So many updates

Sorry about the delay in posting.  A combination of being too busy, and having many many photos I wanted to add to a post, but my computer’s been playing up again (I’m about to give up and pay someone to fix it properly, because my “wiggle a few wires and hope” fix keeps failing) and…

Cat on a cold tin roof

Amazingly, the sun actually came out over the weekend, and the forecast for Thursday and Friday is now just “drizzle at time”, rather than rain.  Drizzle at times I can handle.  Drizzle at times means just ducking under the shelter of the marquee for a few minutes until the sun comes out again.  Drizzle at…

Dratted Debbie

After doing a pretty good job of trashing Queensland and the North Island, Cyclone Debbie reached us last night. This far south, it’s not a proper cyclone, just a lot of rain and a bit of wind, but it’s still been pretty miserable weather. The Press this morning was saying we’d get an entire month’s…

Bitten by an Australian

I’ve always suspected being social is a dangerous thing.  I proved it on Tuesday night, when, waving to my neighbour as we always do when I happen to arrive home while she’s in her front yard, I thought I’d actually stop and say hello for a change.  As I was talking to her, I leant…

Two for the price of one

Typical, you go for weeks without a blog post, and then two come along at once!  This one is because I spent the afternoon out at Tai Tapu with Lytteltonwitch, at a sculpture exhibition, and took very many photos, so I thought I’d better get them edited and posted before they get added to the…

Scrappy bits

So much for my good intentions of regularly posting to my blog – that seems to have fallen by the wayside a bit!  Partly because I’ve been busy (last week I went to Toastmasters on Tuesday night, my craft group on Thursday night, and a union Rainbow Te Kahukura function on Friday night.  And this…

22nd

Today was the sixth anniversary of the 22 February earthquake.  The big event for the day was the unveiling of the new memorial wall, much discussed and debated over the last few years.  We needed a blog post for CEISMIC, so I offered to go to the ceremony and write up my impressions.  I won’t…

Rain!

The good news is, it started raining yesterday (I’ve never heard so many people saying “Yay, it’s raining!” instead of “Ugh, it’s raining”). The bad news is, it’s the wrong sort of rain. It’s just been a light drizzle – not enough to put the fires out, but enough to hamper visibility so that the…

Since my last post…

In just the few hours since I posted, the fires have got worse.  They’re evacuating some of the hill suburbs, and the smoke is coming from a huge swath across the hills now – I was just at a function on the 6th floor of another campus building, which has an unimpeded view across the…

The hills are burning

A couple of days ago, two scrub fires broke out in the Port Hills.  Since then, despite the best efforts of fire fighters (and the death of a helicopter pilot who had been one of many dumping water from monsoon buckets) the fires have continued to spread, and the cloud of smoke over the hills…