The fence on the south side of our new house has been finished. 🏡
There will eventually be one on the east side too (there's already one on the north) but not while the land behind is not yet even for sale.
It's an optical illusion that the fence appears to take a turn in front of the house.
A friend came up by train from Wellington to meet me at Paekakairiki for brunch. Then we walked beside the sea for a bit in the sunshine and fresh air. That was very pleasant.
Brilliant comic from Tom Gauld on grammatical voices for use in scientific writing | New Scientist:
ACTIVE VOICE e. g. Our team collected samples and then we tested them.
PASSIVE VOICE e.g. Samples were collected and tested.
PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE VOICE e. g. We did all the collecting and testing. No need to thank us. Just doing our job.
CLICKBAIT VOICE e.g. We collected some samples... You won't believe what happened next!
HAIKU VOICE e. g. Quiet science lab. Workers arrive with samples. The testing begins.
CONSPIRACY VOICE e.g. Mysterious "samples" were harvested and covertly "tested" by so-called scientists.
Seems it's fungus season. This basket fungus is past its best.
For this morning's dawn beach walk I entered by a different track, then paused to take in the sweep of coast.
With only a few weeks until we leave for northern parts I wanted an aide-memoire.
There was a degree of friction for me while reading this book. It was partly slightly awkward language, partly somewhat off-putting characters. It was OK, but I may not read more by this author. Bitter Roots: Police Procedural Mysteries by C. J. Carmichael. 📚
Dispatcher Zak Waller prefers working behind the scenes in the Sheriff’s Office , but when the Sheriff is quick to pin the death on an unknown outsider, Zak starts his own sleuthing.
I've enjoyed others in this series but this one just didn't gel for me. Shee McQueen: Bloodlines (The Shee McQueen Mystery Thriller Series Book 9) by Amy Vansant. 📚
An invitation to an elite tactical training retreat unleashes a torrent of family secrets for Shee McQueen and her band of Loggerhead mercenaries.
It may be my current unsettled mood, but this fits into a genre of books, shows, movies I call "Running Around" — probably technically known as adventure or something. Good and bad guys meet somehow, end up chasing / avoiding one another in various locations until someone wins.
I generated a random date and looked in my photos. I came up with this picture from March 2018 of Sasha the dog and Ares the cat side by side on a walk. 🐶 🐈
Deb and I drove to Wellington to clean out her office — books and bookshelves, cushions, paintings, pot plants and the like.
On the way though we stopped at Kowhai in Ōtaki for a delicious brunch. I had fried eggs and halloumi on ciabatta, and a small hot chocolate.
All very yummy.
It was probably someone on Micro.Blog who linked through to this, but now I want to encourage others to get the free or paid Fix The News newsletter. If you're sick of doomscrolling, find out about the good stuff going on in the world instead:
Each week, we find 30-40 stories of progress from around the world, and summarise and share them in our email newsletter.
An enormous loss when we move will be the (lack of) views. 🏡
Here we look over paddocks or greenery to the hills, or barely visible neighbours. Every window has a view.
In the new place there will be a 1.8 metre wooden fence only a short distance away.
Joss Fong and Adam Cole do such a fabulous job in their Howtown videos. Love this one about Quetzalcoatlus — You're telling me this thing could fly?:
Quetzalcoatlus, one of the largest known flying animals, survives in science as sixteen wing bones pulled from Cretaceous Big Bend
Good news at Waikawa Beach — At-risk Waikawa Beach footbridge to be replaced | The Post (paywall):
It was recommended the bridge be replaced after a recent structural assessment.
The bridge provided the only pedestrian access to the northern part of the beach and was used by residents, dog walkers and council staff doing environmental work.
At Wednesday’s council meeting, councillors voted to pay for a new suspension bridge, which could carry 20 people and would last for 50 years.
It would cost $450,000, as well as $80,000 for consenting costs and $50,000 for dismantling the old bridge.
I'm enjoying this series and the wit sometimes makes me laugh out loud.
Between my daughter Franny and the Mel and Al duet, I’d been lectured so often on the effects of fat on women my age that I did most of my fat consumption in private these days.
Five Degrees of Murder (The Cat Caliban Mysteries Book 5) by D.B. Borton. 📚
Nothing but ash remains of the victim. Can Cat Caliban solve the case before more lives go up in smoke?
The painters have been at work inside our new build at Ruakākā. 🏡 This photo from the builder puzzled me until I worked out the painters have stood up some internal doors in the main living area, presumably to make painting easier.
Meanwhile our designer sent me this photo of a worker starting to erect the fence on the south side.
The lot next door is on the market too.
I was feeling very blah and 'untethered' this morning so took a brisk 5 Km beach walk at dawn:
- morning light and walking by water lift mood
- exercise is grounding and movement shakes off low feelings
- exercise is good for health
- fresh air
- I met and chatted with a couple of people I really like.
I had no idea there was a women-only labour camp in Nazi Germany! This was a very interesting ~30 minute listen. Lynne Olson - resistance at Ravensbrück | RNZ:
Lynne Olson's new book The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück tells of defiance in a notorious women-only Nazi concentration camp.
Already well-practiced in sabotaging the Nazis in occupied France, this tight-knit group of French women joined forces in the camp to defy their German captors and keep one another alive, including staging a music show to keep spirits up.
The archaeological research (PDF) I was looking at the other day reveals that around 150 years ago:
The 1887 electoral roll lists 69 voters in the Ruakākā area, 36 of whom were gum diggers. Gumdigging was one of the principal late nineteenth century and early twentieth century occupations in the area. The activity was focussed inland on areas between Marsden Point, One Tree Point and Ruakākā, a landscape of swamp and old consolidated sand dunes where great kauri forests had once grown.
Research ahead of big projects adds to the store of our local knowledge
One of the great things about Meridian building a huge solar farm very close to our new house in Ruakākā is that first all kinds of investigations take place.
That's how I came to know that all the birds listed below have been observed within a radius of about 5 Km of our house. 🐦
As well as matuku, a number of other Threatened and At-Risk species of birds have been recorded within the Proposal site, namely, spotless crake/pūweto, dabchick/weweia, brown teal/pateke, banded rail/moho pereru, pied shag/karuhiruhi, little shag/kawaupaka, little black shag/kawau tui and pipit/pihoihoi as well as South Island pied oystercatcher/torea and Northern New Zealand dotterel/tuturiwhatu.
The white dot on the map below showing where various birds were spotted is 2 Km in a straight line from our house.
I'm specially excited that Bitterns | Matuku are in the area.
I also love the special engineering provision to help prevent cars and bittern colliding as the birds fly to a nearby location:
A 2.0 m earth bund and vegetation planted on top will ensure birds flying directly from the wetland will have sufficient height to avoid the road corridor as they will need to gain elevation to pass over the vegetated bund.
First visit to Wellington in a while and everything's so quiet — almost certainly related to this awful government hacking back civil servants, services, everything really.
I'm waiting in the Library for Deb to finish a dental procedure next door. How can anyone concentrate in these environments?