Brisk

Posted on 29 May 2013 by SJPONeill

If ‘Brisk’ was a photo challenge theme, my entry would be this morning because brisk begins with brrrrrrr….

We have uber-excellent thermal curtains over all the windows and multiple layers of insulation in all the external surfaces of the Lodge + double glazing on some of the windows (we’re running a rolling replacement programme). The curtains have a secondary effect of blocking out the light which is great for clear full moony nights and daylight saving when the sun comes up at uncivilised times. In winter, however, there is a risk that the lack of light will induce professionally unrewarding sleep-ins so we have a double-glazed skylight in the hallway by the rear bedrooms.

I thought that it seemed a bit dark this morning and here’s why…

DSCF6810

…a good 20cm of snow on the skylight, seen here as it started to thunk off the roof – no one questions this morning about the ‘why’ of a steep pitched roof…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Pattern | The Daily Post

Posted on 15 May 2013 by SJPONeill

1930s US Army aircraft markings

Sunrise over the Plateau

Reflections in a window, Alexandra, VA

Lighty things at LAX

Slates on the roof of the bell tower of the Flanders Museum in Ieper. An accidental shutter click…

Iron fencing outside St Patrick’s Basilica, Oamaru

Light show on the roof of Fremont Street, Las Vegas

Weekly Photo Challenge: Pattern | The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Change | The Daily Post

Posted on 7 May 2013 by SJPONeill

These stairs were a Trademe score…I noticed them on the ‘closing soon’ page with 20 minutes to run and after a quick phone confab, we tossed in a bid for $2k fully expecting to be outbid by all the watchers ( the stairs are, after all, genuine rimu – and the spiral hand rail is a single piece) and were blown away to pick them up for the mere $600…

We were further amazed when we met the seller in Wellington that he had intended to only list them once – after being nagged into it by a friend – before converting them into firewood. He also threw in, at no extra costs. a complete set of rimu kitchen cupboard doors which had been destined for the firewood heap as well. Even so, he had meticulously itemised and numbered every piece so that the joiners were able to re-assemble it with no difficulty. They did have to take all the parts to their workshop some 55km away as that was the only place with a high enough ceiling to assemble and work on it.

Above you see us as the assembled stairs are delivered back to Raurimu, as we head-scratched and considered how to get them in through the front door (fortunately a double door) and into position (assembled, this thing wasn’t light!!). We managed though:

…and these are the horrible things that we got rid off in favour of the spiral – the drop down the central beam was a good metre or so – awesome with small children – NOT!!!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Change | The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Culture | The Daily Post

Posted on 6 May 2013 by SJPONeill

Two cultures at the same time, adjusting to learning all about electronics and stuff in a trade environment…

….while also learning a new green culture Wednesday nights

and weekends…

…not too many photos from those days, well before the advent of anything remotely digital (and affordable), relying on a little 110 camera…
View from Telecom mast near Invercargill

…view from a Telecom tower ‘somewhere in Southland‘…

Home Sweet Home, TF Annual Camp, Jan 84, Tekapo

…’home sweet home’ somewhere in the Tekapo Training Area January 1984

Weekly Photo Challenge: Culture | The Daily Post.

My Little Life: Five Question Friday!! 5/3/13

Posted on 6 May 2013 by SJPONeill

1. What is your next home improvement goal?

In priority order….

BATHROOM!!!!!! BATHROOM!!!!!! BATHROOM!!!!!! BATHROOM!!!!!!

Knocking out the wall between the current shower and the rest of the bathroom; shifting the shower into the opposite corner of the bathroom and putting the bath in the area where the shower is now…

This wall goes and the bath goes in the new area;

…the windows are replaced by a full-length bi-fold or sliding door that provides full access to the bush outside…

…seal up the sleep-out cottage by fitting clear roofing over the deck(ette) and mounting windows (currently in storage in the Chalet’s garage where the plywood panels are at the moment; flip the door so that it opens the other way towards the direction people approach from the Lodge; the cool bendy tree in the foreground will go as it has passed away and the deck will be extended another metre or two….

…at the moment the dining room bifolds open out to nowhere: the plan is to put a floor level deck out here extending out as far as the gate post in the foreground and, in Deck Phase 1, to just past the kitchen window (to about where the bush under the pantry window is now; Phase 2 will see the deck extended to meet the spa deck steps and around the corner to the back door…if the ugly internet satellite dish can not pick up any decent TV channels it will go to as we know have fixed line broadband

2. If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be? No religious texts (ie Bible, Quran, Torah, etc, etc)…

This is a toughy…I once spent six week in Vietnam with only one English book and no access to any bookshop selling books in English til my last night in Saigon…had to settle for many many re-reads of Vulcan’s Glory (I’ll add the text as there’s not mcuh as most people lack the fitness to click on the link anyways)

The novel focuses on a young Spock, a conflicted ensign, serving on the Starship Enterprise under Captain Christopher Pike. Spock is having a difficult time dealing with his Vulcan heritage and how it conflicts with his duties as an officer and what he wants personally.

Spock soon becomes involved in a mission to retrieve the ‘Vulcan’s Glory’, a priceless gem long thought lost in a spaceship crash. It is soon discovered there is far more to this mission then readily apparent.

The novel focuses on the crew of the Enterprise from the period featured in the pilot episode The Cage. A younger Montgomery Scott also appears.

That was challenging, character-building even, but I survived with no (visible) scars…looking around the library now at all the books that I have read so many times, I am conflicted…I’m leaning towards a classic like George Lucas’ original Star Wars, or possibly Dean Koontz’ Watchers or Lightning…?

3. What is on top of your refrigerator?

Dog treats, soap crystals in case one of the dogs picks up any of the poison that the Department of Conservation persist in dropping everywhere , tea pot because it is handy and unlikely to get knocked off, bug zapper, token pot plant, random stuff up high and out of sight out of mind when the girls are here….

4. What are your favorite or most used phone apps?

My phone is not really app-compliant or -capable but it does has Lego Star Wars on it from the time when the twins were born and we were spending a lot of time hanging around in hospital waiting rooms…

5. What’s the one thing you hate most about your spouses job?

That they don’t recognise her for what she does, more so considering that THEY headhunted HER for the job…be nice if some of that recognition involved extra income but ‘thank you‘ also goes a long way…

via My Little Life: Five Question Friday!! 5/3/13.

Weekly Photo Challenge: From Above | The Daily Post

Posted on 5 May 2013 by SJPONeill

Looking down on a novel and innovative mousetrap in A Department of Conservation hut near Mt Cook during a school trip in 1981…the beer bottle is wrapped in a sock to stop it rolling away and had a chunk of cheese jammed in the opening…the rest is simple physics…

As much as I aspire to always use my own images in these challenges, this time I can’t resist putting in a plug for my mate, Rowland at Hawkeye UAV who has combined cutting-edge geospatial technologies with state of the art small UAS technologies for the ultimate in commercially-useful look-down applications. In addition, this is largely based on Kiwi home-grown innovation and smarts…

This imagery is from a recent task over New Plymouth, New Zealand and over a clearly urban area which gives the lie to the know-it-all doomsayers that state that small UAS can not operate safely over urban areas…

Hawkeye UAV New Plymoutn 2013-1

…don’t forget that this is a 3D image – as you scroll it the perspective and relationships between features on the ground change…

…and all done from Hawkeye’s own AreoHawk UAS…

Weekly Photo Challenge: From Above | The Daily Post

Click to view some very cool imagery…even if it is only New Plymouth….

Weekly Photo Challenge: Up | The Daily Post

Posted on 5 May 2013 by SJPONeill

Looking up at the Lindberg XF-91 that I built for the Unofficial Airfix Modellers Forum (UAMF) 2008Classic American Kits Group Build…the pilot has dropped his pencil and is just leaning forward to pick it up hence the white of his helmet being so far forward in the cockpit…

Actually, I didn’t quite finish it…the reason that many of my shots of this aircraft are looking up at it is that while I was adding the markings, I reached for my trusty bottle of Mr Mark Softener (bottle with a bright green top) to assist the US national marking to settle closely over the rivets etc on the wing but picked up instead my equally trusty but in this case not appropriate bottle of Tamiya Extra Thin Cement (bottle with a bright green top) with the result that half the the star and bar marking instantly dissolved into a murky smear… UAMF xf91 014

One of these days, I’m planning on stripping it back and finishing it off properly, doing a decent paint job on, or replacing the original pilot, and adding the undercarriage…some day…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Up | The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Color | The Daily Post

Posted on 6 April 2013 by SJPONeill

The deep blue of descending night against the stark white stone of the Menin Gate in Ieper, Belgium…during the daily remembrance ceremony that has been conducted every night since 1928..

My totally random take on the theme of colour…a quick scroll through the last few years of pictures…in no particular order…just colours….

It is what the sign appears to say…The Beer Temple’ shop in Brussels…well worth a few hours browsing and a few euro expended…

A bright London bus against the drab city (it was a drab sort of day)…

No idea what these are – big lighty things outside my room at the Radisson LAX…

The Matchbox Walrus box-art was always very orange and is well-captured in this 3D recreation at Scale Modelworld in Telford 2011…

Purty crimson looks out of place in this special ops helicopter display at the USAF Museum near Dayton, OH.

The for-real Mother Of All Bombs in bright colours at the USAF Armament Museum at Eglin…looks more like Resene display…

My place of work at home – not sure if this is before, during or after a tidy up…

The morning after snow – crystal-clear blue sky…

A colourful character…

Good use of colour by Lily aged 5

…and Lily aged 5…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Color | The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: A Day in My Life | The Daily Post

Posted on 4 April 2013 by SJPONeill

Weekly Photo Challenge: A Day in My Life | The Daily Post

Phoneography has been the theme of recent WordPress Weekly Photo Challenges and I find myself here even more limited than I normally might consider myself in some of the challenges…I’m a bit old school and just carry a phone to take and receive calls and send and receive the occasional text. On rare occasions, I might use it for an alarm but that’t it – no bells, whistles or other 21st Century technotomfooleery…

So when the challenge calls for photos to be taken with one’s phone, life becomes a little interesting, more so when we don’t have coverage for this particular carrier at home so I am not wont to carry the damn thing around with me when I am at home – which these days is most of the time. But we persevere and I guess that’s why they call them Challenges and not Easies…

So a day in my life, specifically last Sunday 31 March 2013…seen through a 1.3 megapixel lens…

Cuddles?

How the day started…we’ve gotten a bit slack and have been letting the big dogs sleep inside the last few weeks…a side effect of this is that one or both of us gets woken with a ‘kiss’ as soon as it is light…

The drought has been a worry for weeks now so it was good to wake up to moisture on the ground although the Island needs a lot more than this to do any real good…

…and looking at the eastern skies, the sun is already starting to burn through the cloud…

Breakfast is first up – well a bit of a clean up in the kitchen first – although it rained that night, old habits die hard and dish rinse water is poured by habit over plants by the front door, baby chestnut trees in this case…

I’d remembered to put some bread on the night before so here it is all fresh and yummy out of the bread-maker…

Because the girls are still producing big time we have oodles of eggs for scrambled eggs for breakfast, so scrambled eggs on fresh bread in the order for breakfast…but first just to pop out to the garden for some fresh parsley…

…and a reminder from the little (in relation to the ‘big dogs’) dog that I’m not the only one that needs feeding…

So that’s them happy for a while…

…and them that are exiled to the small coop while the effects of their worm dose wears off…

and then into the ‘big house’ to feed the general chook population…

…that’s these ladies…

And also to check that the new chook waterer thingie is working OK…

…while remembering to remove their early morning labours…

…before heading through the gate to the Chalet…guests from the weekend had already departed so time for a quick check inside – yup, tiptop, no problems plus a couple of Parrotdog beers left in the fridge – Thank you!!! With the benefit of hindsight, i guess that I could and should have taken some pics of what the Chalet is like inside but, to be honest, never thought about it – next, day in the life Challenge, I promise…

And now off over the other side of the Chalet to check on Fred…he’e here somewhere…

Ah, he is – Fred is prone to wander and some day soon is in for a bit of a shock when the fences get reconnected to the grid…

He does a pretty good job though – clearing away the blackberry – he could clear other stuff but he has become a little spoilt and particular about his diet…

Pre-Fred, this was all blackberry…

…and finally back to the office for work…well, actually, quite a few hours trying to work out how to get these photos off said high-tech phone (in 2006) and onto a computer…it is too old to support native USB connections and the interface software is to old and cranky to want to run on Win7, even after I went and searched and dug-out the old installation CD and connection cables – ah, yup the good old days of proprietary interfaces….NOT!

After many trials and tribulations and slings of outrageous fortune, I finally managed to achieve the mission using the common interface of Bluetooth between the phone and my trusty netbook…and this is where I spent the rest of my day working on various projects….

My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 3/28/13

Posted on 30 March 2013 by SJPONeill

Cake for Birthday #41…

1. How often should adults have birthday parties?

At least once a year i.e. birthdays should be acknowledged, not just passed over or forgotten…whether it’s a big party, or just a few friends and family is entirely a matter of choice and personal preference…

2. What was your room decorated like when you were a child?

Only room photo I could find…

Very cooly…I had loads of shelves for books and toys, had all my Matchbox cars displayed on top of the dresser, and all my model planes hanging from the ceiling…posters, mainly scifi-themed on the walls…not many photos though as this was before the era of convenience photography…

Only image of my model planes from way back then…I think this one might still be stored away somewhere…?

3. Do you have any traditions for Easter? If so, what? and do you have a why behind that?

Not really but it is usually a chance to get last-minute summer jobs done before the weather rolls in for the next few months…this year, however, we are just hanging out for that weather to roll in as it is so dry at the moment we don’t dare do any ground work for fear of extending the desert…

4. Do you get Good Friday off? If so, any plans?

R&R…I am finding the one problem with working from home on a casual/part-time basis is that work days are not as clearly defined as they are in the Monday-Friday 9-5 paradigm so this weekend so yesterday was definitely an enforced chillin’ day…

5. Did you wear hats & white shoes to church on Easter? (Or was that just in the South?)

Not here but maybe in the South…?

via My Little Life: Five Question Friday! 3/28/13.