Category Archives: Wellington

Pohara welcomes us with tears

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The view from our place to the sea – missing the sea because of the mist and rain

After weeks of glorious weather the day we arrive in Pohara the rain started. Well in truth, the rain started in Nelson and followed us over the Takaka Hill. The hill is a challenging drive in fine weather but with a mix of rain and mist it becomes doubly exciting – particularly as the traffic includes numerous camper vans and cars towing boats. It’s only the raw power of the mighty Falcon ute that means we can keep up a decent pace.

We arrived at “our place” for the next few days with light rain falling. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain I recall that, according to Maori mythology, rain is seen as tears of the gods which is good luck.

Hopefully good luck that brings fewer tears and more sun over the next few days.

On the road again

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Pohara at sunset

For the next week or so we are on the road – heading south for a traditional kiwi Christmas break. A few days with relatives in Nelson and then on to Pohara, a small seaside village  nestled at the base of Golden Bay, at the top of the South Island.

There is a whole mix of friends and relatives descending on Pohara – by my rough count 5 rellies, 12 friends, Jean, me and Poppie. That’s 14 adults, 5 children and one dog. Nothing more to do than relax, eat and drink. It should be a great few days.

Wellington sunset

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Dusk from our verandah

Sunday was a cracker in Wellington – warm and sunny and everything you could want from a summers day. And with an end to the day that was deserving of a round of applause.

(As taken from our verandah.)

Council workman humour

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Road Builder Humor

This photo was not a set-up. I was driving into town today and around 200 metres from home I passed some road works. When the lovely men from the city council do this type of work they forewarn the residents and ask them to park their cars outside the work zone. In almost all cases the residents comply. When they don’t …

Warning – gratuitous dog shot

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Today I was playing with Poppie the dog on the study floor. I just happened to have my camera and a wide-angle lens with me at the time.

After about 5 minutes and 50 photos we both ran out of steam. Well I ran out of steam, Poppie just got bored and wandered off. But somewhere in the middle of those 50 shots was one I really liked.

Sorry, it’s another gratuitous dog shot.

It’s Hobbit premiere time

Gallery

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This gallery contains 15 photos.

Today Wellington will come to a standstill for the world premiere of Peter Jackson’s movie The Hobbit. There will be stars, screaming fans, air kisses and autograph signings by the thousand. This morning I had a meeting in that part … Continue reading →

Wellington’s wonderful waterfront

Gallery

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This gallery contains 24 photos.

One afternoon last week I took a walk along Wellington’s waterfront. It was a glorious day and it seemed like most of Wellington was out to enjoy it. When I say I walked along the waterfront, in actual fact, I … Continue reading →

Partial Eclipse of the Sun

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Today at 10:47am everything around our place went a little dark. The culprit was a partial eclipse of the sun – where the moon gets between the sun and the earth and we see the sun partially obscured. It was a little eerie as a beautiful sunny Wellington morning regressed to post dawn light and the temperature turned chilly.

To me it was the ideal opportunity to try solar photography. So my tripod, laptop and camera were set up in the front yard to capture the event.

Now we all know it’s not a good idea to look directly at the sun. Well it’s an even worse idea to look at the sun – even one partly obscured – through a camera eyepiece when a 300mm zoom lense is strapped on the front.

In fact, almost 6 hours later, I still seem to have a mysterious spot of intense white light obscuring part of my vision.

But, good news, I actually got a shot or two and after a wee bit of Photoshop correction it’s a fair representation of the event – nothing spectacular, but up close an eclipse is, fundamentally, just an eclipse.

Having said that, I probably could have simply generated the same thing in Photoshop and saved myself the temporary blindness.

For those who are into the detail, this shot was taken at ISO 100, f32, 1/8000 of  a second.

In defence of photo albums

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An early casualty of the digital photo revolution was the traditional photo album. During our stay in the UK and Italy last year I took 4,626 photos. Of that vast number exactly none have been printed out.

They are all stored on my iMac, and on two back up drives that sit humming away next to it. If we want to show people the photos we gather around  the television and run a slide show with commentary provided by Jean and I as our guest’s eyes slowly glaze over.

We have lost the tactile fun that is a photo album – and we were reminded of this when my brother and his wife visited last weekend. They had just returned from a trip to Texas and the East Coast of the USA. Upon returning, brother Geoff had taken the memory card from his camera to the local photo printing place and returned with 6×4 glossies. All of which are now in photo albums.

Going through them was a pleasure. All of us huddled around the albums as they were passed around. Fingers pointing at certain shots and describing the situation that went before or after. Turning pages to connect one shot with another. We spent an hour going through them and didn’t realise where the time went.

So here’s the thing. If you’ve got all your photographs sitting on hard drives or CDs of DVDs, go non-digital and print off an album or two. I intend to.

Tui on a wire

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Five years ago we had never seen a Tui in our back yard. We thought of them as birds of the bush or forest, certainly not visitors to our suburban home.

These New Zealand native birds have a distinctive white ruffle under their chin and a call which is a mix of ringing bells, clicks, whirrs and buzzes – with the sound of someone gargling mixed in for good measure.

About 3 years ago Tui just started to appear around the house and now their annual arrival is a mark of spring and the arrival of the warmer weather.

Their resurgence in numbers has been quite significant and is due, in no small part, to a successful breeding programme at our local wildlife reserve.

Nice.

The book of the blog

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I started writing this post as an endorsement of a fantastic service for turning your blog posts into a book – Feedfabrik.com. But I’ve just learnt that, due to problems between the partners, they have stopped taking orders, their website is offline, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon.

I first used Feedfabrik last year to produce a simple black and white book of the first 100 toscanakiwi posts which we had delivered to our cottage in Tuscany. We carefully carried it around Europe on our travels and it’s sitting, slightly battered and beaten up, in the bookcase next to me.

A month ago I ordered two volumes of blog posts (about 200 posts in all) hard bound on high quality paper and in full colour because they produce the pictures that go with blog posts as well as the writing. The books arrived last week and they look absolutely stunning.

It is a real shame that others won’t be able to make use of this excellent service in the foreseeable future.

Our thanks to the team at Feedfabrik.com. We love your work and hope that you’ll be back soon.

You hum it, I’ll play it

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In the last few days Wellington has been plagued by an outbreak of humming. Not your run-of-the-mill, can’t remember the words humming but rather humming on a city-wide scale. As our local newspaper put it on Tuesday:

Mysterious hum reported in Mt Victoria

A mysterious low-pitched humming sound has been troubling some Wellington residents for the last few days and it seems no-one has any idea what it might be.  The Wellington City Council has had several calls over the past few days with the most recent being about 5am today.  Spokesman Richard MacLean said the complaints had been coming in from Mt Victoria, Newtown and Mt Cook residents. “We are interested to hear if this starts to become a constant thing. We are keeping our ear to the ground.”

One Mt Victoria resident said he and his fiancee had noticed the noise on Saturday and it hadn’t stopped since. He likened it to a low to medium pitched humming sound and said it went all day and all night and was “doing his head in”.

Of course the source is a mystery but there have been many suggestions made in the local paper. Some rational and some not so:

 “Maybe it is the 50Hz hum that comes from a transformer feeding electricity to the area. If the transformer is overloaded it will hum louder, or maybe something on or near its enclosure is vibrating at 50Hz.”

“The Mothership is preparing [to] leave. Because Mt Victoria is actually an ancient alien spaceship. It would be a bit annoying for the suburb’s residents, though it would make the commute between Te Aro and Hataitai substantially quicker once it left.”

But  this comment is my favourite: “Why is Mt Victoria humming? Simply because she doesn’t know the words.”

Today Wellington lived up to it’s windy reputation

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With winds whistling through Cook Strait at up to 140km/h today our place reminded everyone why it’s called Windy Wellington.

The normally peaceful view of small boats moored in the shelter of Evans Bay looked a little different today.

Here comes the sun

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From the end of May to the middle of August our house loses the sun.

For the other 10 months of the year it basks in the golden glow but for the darkest depths of winter the sun teases us as it passes over the front fence never coming any closer. This was one of the reasons we decided to spend July in Europe each year usually returning just as the sun started to creep inside again.

Over the last few days we have seen the sun start to return – much to the delight of Poppie who spent this morning asleep on her recently adopted rug on the stair landing, warmed by the sun.

For Jean and I it means that summer is that little bit closer.