Miraz Jordan

Fascinating 25 minute The Allusionist podcast episode: SOS:

SOS is a really versatile distress call. You … can tap it out in Morse code; you can honk it on a horn; you can signal it with flashes of light; you can spell it out on the beach with debris from your wrecked ship.

🧐 💭 What Chinese Philosophy Teaches us about the Good Life:

The heart of compassion is the sprout of humaneness. The heart of shame is the sprout of propriety. The heart of deference and yielding is the sprout of ritual. The heart of right and wrong is the sprout of wisdom.

Today’s village - beach loop walk added resistance training into the mix, courtesy of winds gusting up to 78 Kph at our place, probably more on the beach. I’ve also been liberally coated in sand. Still, when it wasn’t a head or side wind my speed was slightly higher.

👍: Wellington dogs to swap plastic tags for metal 🐶:

Wellington’s wagging goodbye to plastic registration tags for dogs in a bid to cut down on waste.

… replaced with a single metal tag that should last a dog’s lifetime - … owners will still have to pay fees annually.

Super busy day today. We had 17.5 mm rain: hooray! I’m making progress at line dancing: hooray! Arrangements to launch the new local Little Free Library are falling into place: hooray!

I listened with great interest to Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Confucius the other day then found my way to the free course at edX The Path to Happiness: What Chinese Philosophy Teaches us about the Good Life.

All part of my quest to be an actively decent human being.

The 15 year old dogs have trained me to walk at a slow dawdle, with frequent stops, for max 20 minutes. Today I left them at home and did a brisk 40 minute walk, 3.6 Km round the road to the village and back across the beach. I need to build walking fitness.

We enjoyed watching Uncle Frank 🎬:

Set in the 1970s, Uncle Frank is a road movie about a gay man who confronts his past.

The privately owned lane we live along (with 4 other parties) needs resurfacing. We had a meeting today to discuss the quotes we’ve had and after some discussion all agreed on the middle-range option for the common area we all use. Not so hard…

Soo… we had our first real frost of the year. Mid-May seems a bit early. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Temperature bottomed out around -1.8C. Paddocks next door show the white coating.

Ordered Airtags. After a week or two they were picked up by the courier in China. Nothing, nothing, nothing. 5 days later they’re in Auckland. Probably be with me by noon Monday. Now to find or make a decent case.

Concerned when I watched The Flash S07E09. One of the bad-guys, giving people nightmares, had a fullface tattoo. The original screenshot was way too dark, but with huge overexposure it’s visible. Thing is, it very much resembles Māori tā moko. It’s cultural misappropriation!

Brain-explody: Comparing the world’s most well known locations with NZ’s latitude | WeatherWatch.

(Using latitude co-ordinates only)

• Well known international locations on a map of NZ.

• How close are you to the South Pole and Tropics compared to other well known places?

Already got back the results of my routine blood tests. All good apparently. ✔️

This is an excellent time of year for taking photos of the neighbour’s gorgeous horse.

The farmer next door runs hundreds of cows, and 4 sheep. Sometimes random animals also turn up — one year it was a Kunekune pig. This year it seems to be a deer. It looks fairly young.

I hoped the doctor would remove a small annoying sebaceous cyst for me today, but instead she checked it and made an appointment two weeks away for the removal. Then she sent me for routine blood tests because it’s been a while, apparently. Right next door, and only a brief wait.

Uh oh, I take that back. Now the 2016 MacBook Pro can’t load Amazon.com either…