Author Archives: SJPONeill

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About SJPONeill

Retired(ish) and living on the side of a mountain. I love reading and writing, pottering around with DIY in the garden and the kitchen, watching movies and building models from plastic and paper...I have two awesome daughters, two awesome grand-daughters and two awesome big dogs...lots of awesomeness around me...

Weekly Photo Challenge: Peaceful

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This week’s photo challenge is Bill the Bedford on his way to Gore on a very peaceful Kaikoura morning…funny sort of job….long story starting with a rimu spiral staircase that appeared on Trademe in 2008. Rimu staircases being somewhat rare, one’s with an opening bid of  a dollar being even rarer, Carmen and I had a quick confab over the phone at work (this is when we were both in Waiouru) and tossed a fairly substantial maximum bid in on it with only a couple of hours to go. We were really surprised to win the auction for only $600…

A few weeks later, must have been just after the big snow of ’08, we took Oscar the Ssangyong on its first run to Wellington to pick up the stair case. Not only did we get the staircase but also a full set of rimu doors for kitcheb cupboards. The guy we got them off had just been made redundant and while unemployed was working his way through his ‘honey to-do’ list at home, task #1 being to remove “…that staircase that I’ve always hated…” His original plan had been to toss it on a bonfire but a mate suggetsed he stick it on Trademe just to see what would happen “…might be a bit of pocket money in it…you never know…”

So, we get this stair case home, all parts wrapped and numbered and it sat in the garages (migrating from the top garage to the bottom one as its installation date slipped further into the future…in mid-09, we got a joiner into to look at it to give as idea of what was involved in putting it in…he took one look and was dead keen to have a crack at it as “…things like this don’t just come along every day…” Next thing he’s shifted all the parts to his workshop in Turangi, along with some spare rimu to make a platform the top landing, as it needed to be assembled in a proper workshop where it could be supported. Apparently it became something of an attraction there once it has been assembled and polished with some interesting offers being made for it – well over our initial investment but by then we’d seen it too and we set on repalcing the front stairs with it.

What’s all this got to do with Bill the Bedford’s trip to Gore? Well, one smoke while it was being installed, the joiner mentioned that he’d sold Bill on Trademe but was at a bit of a loss on how to deliver him to the new owner in Gore. Carmen, at this point wasn’t working and promptly volunteered to drive it down for a small fee, staying with friends for a few days before meeting me in Wellington for Scale Model Expo 09. That was the year that Feral the Cat decided to go walkabout just as I was ready to leave home and we stayed at the delightful Belmont Cottage above the Hutt Valley…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Self Portrait

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Maybe I should have saved this one in case there is a photo challenge for ‘scary’ but it’ll have to do for the ‘self-portrait’ photo challenge…as seen in the date in to top corner, this dates back to 1999…when I had started out on the series of exercises in Betty Edwards most excellent Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain (ISBN 0006381146)…one of these days, I must get around to finishing the entire series…

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Between

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...between the rail and the river...

I really struggled with this photo challenge…until while Picasa-ing through the photo library, I came across  this shot of one of the last one-way bridges on State Highway 1, between Kaikoura and Blenheim – kinda strange to think that, in 2005, there were still one-way bridges on the national ‘one end t’other’ highway…it’s now been replaced by a new dual carriage-way bridge but I think that the railway (running on the level above the road) still uses this bridge…

We were driving back from my sister’s wedding in Dunedin – you can see the Otago Property Press reflected in the windscreen – we’d picked up one of these as it our wont when travelling and stumbled across the little whaling cottage I mentioned in the Paths photo challenge and that we bought spur of the moment…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Celebration

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Every year, the true celebration, as per the weekly photo challenge from a few weeks back, of spring is when the punga explode into life…around the time that this challenge was posted the punga all around the house were all straggly and brown, looking pretty much like they were all dying….every year we go through the same angst, wondering if they are all dying and then, almost overnight, they explode into life with glorious fascinators for green reaching for the skies…

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Winter

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Although, here, it is (apparently!!) summer, Winter is the theme of this week’s WordPress photo challenge…our winter this year was more wet than anything – we’re just below the Central Plateau snow line but even then we only got snow twice last winter…it was as cold as it looks here – the driveway is a big heat soak (we only heard about heat exchanger heating systems the week after we laid it down) and a sure sign that it is really cold outside is when the snow settles on it without melting as it did soon after this pic was taken.

…but the next day was beautiful: great contrats of blue skies and white ground…

…and not everyone was upset by the cold…of course, the flip side of this is that it kinda sux to be a big black dog in summer…

More photo challenge catch-up inbound…

It’ll all be over soon…

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…well, the working year anyway…and two other big ‘over’ milestones this week…the War in Iraq is ‘over’ (uh-huh) as is the reign of North Korean tyrant, Kim Jong-il, whose main claim to fame was a rather wooden cameo in Team America – World Police…

At least he’ll be remembered for something…

Certainly I’m looking for a bit of slower time between Christmas and New Year to recharge batteries and consider how to do things smarter in 2012 – I don’t think that current tempo is sustainable – although spending two months of the year overseas sounds all very nice and exotic it is actually a real grinder that generates its own burden of work on getting home…I think I’ll be mandating periods of down time from January onwards to chase that elusive work/life balance – apart from reading and stash acquisition, hobbies have definitely take a back seat in 2011 and that’s neither healthy nor satisfying – I have enjoyed meeting the challenge of the WordPress weekly photo and expect see see this last couple of challenges caught up before the end of the year…I hope WordPress keep this up into 2012 as it is a great way of trying to maintain a steady pulse of posts…

Also expect a surge of more professionally-based posts too as I wade through the morass of draft posts sitting here and in MS Live Writer and select those which still may have a little life left in them…

Right then, that’s that surge of creativity suppressed…back to shifting offices…

Magic

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Just a lil graphical magic to keep small minds occupied while I slip into the lab and reverse the polariser on the Lava Gun (TM) again…

Don Paul BySouth Snr’Grandma’s Laughs & Tid Bits. Notice that even though this is not a .gif, the part of the image on the peripherals of wherever you are focusing seem to move. You can prove this to yourself by focusing past the image. Once you do so, the image stops moving. Optical illusions are failures of your brain software. Your brain has 3D models of textures and shapes that describe your immediate reality. When certain patterns confuse this software, it seems to baffle us…..Still cool though…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Waiting

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Waiting…this week’s WordPress photo challenge theme…

Waiting…something soldiers do a lot  of…above the the iconic painting by Graham Braddock of a soldier shivering at the Waiouru train station in the company of those who have gone before…it is not the most hospitable of places especially in the middle of winter, and less so when the duty driver forgets to meet the train…have walked down the tracks into the camp a few times…

Waiting for something to happen, waiting for something to stop…waiting to march on to a battalion parade after having already been at work for two hours (theme variation: hurry up and wait!), waiting for a reviewing officer whose driver got lost, waiting to see if the boss gets his words right this time…huddling on an icy hill in Pureora, waiting for the damn sun to come up so we can find out where we are…waiting for the chopper home only to find it’s been cancelled…waiting for the camp duties to call the RP Section to close the Baggies bar coz it’s a bit rowdy…

More waiting below…all cleaned up with our good gears on waiting for the Herc to take us back to Burnham…the two Scorpions are not back to back in al-round defence: one is towing the other – bloody tankies abusing the Jag engine and gear box again, most likely!

HEREKINO SAFARI was was of the best exercises I ever did…a full Ready Reaction Force deployment to Northland to clear the dreaded Musorians out again…HMAS Tobruk wasn’t available so to replicate an across-the-beach landing all the vehicles bar a couple of Rovers and Scorps that were flown in, were assembled on Ninety Mile Beach just as if they had been marshalled off the landing craft.  It really demonstrated the utility of the Scorp as a light fire support vehicle – one would trundle just behind the lead section as it advanced on foot – action on contact was to break off to the sides of the road and let the Scorp barrel up and start thumping away.

And on the topic of waiting, our section was tasked to conduct an OP over the enemy main position for a couple of days, returning back to the company lines just before the battalion moved out on a night march to the form-up point for the ever-popular dawn attack. The OC stood us down to secure the company’s kit that had been left behind but he may have omitted to run this by our platoon commander (some guy Keating who may have subsequently gone on to bigger and better things!!) – when informed that we’d been excused dawn attacks for the day, he had a fit of junior officer bravery and went storming off to  “…see about this...” No doubt he did but we still got the night off, harboured up by the local community hall where they just happened to be having a shindig of some sort…the lovely local ladies probably slipped more kai out the kitchen window to us than went into the hall itself as we waited for sun-up and Aunty Huia…

Waiting to see Wigram as we descended through cloud on the way home –  just a flash of concrete and a thud as the main gear hit the runway – waiting to see if anyone up the pointy end could actually see where we are going in those pre-GPS days…the good old days…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Family

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This week’s pic for the weekly challenge is a family get-together for my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary – you can probably tell from the hair styles and clothes that this was in the mid-80s…I’m not there so must have been either in the field, or overseas or both…