Representative of my life right now

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Misty morning outside the house.

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jul 21, 2013 at 2:30pm PDT

The post above was the first I shared on Instagram. So much has changed in the seven years since: Three and a bit years later, I’d be in hospital getting a cardiac stent, six months after that, Nigel and I moved to the southern edge of the Manukau Harbour. Six years after this photo, we were a month out from what would be Nigel’s last birthday (I never blogged about Nigel’s birthdays).

Now, the dogs and I are in a new house alone, without Nigel, in a different city than the photo was taken in, and, seven years after I took it, I think that photo’s representative of where I’m at in my life right now: Some things are obvious, some are indistinct, but it’s kind of hard for me to see anything clearly. It’s familiar and strange all at the same time. And the thing I notice the most about it is something I noticed back then, but didn’t pay much attention to: A feeling of aloneness and loneliness. Like I said, it’s representative of where I’m at in my life.
And today it’s cold and raining. Seems appropriate, somehow.

Related: “And another” – my blog post about that photo, published the same day I posted it to Instagram, July 22, 2013. Back then, I didn’t embed the original post as I did above. Like I said, so much has changed.

This is a revised and expanded version of something I posted to my personal Facebook this morning. Among other things, I added links to relevant blog posts.

Papatūānuku is breathing

The video above was posted to Facebook today by Auckland Tourism, Events, and Economic Development (ATEED), an organisation controlled by Auckland Council. In normal times, they promote Auckland as a place to visit, play, and invest, but things are different now, and this video reflects that. It finishes:

“Sit at a distance, stand as one. When the time is right, we welcome you. But for now, listen. Papatūānuku (our earth mother) is breathing.”

They note in their Facebook post that this video doesn’t break any of the lockdown rules—something that’s sadly necessary to point out these days. They said:

• All footage captured prior to lockdown. Voiceover and editing completed at home.
• Bird sound recording source: Department of Conservation. [Link in the original]

A lot of people have been commenting on how much bird song can be heard now, and I’ve also seen people say that some rare birds have reappeared near people. I’ve certainly noticed how quiet things are at the moment, and that’s very welcome.

This lockdown is a struggle for everyone to varying degrees, but the earth itself is having a reprieve, which is good in itself. Maybe when this is over we could try a bit harder and not return to our bad habits. Papatūānuku would appreciate that, and so should we all.

The stormy Christmas

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…then one rainy Christmas Eve… 🎅

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Dec 23, 2018 at 3:59pm PST

Our Christmas this year was wet and stormy, which was a little different than we’ve had in recent years. We still had a brilliant time, but it was definitely wet. And stormy.

The Instagram photo above is of the surface flooding in front of our house around 10am on Christmas Eve, just as we were getting ready to leave to stay with family members for Christmas. The flooding wasn’t as bad as back in August, but it was also only the start. It had been raining all night, and much of that was hard rain. The rest was just pretty steady. That continued in the morning as we got ready to leave. And it didn’t stop all day.

An hour or so after we left, a car hit a power pole on the road we drive along, blocking the road. There’s an alternative route that’s longer, so we were lucky we’d left so much earlier. That accident was probably a good indicator of the mayhem to come.

At the time that car hit that pole, we were moving slowly along the motorway, held up by heavy rain and our abundance of caution. As Nigel put it, we weren’t in a hurry to get there, and we’d rather actually get there.

Once we got to Hamilton, the rains continued virtually without interruption the entire day and evening. The next day—Christmas Day—had long dry spells, and even a bit of sun, but everything was pretty damp, and the air was humid.

Back home, there were multiple lightening strikes in the larger district that cut the power all over the place, including at our house. That was bad timing, to say the least. As the local power company put it on Facebook:

Merry Christmas everyone! We've got multiple outages around the district due to lightning strikes. Our crews are working as quickly and safely as they can to restore power so you can enjoy your Christmas dinner. We can't send crews up the poles while there is lightning around but we are on the job and working to get the power flowing.

Just a reminder to stay well clear of any downed lines and to always treat all lines as live.
Stay safe out there.

We knew about the loss of power because Nigel gets an alert on his phone when there’s a power outage and our computer server has to re-start. Since we weren’t home at the time, and apart from clocks showing the wrong time when we did get home, it wasn’t a big deal for us.

The trip home today was largely uneventful, though we saw surface flooding everywhere. The skies were overcast, but it didn’t rain. But every time we passed shopping area, there were traffic queues.

Boxing Day is New Zealand’s biggest shopping day (roughly equivalent in that respect to Black Friday in the USA). Apparently, people arrived at Sylvia Park, currently New Zealand’s largest shopping mall, at 7:30am to get a car park, and by 8:30 the carparks were “nearly full”.

Then when we got home we saw that the wind had blown some of the trellis at the top of our fence (photo below) into our yard (and yes, I know there are weeds around that rock…). Our neighbour told us a couple of the plants in her garden were knocked over, too. We wondered if there had been a mini-tornado, since we’ve had very strong winds before and that trellis remained intact, and because the trellis appears to be wrapped around itself. We’ll never know the answer, and it doesn’t matter: We just have to fix it.

Despite the weather challenges, we had a really good Christmas, a bit smaller gathering than usual with family members celebrating with their respective parts of the family. But the food and company were awesome, as always, and being together is really the entire point.

Now we’re getting ready to celebrate New Year’s next week—and when I saw “we” I actually mean me, because Nigel and his mum don’t usually stay up until midnight. I always do, of course. But that’s next week.

Right now, this week, we’re back home after an awesome Christmas. I hope yours was awesome, too.

Merry Christmas 2018

It’s Christmas Day here in New Zealand, and, as usual, I’m spending the day with family. That means that I won’t have a chance to write a fresh blog post for the day, so, for a change, I’ve created this one to publish automatically.

As I say every year, I’d like to send holiday greetings to all my whānau, friends, and friends I haven’t made yet. Everyday is what you make it, but that’s especially true for holidays. I won’t waste it, and hope you won’t, either.

Merry Christmas!

I took the photo above in December 2016 at Birkenhead Wharf.

A week of firsts

Last week was a week of firsts for me. All of them were ordinary and relatively unimportant, but for some reason I noticed all of them and the coincidence of them happening in the week.

First, and most importantly, I voted in the US Midterm elections using a system I’d never used before. Unlike previous elections, I printed out the PDFs e-mailed to me, including the ballot, and marked them and posted those back. In all previous elections I’ve used the official stuff posted to me.

Last Week I also went to a new grocery store, the New World in Papakura (the entrance is in the photo above). The truth is, I didn’t even know it existed until last week. I had to go to Papakura, anyway, so I was planning on going to the Countdown there, rather than the one a few minutes farther away in the much busier Takanini—a store I got to from time to time because it’s right next to the pet store/vets where I get Bella’s special food.

Nigel said there was a new New World in Papakura, so I decided to try it. It turns out, it’s a really nice one, better than the only other one I knew about, in Waiuku, which I’ve been to twice (and the second trip made me think I’d judged it too harshly the first time I went there). In fact, it’s good enough that I’ll add it to the list of stores I’ll choose.

Last week was also the first time this season the temperature hit 20 degrees (68F), and it went on to hit 23 (just under 74F). We’re definitely warming up now, which makes sense, since we’re in late Spring, and only a couple weeks from the start of Summer. To me, this is a very good thing, however, I may change my opinion if the summer is really as hot and dry as the weather mavens have predicted.

At the end of the week I was meant to accompany Nigel to the birthday party for the child of one of his work colleagues, who is from India. I’ve never been to an Indian celebration—I’ve been to Māori ones, of course, and Samoan, but not Indian. Sadly, I was behind in my work and couldn’t go, so that first will have to wait for another time.

None of that is out of the ordinary, and mostly it’s stuff that's important to me alone, not necessarily anyone else. But sometimes it’s good to just stop for a minute and note ordinary things that happened for the first time. We all need a break sometimes.

Nice winter day

Beautiful day at Achilles Point. Auckland does beautiful days in winter! #auckland #nzwinter2018

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jun 8, 2018 at 5:46pm PDT

An Australian friend visited us yesterday on his way back home, so we decided to go on a drive around Auckland to show him a few of the sites we like. The photo above is looking back toward the Auckland CBD from Achilles Point, which has a particularly nice viewing platform looking out over the Waitematā Harbour and Hauraki Gulf. The spot it self is named for the HMNZ Achilles, a light cruiser that took place in the Battle of the River Plate in WW2, a battle that led to the defeat and scuttling of the Nazi pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee.

After lunch, we headed over the bridge to the beach at Takapuna (I made a video of a visit there back in 2015). Even though it was a cool day, especially with the lengthening afternoon shadows, the beach was very busy. Part of the reason for that was that Auckland Council built a large children’s playground there a couple years ago, and that was mobbed. It was nice to see how popular it was, even in winter.

Of course “winter” is a relative term. It was a beautiful and sunny day, something that’s actually quite common for Auckland in winter—in fact, some of the prettiest days all year are in winter. I have no idea why that is. Maybe it’s that it rains so much in winter that sunny days seem extra nice. In any case, it was also reasonably warm at 16 degrees (60.8F), though somewhat cooler nearer the water’s edge, where sea breezes were more of a thing.

So, it was a lovely day, and we had a really nice time during our friend’s (too short!) visit. It was in every sense a nice winter day.

Out to lunch

Gardens outside cafe where we had lunch.

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jun 1, 2018 at 7:53pm PDT

Today I was literally out to lunch, and it wasn’t because of my political views, as some people may think. No, it was literally a trip for some lunch on the Saturday of a holiday weekend because, why not?

It was a was a cool (though warmer than it’s been lately…) cloudy winter day, so we decided to go out for a late lunch. We haven’t gone out for lunch in a very long time, actually, mostly because of a lack of time or whatever.

So, out we went, decided on one of our regular places in Karaka, but Nigel noticed signage flags at the corner of the road where St Margaret’s Café is located. We’d been meaning to try it for around the past 14 months, ever since we first heard about it from friends who liked it. But we kept forgetting, not the least because we couldn’t see it from the main road.

Nigel pulled off the road we were on, turned around, and we headed back to the café. It was a good choice.

The café’s style is kind of rustic, in a comfortable home-like way, not kitschy. The food was very nice, and the service was efficient, even thought they were very busy with a large group there with an online voucher for their high tea. It looks like that would a fun afternoon diversion (that requires reservations) in part because high tea is so rare nowadays.

As we left, we took a brief stroll around the gardens adjoining the café, which appears to be used a lot for weddings. The photo above is from that brief walk.

So, a kind of chance thing—noticing the promotional banners, which we could easily have missed—led to a nice meal, a pleasant time, and a new place to add to our list of regular haunts.

Now all we need to do is go out for lunch often enough that we can actually have “regular haunts”.

And this post has an Instagram photo that's not of any of our furbabies, so there's that, too.

Summer things

Quick stop. They have “real fruit ice cream”. Coincidentally. #summernz2017 #lifeinnz

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Dec 27, 2017 at 5:40pm PST

This week was filled with summer things. That happens when the weather cooperates, and it’s especially likely in the days between Christmas and New Year. This week showed that.

The photo above is of a fruit & vege shop at the top of the Bombay Hills (also called “The Bombays”). The hills, which are particularly high, serve as the southern boundary—physical and symbolic—of the Auckland region. People on the rest of New Zealand sometimes claim, not always without justification, that “Aucklanders don’t care about anything south of the Bombays”.

That particular truism is false because so many Aucklanders, in fact, came to the region from “south of the Bombays”. But it’s true insofar as Aucklanders care about their city (sometimes begrudgingly) and sometimes resent it when we don’t seem to get our fair share from central government. In other words, Aucklanders are just like people who live in other regions.

That particular fruit shop isn’t all that great, to be honest, and the “real fruit ice cream” wasn’t as good, was smaller, and was more expensive than one we’d had from a fruit shop closer to our house earlier in the week. But, it was nice enough, I suppose.

That particular day we were taking Nigel’s Mum back home after her Christmas visit with us. We then had an early dinner with family in Hamilton, and left for home, arriving just as the light was fading at around 9pm or so.

The second photo, below, was just a sunny day’s activity. I try to hang up the washing in the summer when it dries quickly and completely. I can—and do—hang the washing out year round, but in winter (or near to it on either side) it doesn’t dry completely. So summer and it’s drying is always a good thing—and saves us money on electricity, of course.

And these are just ordinary, everyday sorts of things in my summer in Auckland. Sometimes I like ordinary summer things best.

Great day to hang the washing out. Think of it as our solar-powered clothes dryer. Which is why I have my hat and sunnies on (as I always do when I’m out in the sun...) #sunsmartkiwi #lifeinnz #nzsummer2017 #auckland

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Dec 28, 2017 at 5:18pm PST

Merry Christmas 2017

It’s Christmas Day here in New Zealand, and I’ll be spending the day with family. That means that I probably won’t have any time for a fresh blog post today—not that that’s any different from usual these days.

Be that as it may, I’d like to send holiday greetings to all my whānau, friends, and friends I haven’t made yet. Everyday is what you make it, but that’s especially true for holidays. I won’t waste it, and hope you won’t, either.

I took the photo above last year at Birkenhead Wharf.

Merry Christmas!

Explaining that photo project

The thing about social media photo challenges, is that they come with rules. Sure, rules are meant to be broken sometimes, but unless there’s a good reason to do so, it makes more sense to play along. It’s part of the challenge. Even then, there can be ways around the rules, and this post is an example of that.

Recently, I took part in a photo challenge: “7 days, 7 black and white photos of your life, no people, no explanation.” Leaving the photos unexplained was part of the challenge for me and anyone seeing the photos. Sure, the main question could be “why did he choose that?!”, but there’s also the much simpler, “where/what is that?”. This post will answer that last question for each photo.

Starting in the upper right corner is Day One (links for each day are to the blog posts about each photo): That grid-like pattern is shadows on the carpet, as may be obvious. It’s the shadow of the vertical blinds hanging in front of one of the doors in the lounge that lead out to our deck (we’re not keeping the vertical blinds, but don’t have a better alternative yet). It was not, however, the photo I was going to use. That photo is at the bottom of this post (and in colour). I didn’t use it because I was under the mistaken notion that the photos were supposed to be inanimate objects. As soon as I posted my first photo, I saw someone else taking part in the challenge had posted a photo of their furbaby. Doh! It’s too bad because I liked the photo of Sunny’s paw much better, but one of my own rules was the photo I posted had to be taken that same day, so I couldn't use it another day.

Day Two, left most photo in the middle row: This is of tomato and capsicum seedlings in our kitchen window. I almost posted a comment about them because I was concerned a botanically-challenged viewer might think the tomato plants were something illegal, but I realised that would be an explanation, so I said nothing. Until now.

Day Three: This is from our deck, and I’ve posted similar photos before, but this one struck me because a storm was moving in and there was a weird mix of light—the last gasps of sunlight as the clouds thickened, the different light hitting the clouds over the harbour, all that. I just liked it. Apparently, others did, too, because as I’m writing this that photo got more Instagram likes than any other photo in the series.

Day Four: This photo came about because of an unexpected opportunity. As the geo tag in the original post said, it was at Smith & Caughey’s upmarket department store in central Auckland. The photo’s actually of the back of the store on Elliott Street (its main facades are on Queen Street and Wellesley Street). The Elliott Street side looks very urban to me—a bit New York, Chicago, etc. It’s a heritage listed building built in 1929, though it looks much older (the company itself was first established in the 1880s). It was unexpected because Nigel had a meeting in the CBD and asked me if I wanted to come along for an hour or so, and I knew I’d have a photo opportunity or two, so I went, and this photo was my favourite of the options I saw walking around for most of that time. This was my second most-liked photo.

Day Five: This is a welcome sign on the road leading into the area where we live. Nothing special to report about that, except I actually was in the car with the dogs on my way back from picking up the package with the flag poles and flags that the courier had delivered to their local agent rather than us (long story). I stopped, shot some photos, and continued on home.

Day Six: One of two least-liked photos, this is our letterbox. This one bugs me because, due to glare, I didn’t notice how I could have framed the photo better. Oh, well.

Day Seven: This is a shot of grapefruit lying on the ground under the tree in our yard. This will amount to a memorial, since we’re going to cut down that tree: I can’t eat grapefruit, none of the people we know who can eat it actually like grapefruit, so it’s taking up room we could use for a fruit tree we’d actually like (we’re thinking maybe a lime tree, since limes are expensive to buy; we already have a lemon tree). These grapefruit are a particularly cruel variety because the skin is bright orange, so they look like they could be nice—and they’re just not. They’re grapefruit. This was the other least-liked photo.

Since I mentioned it, here’s the relative popularity of the various photos at the moment, from most to least liked: 1. Day 3 From our deck, 2. Day 4 (Smith & Caughey’s), 3. Day 2 Seedlings in our kitchen window, 4. Day 5 Welcome sign, 5. Day 1 Shadows on the carpet (I bet the one I wanted to post would have been more popular…), 6. Day 7 Grapefruit, 7. Letterbox. I have no idea what the relative popularity of the photos means, if anything, except that I agree with the two most popular photos (I like those two the most, too). The thing about statistics, social media likes, etc., is that it’s difficult to draw any guidance from them, which is a shame if the goal is getting more eyes seeing the stuff we post.

So, that’s what those photos are of, and a bit about what I liked about them. However, I haven’t said why I chose those particular photos rather than any others I shot the same day (apart from the one below that I didn’t used because of a misunderstanding). I didn't talk about that one aspect because there are probably some things that should remain a mystery.

That photo that could have been first—and probably more popular than what was first.

Visiting the Manukau again

I shared a photo of these same steps several months ago when there was a storm. Today the Manukau Harbour was like glass. Brilliant day! #manukauharbour #auckland #lifeinnz #newzealand 🌞

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Aug 23, 2017 at 7:26pm PDT

One of the things that moving closer to the Manukau Harbour should have brought is more frequent trips to the shore, but that hasn’t happened. It turns out that there are a lot of things to do when moving from one house to another, a lot of projects to complete. Who could have guessed that?! Today, that changed a little bit.

My mother-in-law is visiting us, and today after lunch we swung by the harbour’s edge and I took some photos. The first one I shared to Instagram is above. The earlier photo I was referring to in the photo caption was back in February, and it was a very different harbour that day. I shared more of today’s photos in an Instagram montage (below).

We’ve had rain nearly every day all winter long, but we’ve had four sunny days in a row—a welcome change. Today was pretty much dead calm—the harbour was like glass. It was pretty much the exact opposite of my visit last February, which is entirely accidental (I had no idea how nice the views of the harbour were until we arrived).

In the months ahead—especially as the weather gets better—I’m going to take more photos of the harbour, and at different areas, as well as some of the countryside. Maybe other stuff, too. Naturally, I’ll share most of them here, or you can follow me on Instagram.

In any case, I look forward to sharing more about my home.

More photos at the edge of the Manukau Harbour. FOUR sunny days in a row!! 😯 #lifeinnz #manukauharbour #auckland

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Aug 23, 2017 at 7:38pm PDT

Arthur’s day out

In Auckland's CBD today, so I stopped in the old Civic Administration Building that used to be an office building for Auckland Council and Auckland City before that. It's being converted into apartments as part of redevelopment of the area around the building. A helpful and friendly person filled me in and gave me a massive sales brochure. Looks like it will be awesome when it's done, and will bring life to the area 24/7 which will be great for the Aotea Square area. #auckland #aoteasqaure

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jul 11, 2017 at 4:12pm PDT

Today I had an impromptu time in Auckland’s CBD. By that I mean that it wasn’t planned at all, but it turned out to be a good adventure, one too long delayed. And, there are tales to tell.

Nigel had a meeting in the CBD after which he was coming back home, so he invited me to go with him and have a wander around the central city, then we’d have lunch and go home. It’s probably been a couple years since I did that, so it seemed like a good idea.

The traffic into the central city was quite good today, and we got there before 9am, much earlier than we’d expected. A lot of shops weren’t open yet, so I went for a walk down Queen Street, then back up, and then all around. There’s a tale that goes with that, which I’ll talk about in a different post [UPDATE: That other post is now published].

I had two places I wanted to visit. The first of those was the Farmer’s store in the former Whitcoulls building (I posted a photo of the former store in a post from November, 2009). I wanted to see how they’d re-done it, and, to be brutally honest, I didn’t think much of it. Whitcoulls had become rather shabby by the end, and had few books (most of their stores now focus far more on craft supplies, some office supplies, some gift-y stuff, and with only a few books), and I don’t think that Farmer’s really did very much. Sure, it looks better than at the end of the time that Whitcoulls was in it, but it was nothing special. And the men’s clothing section was a joke.

Interestingly, there’s a passage way off the second level/first floor called “Little High Street”, which has a few shopfronts on it, some empty. One of the occupied shops was a Whitcoulls, which, while tiny, ironically seemed to have more books in it than the former big store had at the end.

The other place I wanted to see is in the photo at the top of this post: The CAB in what they’re calling “the Civic Quarter”, though it’s adjacent to Aotea Square. It’s the residential redevelopment of an old Auckland local government office building. The work hasn’t begun yet, so the “model apartment” is on the ground floor and a kind of a mock-up, but they had large versions of the floor plans on display and very friendly staff, even when it was clear I wasn’t a potential buyer. By my count, they’d sold 32 apartments so far, which means they must be closing in on the halfway point. It looks like it'll be a great place when it's all done.

As I walked out of Aotea Square, I stopped and took a photo of the temporary skating rink there:

And, while I was still at Aotea Square in the CBD, I had a peek at the ice rink set up in Aotea Square. I'm not stupid, so I certainly did't use it (I never learned to skate, and I've also never had a broken bone -- coincidence?). This is winter in Auckland -- and a nice diversion for parents to take the kids to during school holidays. #auckland #aoteasquare #aoteasquareicerink

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jul 11, 2017 at 4:38pm PDT

It certainly seemed cold enough for ice skating today, though in fact the truly cold temperatures in our current winter storm are hitting tonight. I went somewhere to warm up and wait for Nigel to finish his meeting.

Next, we had lunch at a teppanyaki place in the “Sky World Indoor Entertainment Centre” in Queen Street on the edge of Aotea Square. in Queen Street on the edge of Aotea Square. The centre used to be called “SkyCity Metro” (it’s partly in photos in a post from 2010, but it’s been redeveloped a bit. Lunch was awesome:

And now lunch... at EN Teppanyaki. #aoteasquare #auckland

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jul 11, 2017 at 5:20pm PDT

After that, we went home, arriving back here in the early afternoon. It’s true that I didn’t get done the things I'd planned, but I had a good day and got some bonus time with Nigel. I count today as a definite win.

Missing city

Good Morning, Auckland --wherever you are! Somewhere in all that fog is the Manukau Harbour & the airport and CBD beyond. There's been a LOT of fog recently. Ah, winter... #lifeinnz #lifeinauckland #franklindistrict #manukauharbour #fog #aucklandwinter #wheredidmycitygo

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jun 29, 2017 at 2:17pm PDT

It’s been foggy on many recent mornings, and while that’s not necessarily unusual for winter in Auckland, it does seem to have been a bit more common this year than most. Still, the phenomenon can often be pretty localised, and it's possible we’re just in an area getting it more than others. Maybe we’re just lucky.

I posted the photo above to Instagram this morning, and the graininess was mainly because the camera had trouble focusing with so much mistiness around. The photo below is of basically the same area (I think…) as shown in the photo at the top of my post from last March—when it was much warmer, nicer, and not foggy in the morning.

When I got up this morning, it was around 6 (42.8F). By midday, it had only managed to climb to 11 (51.8F), and because it was still foggy, it felt much colder than it really was—probably due to all the foggy dampness, I suppose. But, that’s just winter, something that will be going on for another couple months—and July, which we’re about to start, is often the coldest and most wintry of the lot. Yippee.

Still, there’s something kind of magically mysterious about thick fog, the way it changes everything familiar into things that are not. The only similar thing I’ve experienced has been heavy snowfall on an otherwise bright day. I’d rather have fog than snow.

Like everything else, this fog, and winter, will pass. That’s good. It’s too hard to take decent photos on a foggy day.

Winter wonderland

Good Morning, Franklin! Cold, foggy start to the day here in the southernmost reaches of Auckland. This is winter -- certainly much better than where I grew up! #auckland #winter #lifeinnz

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jun 11, 2017 at 1:55pm PDT

Winter days in Auckland can be some of the best of the year: Clear, sunny days with brilliant light and fresh air. But skies don’t have to be cloudless to be brilliant: Clouds can also be brilliant. But good weather or bad, Auckland’s winter is always better than what I experienced in my native Illinois, and that’s a good thing all on its own.

Early this morning, it was a bit cold, with fog. But unlike the pervasive fog we can get in winter, it was more like a cloud had come in for a landing, lying close to the ground.

As the sun rose, the fog lifted, but it made it a prettier day. I took the photo above from our deck mainly because I thought the clouds and shadows were nice. But it was actually my second photo of the morning.

I took the photo below first, after I’d looked out and saw drops on the clothesline in the light of the rising sun. I thought it was pretty and decided to go take a photo. I then looked over, saw the scene in the photo above, and went up onto the deck to take that photo. I decided it was a better photo for Instagram, and that’s why I posted it instead.

A nice start to the day, sure, but the real story behind this photo is that it was all actually at the end of my day.

I’d been up all night working, finishing around 7am this morning. That’s something that doesn’t happen very often fortunately—I’m not as able to cope with all-nighters as I could when I was half my age—but this month it did happen, and I survived. I needed to stay up a little longer to take my medication, so I was awake (and, apparently, aware enough) to take these photos.

Photo opportunities aside, the best thing from my perspective is that our winter mornings don’t have snow, rarely have frosts (and not severe ones when they do happen), and never get anywhere near as cold as I experienced in Illinois. That probably makes it easier for me to appreciate the beauty of Auckland’s winter days, whether subtle or obvious. These days I’m also likely to have my phone—and its camera—with me.

That’s the story of how these photos came to be, and also of what a nice winter morning we had today—what I saw of it.

Any sky can be pretty

Lovely sky on a pleasant autumn evening at Shepherds Park in Beach Haven. Auckland is a great place to live. 🙂

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Apr 17, 2017 at 10:29pm PDT

Any sky can be pretty. It depends on the interaction of light and water vapour, clouds in particular, the angle of the sun, time of day and year—and both the observer and the mood they’re in at the time. The sky just IS—whether it’s pretty or not is really up to us.

I took the photo up top yesterday evening at Shepherds Park in Beach Haven, on Auckland’s North Shore. I had a meeting there, was a bit early, and sat down to just enjoy the nice autumn evening. Then I looked up.

The photo's what I saw, though it doesn’t really do the scene justice (the colours were more vivid). Still, I didn’t use any filters nor adjust it either in Photoshop nor using Instagram’s basic editing. It’s pretty much exactly as I took it, which is actually true of all the photos I post to Instagram.

So many people mock or complain about the banality of photos shared on social media, but I’m not one of them. I’m always interested in what has caught the eye of people I know. That includes food photos, too (some of the folks I know produce amazing food porn…).

I suppose this attitude is sort of a variant of Arthur’s Law: I like what I like (and share whatever I want to), and I don’t really care whether anyone else likes it or not. After all, I may not like what others like or share, either. Honestly, life’s just too short to get all worked up about what other people choose to share on social media.

Actually, these days I prefer seeing people share photos of clouds and meals rather than some of the endless political things against Don. I never thought I’d get to the point where I—ME!—would get sick of politics, but there it is.

I haven’t felt like commenting on US politics, obviously, I guess, and I frankly don’t think that’s likely to change any time soon. Maybe that’s a topic in itself. Maybe not.

So, yeah, the sky just is—whether it’s pretty or not is really up to us. Like so many things.

Anyway, that’s how I look at it now. Maybe clouds got in my way.

City of Sails – and farms

One of the things about Auckland that many people don’t know, or know well enough, is that most of Auckland is actually rural or semi-rural. Auckland is New Zealand’s largest city, home to a quarter of the nation’s population, the centre of business and commerce, and yet much of its area is actually basically rural.

The Auckland Plan puts this well:

Most of Auckland is rural. Our large rural areas host diverse economies and activities, and include stunning landscapes and coastal areas: the West Coast; Hunua and Waitākere ranges; the Kaipara, Manukau, Mahurangi and Whangateau harbours; Gulf Islands; and numerous regional parks. Here rural people make their living and urban Aucklanders can connect with nature. There is enormous variety in terrain, land uses and settlement patterns across 384,000 hectares of land, which comprise over 70% of Auckland’s landmass, and are contained by over 3,700 km of coastline. These areas are integral to Auckland’s unique character, and vital to its economy and its people.

As that passage suggests, different parts of rural Auckland have different characteristics. The southernmost parts of Auckland, south of the Manukau Harbour, are often farmland, sometimes used for dairy or sheep, but also for market gardens, which are relatively small farms growing cash crops, chiefly vegetables and fruits. I heard on the news the other day that most of New Zealand’s land that’s suitable for such crop farming is in the area south of Auckland, and yet that same area is under great pressure for new housing as the rising price of housing in Auckland is pushing people farther and farther out.

This is a legitimate concern, and Auckland Council—and also central government in Wellington—will have to be careful to preserve productive farmland, even as they open more land for housing. It’s a delegate balance to achieve, but it’s important.

In the meantime, it would be kind of nice if more people—including more New Zealanders—understood how rural Auckland’s land area actually is. It’s kind of interesting in itself, but if people in other parts of New Zealand understood that, they might be less hostile to helping Auckland solve the many problems caused by the city’s explosive growth.

In the meantime, it’s fun exploring more of the rural Auckland, and I’ll be talking more about that.

The photo above is of farmland visible from the new AmeriNZ World Headquarters. That bare earth will soon be a new housing development, with a mix of various types and sizes of homes. This is a prime example of the issue.

Another harbour

The Manukau Harbour was a bit choppy today. It was very windy, and even at high tide it's relatively shallow there, so it makes sense. I can imagine what an actual storm would be like! I was running an errand, but glad I stopped for a photo. #auckland #manukauharbour

A photo posted by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Feb 12, 2017 at 7:03pm PST

The photo above is of the Manukau Harbour in Auckland, taken today. Most of the photos of the New Zealand seashore that I’ve shared, either on this blog or on Instagram, have been of the Waitematā Harbour. Many people call that “Auckland Harbour”, but the reality is that Auckland is built on an isthmus between two harbours—the Waitematā and the Manukau.

Well, it used to be that way, and that means it’s high time I diversified my photos.

Since the creation of Auckland Council in 2010, Auckland now meets another harbour—the Kaipara, one of the world’s largest harbours—in the northwest. There’s also the Firth of Thames in the southeast of the Council area. The Firth of Thames is a bay at the southern end of the Hauraki Gulf, which the Waitematā Harbour is also part of. The Hauraki Gulf, meanwhile, opens to the Pacific Ocean.

Despite all these options, I’ve only ever posted one photo of anything in the region other than the Waitematā Harbour, and that was a photo of the northern end of the Manukau more than a decade ago on my friend Jason’s last full day visiting New Zealand. The photo above was taken at almost the exact opposite side of the harbour.

The Manukau Harbour is fairly shallow, apart from its main channel, and at low tide the mudflats extend out quite some distance. The Kaipara Harbour is even shallower, with nearly half of it mudflats at low tide. Both are some drive from where we live at the moment, and we lived near the Firth of Thames before I had a blog and before social media was invented. So, I just haven’t had many opportunities to take or share photos. As I start to get around the outer reaches of Auckland a bit more, though, I’ll share more photos. Today is just the start of that.

All of this is actually spurred on by my using Instagram more frequently: I want to share nice photos, and since my Instagram account is set to “public”, I want the photos I share to be both generally interesting and also not too personal. The result is that I’m sharing more of my Auckland and New Zealand. Then, I talk about the photo in more detail here on the blog. Seems like a good arrangement so far.

The photo below was taken at the same spot, but turning to my right. The rock in the water (to the left of the tree) is completely dry at low tide, and there’s a small beach the other side of the grass (which is what the steps in the photo above lead to). Both photos make it look like an ocean beach, but the opening to the ocean is a long way away. The effect is the result of strong winds driving shallow water.

And these photos show yet another reason why I love Auckland so much: There are so many different worlds to see.

All hands on deck

Today's mission: Get the deck stained. Delayed by all the crappy weather we've had this year (and by gout), it's now kinda urgent. Will I finish the project? 😶 #chores #lifeinnz

A photo posted by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Feb 5, 2017 at 12:05pm PST

This weekend had one job on the list: Re-staining the deck outside our house. We’d had it washed recently, and due to delays in that caused by weather, it wasn’t possible to get the job done. This weekend, we did.

Last weekend I painted the retaining wall next to our deck, but I couldn’t start work on the deck itself because the washing wasn’t finished. Because of further delays, that wasn’t completed until Friday, two or three days later than planned.

At the same time, on Friday evening my current gout attack took a sudden and severe turn, so much so I went to be early and I had trouble sleeping. Had I been bale to sleep soundly that night, I’d have had more than nine hours of sleep when I got up—but in reality, it was maybe seven. I took Saturday off to rest and recover.

Sunday was more promising, but, even after extra sleep again, I was still tired, and still wasn't walking all that well. I took Sunday off, too.

Monday was the Waitangi Day public holiday, and the last chance to get it all done. I went out in the morning and scrubbed a couple spots on the deck that the guy had missed—underneath a couple planters that he apparently thought were heavy because they look like stone (they’re actually fibreglass), plus under the trunk of a tree that bent low over the deck in one area.

While that dried, we went off to run a couple errands and to have an early lunch. We got back just past noon, and were ready to begin, only to realise that the person at the Mitre 10 Mega had sold us the wrong deck stain—even though we showed her a photo of what we wanted and questioned her when it was came a metal can, not a plastic pail. So, while Nigel went to exchange those for the right ones, I started the cutting in with the leftover stain from last time.

He returned, after going to two stores to get the stain, and I continued on with the cutting-in while he started the mopping part. As it happens, Monday was also probably the hottest day of summer at our house: 32 degrees or so (about 90F) on our deck, which, since it was where we were, was all that mattered. The sun was also very intense.

Fortunately, by then the sun was already moving behind some trees and large parts of the deck were in the shade. There was only one part of the deck that was really hot and uncomfortable, since it gets full sun most of the later afternoon.

And yes we were sunsmart: We wore SPF 50+ sunscreen and hats.

Nigel’s sister stopped by and helped us finish up at the end of the afternoon, and we were done by about ten to six. It was still hot then, and Nigel and I were exhausted. We were both asleep by about 8:30 or so that night.

Because I went to bed so early, I got plenty of sleep, so I didn’t feel too tired today—a little sore, maybe, but not bad. The work also hadn’t caused a new flare-up of the gout attack—but, then, that’s what I thought last week at this point, too.

This morning, the deck was still pretty sticky, but the day was warm and the sun came out around midday, so it continued to dry. But last time it was sticky for a couple days, too.

And, despite all that, there are areas of the deck that will need a second coat, mostly because the guy who washed the deck reduced some it to bare wood due the build-up of moss, mould, and such. Maybe this coming weekend, weather permitting.

Even so, the deck looks much better than it did before we started, and it all has protection from the weather now. It’s just that for the sake of appearance it needs some more stain.

And that’s how I spent my holiday this weekend—doing chores, just like last week’s public holiday. It's just what happens when you have to look after a house.

The next public holiday isn’t until Easter Weekend in April. That’s a four-day holiday weekend, of course, but one in which I will NOT plan any big projects. Right now, I feel like I’ve done enough for this decade year.

The photo up top is in the morning, before I washed the parts of the deck. The photo at the very bottom of the post is self-explanatory, except my back was in the sun at that point. But here are two more of the project, each captioned with an explanation:

Detail of the work: before, left, and after, right. I painted the retaining wall last week.

The squarish area in the middle of this photo is where the spa pool was while we pained it's usual spot.

Bella wanted to closely watch me doing the cutting-in. I had to move her along. She wasn't amused. #chores #lifeinnz

A photo posted by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Feb 5, 2017 at 11:37pm PST

A slinking visitor

Walked outside to get rid of a weed & saw this little fella on the deck, just hanging out. I know a LOT of people who have these tiny visitors, but I haven't seen one around here before. 😀 #lifeinnz #auckland #aucklandnorthshore #northshoreaucklandnz

A photo posted by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Jan 23, 2017 at 3:59pm PST

The Instagram photo above is of a small visitor to our deck: A skink. New Zealand only has two kinds of lizards, geckos and skinks, so it’s not that surprising that I hadn’t seen one before. So, it was special and kind of fun.

New Zealand has several native species of skinks, and an introduced species from Australia called the "Plague Skink". I wasn’t able to work out which species visited us, and it may even have been a juvenile, which would have made it harder to identify. I don’t know enough about reptiles to even hazard a guess, let alone identify the visitor correctly.

I’m glad that New Zealand’s reptile population does NOT include snakes—I hate snakes. But it would be nice if the skinks visited every now and then. But, then, clearly there’s a first time for everything.