).

The bellbird – pictured here by prolific utility box muralist Paul X Walsh – is a New Zealand native, with a wonderfully loud call. I’ve never seen one, but their vocal cousins the tuis all over and a great part of what makes life here just that little bit different.

That’s Highwic, home to the Buckland family from the 1860s to the 1950s, now owned by the City and open for tours. It sits just up the hill from the office, and I often walk its grounds on lunch hour or when I’m stuck on a long conference call. But I’d never actually taken the tour. So Lee came and met me for lunch and we did the whole visit.

The front door has a lovely knocker.

After a thorough introduction from the docent , we were free to wander the restored and decorated rooms. The Bucklands were well to do, working in the cattle business mostly, with a bit of land dealing on the side. So, their standard of living was pretty good, but not royal. Most of the furniture on display was not original to the house, but donated later by various “Friends of…” type groups.

All very nice.

The property once covered 10 acres with views right out to the water, but only about 1.5 are preserved. And now it’s hemmed in on three sides by the gargantuan new Westfield mall. Sad.