Our second marine mammal sighting! This time it was a pair of dolphins lazing around. You can just make out a dorsal fin in the lower right.
Very exciting as an idea… I’m in my living room looking at dolphins for heaven’s sake! But the actuality is less dramatic. Over let’s say 15 minutes of arms getting more tired of holding the binoculars, we saw maybe 20 glimpses, none lasting more than a second or so. They did not leap out of the water or dance on their tails even once.
Near the top of the to-buy list is a spotting scope that will let us see more detail and hook up the phone to get better pictures… stay tuned.
One of our fellow pétanque players makes his living as a semi-itinerant arborist. He’s in town at the moment so we hired him for a day’s work clearing jungle. Money well spent.
In several of our homes I’ve felt a need to start things off by taming the green growing things. In Missouri it was the trees growing on the dam to our little lake. In hindsight that was probably a mistake… it looked worse without them and probably didn’t perform any better. Here in our Birkenhead house we had exuberant English ivy taking over a fence. The initial hacking back was a few weekends of work, but then it was much more under control in subsequent years.
Now, we have a steep slope down to the water. At some point, previous owners put in paths and plants and even an irrigation system. But it’s all completely overgrown and more or less impassable. Gordon the arborist made a big dent in opening things back up, but it remains to be seen how much we’ll actually get down there.
Caffe Latte art (or I guess flat white art as it is served here in NZ … although I challenge ANYONE to tell me the difference) is a wonderful thing. Most cafes do at least a little something to finish off your cuppa. Brings me a smile every time.
But is it so simple? Or is this really a subliminal attempt by the deep state of musical theatre to sell records from the back catalog???
We’re watching you, Sir Tim Rice and Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber!
… when there’s a perfectly good chase scene in a movie or show and suddenly they turn the corner and there’s a marching band?
Well, I’ve now experienced it in real life. Minding my own business in between sessions on a work-adjacent trip to the Capitol this week, I turned a corner and there’s the Falun Dafa crowd, holding their own parade, with a big marching band and anti-CCP banners and all the rest.
I don’t have a clue about the actual issues in their long feud. The Falun Dafa people look sort of dimly harmless doing their exercises, so if they really are being tortured and enslaved and having their organs harvested, that should stop!
Normally there’s plenty of rain in Wellington, somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 inches a year. So water hasn’t been something to worry about… they don’t even have water meters.
But last summer was dry, and people had to start conserving a little bit. For someone who grew up in Southern California, the water restrictions imposed on Wellingtonians were laughably easy to comply with, but the whole thing made them very upset.
It came to light that something like a quarter of all their water was being lost to leaks. And that without a substantial increase in local taxes, there’s no way those leaks are getting fixed this decade. It’s never been a problem so they just kind of let things get a bit out of hand.
I’d never noticed the many leaks before, but you know what? They’re everywhere down there!
There’s more political context… one of the divisive issues in the last election was the Labour Party trying to a do a big, difficult, expensive thing to make water infrastructure better and more fair. They lost bigly to the National Party who said, Nah, let’s just cut taxes and the infrastructure will sort itself out.
So, the rains came back, and the people sorta forgot / gave up, and the water still gushes out of holes in the pipes.
I wish there was a happy ending here, or some way to not see this story as exactly what’s going on with lots of big expensive difficult issues we face as a society.
Our last house had a huge wall of built-in bookcases in the family room, thanks to the previous owner’s record collecting habit. That gave us the freedom to display a bunch of things in a way that didn’t overwhelm the living space.
Over the years we’ve accumulated a lot of such items. Souvenirs, knick-knacks, tchotchkes: the words we use to talk about them are all a little bit denigrating.
Now we have a smaller version of the same shelving setup, so choices have to be made. We laid everything out and sorted into three piles: display, store, and donate. I suppose the full Kondo approach would have been even more severe, but we have storage space and years of retirement stretching ahead of us. The more draconian cull will come later in life.
A few boxes of our stuff made it to the Salvation Army. And seeing our things there offers perspective: the memories may be priceless and unique and helped shape us into who are we today, but the souvenir wineglass is $2.
The very first box in the new house. We spent the last weekend in June moving various fragile and awkward things ourselves so the movers could whoosh through on Monday.
We filled up a truck AND a cargo van.
It took a few days to start really cooking.
Somehow, all this eventually fit into the closets.
We’re all moved in to our new house. Well, almost… there’s still pictures to hang and some things to organize. But for everyday activities, we’re here, and we know where our stuff is.
It’s been mostly a full time job, going hard the first week of unpacking and slowing down gradually. I think we can pretty much say that moving is done and normal puttering is beginning. Today, for example, we triaged our pictures, and I put some of those little rubber bumpers inside cabinet doors… why the previous owners didn’t do that is baffling!
The silver lining in the cloud of unemployment has been that I’ve had the time to do all this settling in. But that can’t last forever, and next week I’m back on a plane for a networking event that has taken on new importance.
Matariki is the Māori name for the cluster of stars that rises in midwinter and for many Māori heralds the start of the new year. In Japanese, this constellation asterism is known as Subaru, and I learned it as the Seven Sisters or the Pleiades. It was already too light when I took this picture, but the stars in question are over there somewhere.
Matariki is also the newest public holiday in the NZ calendar, and we celebrated it this year on Friday the 28th of June.
I don’t know a lot about the cultural practices associated with Matariki, other than the vague idea that you’re supposed to reflect on the old year, flush out the bad stuff, and then look ahead to the new year refreshed and invigorated. Fair enough, that seems like a good plan!
I did my bit for marking the annual change this year. I finished my job the day before (thanks for nothing, National Party government). And after I had a bracing sunrise swim, we hauled the first carload of stuff over to the new house… one down, quite a few to go!
The big moving truck comes on Monday. The job search starts in earnest on Tuesday.
Happy New Year! Manawatia a Matariki! Bring it on!
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 