My Little Life: Five Question Friday!! 3/22/13

Posted on 25 March 2013 by SJPONeill

My Little Life: Five Question Friday!! 3/22/13.

1. What advice would you give a newly married couple?

Starting out doesn’t have to be flash…

Save….save like you don’t know where you next paycheck is coming from…eschew (say ‘no’ to) flash new cars and household bling, turn away from offers of credit cards and cheap loans…get your house paid off and build a home…

2. Who does more laundry around your house?

Me…but, in all fairness, I currently work from home so have the best opportunity to load up the machine and hand each load out during the day – and to recover it just on the off chance it should actually rain here in the Raurimu Desert…

Not my turn today though…

I must say, though…really, I must, thjat this sounds very much like one of the domestic issues that will lead to a conversation that ends in the ‘statement’ “See…!!!!!” and/or “I told you so…!!!” Tread carefully on this one, guys…

3. What items, if any, do you prefer to buy organic or make yourself?

The writing on the eggs is their collection date…

As much as possible, we like to grow our own vegetables and now starting slowly on our own fruit…we have been growing our own herbs for years and even had lemons growing successfully until Mr Lemon Tree got caught out by nasty old Jack Frost…we’re self-sufficient for eggs including having enough surplus to trade for chicken feed…

The white things on the ground are summer hail stones…

4. What book/TV series would you recommend for a friend on bedrest?

All five seasons of Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica for TV series…two of the greats scifi sagas ever told…more so after Mrs Lucas’ little boy dropped the ball…

William Shatner’s three Trek trilogies: Odyssey, Mirror Universe and Totality…I like them over other Star Trek books because Shatner (or his ghost writers) gets into Kirk in an almost autobiographical manner…

The best of the nine by a good country mile…

5. So, they say it’s Spring now…what does your “spring” look like at this very moment?

Well, here on the upside-down part of the world from Mama M, it is still the worst drought in seven decades (does that sound better or worse than 70 years?). Although it is still relatively green here, we are rationing our water just in case in continues on for more than another few weeks…

Green 2012 North Island on the left, 2013 scorched version on the right…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Kiss

Posted on 16 February 2013 by SJPONeill

For this week’s theme ‘kiss’, I was really hoping that I’d find some images that would fit some sort of theme like a galactic apocalypse kiss of death, or ‘…the asteroid only kissed the Earth’s atmosphere but that was enough to set in motion a bizarre chain of destruction...’ but nope, sorry, nothing like that at all so it’s back to the schmaltzy-waltzy stuff again…

Not quite a kiss but as close to it as these two foes ever got…

“Ewwww….!!”

“I’ve got your back, sis…”

“Go on…try it…I DARE you!!!”

Bloody cheeky natives…(…but which one?)

…but a parting thought (and it’s not even my own) on that galactic apocalypse kiss of death, ‘…the asteroid only kissed the Earth’s atmosphere but that was enough to set in motion a bizarre chain of destruction...’ thing…somewhere in Russia, as you read this…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Home

Posted on 9 February 2013 by SJPONeill

Home may be many things…

Home may be a house where people live…

Home may be a tent in the jungle…

…a ship at sea…

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

…or even a hole in the ground…

…but, above all, home is where the heart is…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unique

Posted on 3 February 2013 by SJPONeill

In 2005, we drove down to Dunedin for my sister’s wedding. We stayed out of town at a great little Bookabach property in Purakanui. As was our wont at the time, we did a quick scout around the local property market so see what was on offer and stumbled across this unique gem…an old whaling cottage…

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…at was pretty original inside, and totally off the grid…we intended to keep it as much as possible in this condition and use only renewable energy sources…

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…it had all the amenities you might expect…

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…and had great views…

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We were gutted when we had to sell it before we could do any work on it to fund another opportunity…one more lucrative but nowhere near as unique…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Beyond

Posted on 28 January 2013 by SJPONeill

Weekly Photo Challenge: Beyond | The Daily Post

In this challenge I have looked for photos where the subject has been in the foreground but which (probably more by accident than design in my case), the background draws you in other directions…beyond…

Raurimu down the hill Aug 04

The purpose of this photo was to have the national roading agency on about the recurring pot holes at the top of our driveway where it meets the state highway…in the distance though, you can see the road reappear as it rises north out of Raurimu, on its way to Owhango and beyond…

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Here’s our gate again, this time looking back the other way – as you can see, about the six months later, the potholes are getting sorted – with the ‘new road (it used to follow the hill round to the left) disappearing into the deviation towards National Park and beyond…the digger on the lawn was trying to (for 2 dozen Tui – beer not bird – and a banana cake) to even out some of the bumps in the lawn but it was too heavy and just left big trenches I had to fill…

Follyfoot in the Mangaroa Valley May 03 - 1

This is Follyfoot Farm (no, not the farm of teen screams in the 70s!) at the northern end of the Mangaroa Valley, which parallels the Hutt Valley in Wellington. Although the farm is the focus of the picture, the range of hills on the skyline draw the eye and the imagination towards the south and the point where these hills meet Cook Strait…

Greg, Dan, Tom, Bren, Jock, Maurice, Ash and Mr Stead on the Red Lakes track

This was taken on a 7th form study trip in 1981 up to Mt Cook – that’s Mt Cook Village below and, beyond, the mountains rise to peak at Mt Cook. The picture was taken about where the Mt Cook Village inset box intercepts the track in the map below. Unwin Hut at the bottom of the map is where we stayed for the week…if you’d like to know more about Mt Cook Village walks, click the map…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Love

Posted on 27 January 2013 by SJPONeill

Weekly Photo Challenge: Love | The Daily Post.

Schmaltzy-waltzy challenge this week…

Home visit

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Carm and Rubes Mar 04

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Love me - Ruby at Te Waitere

Hawks Over Rangiora

Posted on 24 January 2013 by SJPONeill

There I was…cleaning out the hard drive…when I found this…a draft post from almost two years ago…some imagery that the lads at Hawkeye UAV shared with me after flying tasks in the direct aftermath of the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake…

I’m not sure why I never posted this…possibly too many authoring tools and it was just overlooked…this mission was flown using Kahu as the team started its journey back north. Although Hawkeye’s capabilities have increased geometrically in pretty much every way (aircraft, sensors, software, etc) in the intervening two years, this series still is till a good look at the sequence of a mission from…

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…initial mission planning in the flight control software…each of the dots on the map above represents the point where an image will be taken from the aircraft, taking into account factors like wind and light.

The next five images are part of the imagery set collected during the missions

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These are then combined into a mosaic…in this case a thermal image of the town from a night mission because silly me has misplaced the daylight mosaic shot…

…and also the image of the 3D model of the town created from these 2D images are photogrammetric processing (some interesting work at Otago University on this process)…but here’s a short clip of some 3D imagery from another task…

Pretty cool…more so when it’s all homegrown Kiwi technology and ingenuity…

Weekly Photo Challenge: My 2012 in Pictures

Posted on 19 January 2013 by SJPONeill

Takeaways from 2012…

Meat Loaf 4-08-2012 6-28-15 p.m.

…culinary adventures continued…

Raurimu renovations 009

…the digger that ate the lawn…so much more room…

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…Kirk discovers that TV is more entertaining than chew toys…

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…the chickens finally get their act together…possibly attributable to the mega-mansion that Carmen built for them…

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…the Tupperware Terminator mini-gun of kitchen utensils – instant salsa with a couple of pulls on the ripcord…

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…not so much the mega-hit on blog views the weekend that the ‘family’ came together to rebut the poisonous views of activist Summer Burstyn as the imagery of the three columns covering that weekend…

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…a day in Flanders fields…so sobering…

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…chicken curry and roti for breakfast at Din’s Diner in Singapore – flashbacks to the really good old days of NZFORSEA…

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…a week at the beach…I wasn’t too sure about this at first but it was the best break I’ve had in years…

…and…

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…having a hand in helping these guys grow up…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Illumination

Posted on 18 January 2013 by SJPONeill

This ‘illuminating‘ craze has caught on down here now as well – it doesn’t really float my boat but this is a house just up the road from my parents’ when we went home for Christmas in 2009 – its main claim to fame is that my best friend when I was three lived here – his room was the end window above the garage…

Oamaru Christmas Light House 001