Weekly Photo Challenge: Peaceful

Posted on 19 January 2012 by SJPONeill

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…

The Return of Feral the Cat

Posted on 2 April 2010 by SJPONeill

Feral and her own little Odie

It struck me this evening while watching Tony stalk Maria around her flat on Coro that I have been devoting a little too much time to the Thursday/Friday War category at the expense of some of my other interests. So time to play a little catch-up…

As implied in the title, Feral the Cat has indeed returned to this rural stage…she has been staying with Carmen the last few months and, being an independent lady cat, amusing herself when Carmen comes home on weekends…unfortunately we think that Feral fell in with some of the wrong sort of cats from the wrong side of the tracks in Otorohanga and snorted some bad weed. She was pretty crook for over a week and came home to recuperate. The reason we think she had been snorting weed is that one morning a week ago, she started coughing and coughing…hairball, all you knowledgeable cat types will be crying…but nope, weed.

I went to wipe some of what I thought was just gooby off her face, only too find that she had a blade of grass coming out each nostril. After a quick phone consult with the vet, I got a firm but gentle grip on her and withdrew a 3-4″ blade of grass from each nostril…no wonder she had been coughing so badly…since then she has bounced right back and is now pretty close to normal although a pleasant side effect is that she seems to have shed her FU attitude towards the rest of the world – but still manages to give her Odie aka Penny the Schnoodle a thumping most days…

Once Feral got the weed out of her system, her internal processes started to flow freely again and I had to make an emergency trip into town for some more kitty litter. On the drive in, I noticed cars parked up at all the points where the rail tracks crossed or neared the road, with lots of little groups of train spotters peering expectantly up and down the tracks. I had the camera ready as I returned from my and caught blast from the past on the straights just south of Taumarunui…and here she is the next day, heading south again up the Raurimu Spiral – this is shot from our study window and I do miss the old camera with the 6x zoom…

There she goes, huffing and puffing...

And finally, this just popped up on a friend’s Facebook page – thank God for little commas…

Feral takes a tumble

Posted on 12 November 2009 by SJPONeill

Feral's Domain

This is Feral’s studio, where she hangs out, especially when the dogs are inside. Typical female: has more phones than she can talk into at once, clearly has a bit of a drinking problem, dishes are left out, and it wouldn’t hurt her to have a tidy up in the bathroom.

I’m not sure what she was doing but there was just a great crash and a squawk as her climbing frame thing toppled over, catapulting a tortoiseshell blur over the edge – they really do land on their feet! As you can tell by the stairs and the top of the front door her little eyrie is a couple of metres of the floor so it’s was probably all a bit exciting for her for a while. She’s OK but when I found her tucked away under one of the grandfather clocks, she was clearly less than impressed and has decided to spend the night on the ground floor…

While on the topic of pets, the Creature Comforts newsletter popped into the inbox this morning. I can not speak highly enough of this establishment between Sanson and Bulls – we have been homing the dogs and Feral there for a couple of years whenever we go away. Sonja and Irene are a couple of top ladies and really care for the animals, even giving them a bath whether they want one or not, and offering a great range of services including a new Doggie Daycare facility in addition to the normal overnight stays…Kirk and Lulu both love it here (Feral is not so impressed but then she’s a picky bitch) so if you’re looking for a quality kennel in or around the Manawatu, this is it.

Tapdancing

Posted on 23 October 2009 by SJPONeill

How unusual to have tap dancing on Closeup two days running:

The first story covered the successful attempt by a Wellington stock broker to break the Guinness world tap dancing record with 17 and a bit taps per second.

In the second item, the General Manager of the Accident Compensation Corporation showed off his own tap dancing skills when facing off with the very well-prepared leader of the Bikers Rights Organisation of New Zealand (BRONZ) over ACC’s attempt to grossly hike the ACC levies for bike riders…

What really gets me about all this ACC reforms is that no one is targeting the overpaid underproducing and apparently unaccountable fat cat senior staff who let it all turn to custard in the first place. The Strategist has an item this morning that applies equally to ACC as it does GM…In this battle, BRONZ needs all the support it can get: there’s a Facebook Group set up for this so please have a think about becoming a supporter – non-Kiwis too as deep down we known you all really want to be Kiwis, especially those from West Island!!

On Cheeseburger Gothic today, there is a discarded version of the opening for After America, the next in the Wave series – it is a good read, and also draws out another point about militia which applies to the Information Militia as well: often no one is quite too sure who, if anyone they are accountable too…

Top marks to the NZ Police Sergeant on Breakfast this morning – Always Blow on the Pie – just goes to show that your 15 minutes of fame can come anytime and from anywhere, even a casual stop at 3am five years ago…great to see a happy non-contentious Police story…Safer Comunities Together – get the T-Shirt here….

We woke this morning to a great bright ball in a broad expanse of blue sky…the rain is gone, long live the sun…But I still got drenched yesterday morning, mulching all the blackberry around the Chalet so that it was kid-safe for the guests staying this weekend and in the interests of aesthetics, tidieness etc as well. Also managed to slash my finger clearing away all the rubbish left where a previous tenant had burned rubbish – amazing what people think will burn, hence the slash from a broken bottle – stupid woman!!!!

Feral was making a big show of scratching up her kitty litter bin the other day so Carmen put her outside. Feral was clearly not impressed by this and gapped it again til about eleven that night…she probably has some justification in this as it followed right on from the previous day when Carmen let the dogs without doing the mandatory ground floor cat scan first. So there’s poor old 1.9kg Feral perched up on top of Nimitz (the larger couch), silhouetted against the window, hoping that 96kg of Rottweilers won’t notice her…followed by a blur of tortoiseshell as she bolted for the stairs.

Have been shotgunning my CV around the place while working up Plan B…one insight after a couple of days is that if you want to work for the Government – or some parts of it – you have to really want to work for them – some of the recruitment systems really challenge your level of commitment. I wonder how many quality candidates just give all the hurdles and miss and seek employment elsewhere, leaving us with the ‘dregs’; it would be interesting to review those government departments with a history of screw-ups against the intuitiveness of their recruiting interfaces…

Coming Anarchy has an item on the coming next war – not that any of the current batch are likely to end any time soon…

Feral the cat ran away…

Posted on 12 October 2009 by SJPONeill

…Feral the cat came back – not all stories have the desired ending…still, that will teach her to pick fights with big dogs who are just trying to be friendly…it also shows that cats, like children, come back much more docile after a couple of nights alone in the bush…

It was really nice to get home on Friday to find that Carmen had put the roof on the mancave and laid the foundation of the front deck…certainly saves me some work and puts us ahead of the game to get the damn thing finished – it’s a bit dark inside at the moment til we source some windows for the front but at least the rain isn’t getting in anymore and it has dried out quite nicely….

Mancave 001 Later on I think we’ll extend the deck out a bit further but we need something now as it is a bit of a step up to the door at the moment…when it’s done and after a bit more judicious pruning, the view will be something like:

Mancave 003 Obviously a little more groundwork required in the foreground but the plan is that this is where steps will go down to the next level – the hill down from the house is quite steep but has been terraced at some stage so it is possible to descend from level to level…If I cut down ALL the trees you could see the Raurimu Spiral at the left of the picture…

Have also been quite busy in the garden and we finally got a vege garden underway…the soil here is not very good to say the least being for the most part an unfriendly combination of clay and volcanic ash. There used to be mega-toitoi right up to the house and we have, over the years, pushed this right back and opened up the bush. One of the unexpected benefits of getting rid of the toitoi is that where it has been is actually good rich, well-drained soil. After a few hours hammering way with the rotary hoe, we flattened out the first of the toitoi humps and, on Saturday, got a range of veges into the ground. The plan is to extend a series of little vege patches down the path visible here:

Vege Garden In other blog news tonight…

Cheeseburger has an account of the Sydney International Food Festival this past weekend…sounds like a great event and I too am dead keen to have a crack at the bacon jam…JB makes a point about the way that non-professional food bloggers were treated in exactly the same way as mainstream food media and I think that he is on to something: would you rather read a review of an eatery by someone who has been paid to write it and whose palate might be somewhat picky, or reviews by normal people? I reckon I lean well towards the normalcy side of the fence. Years ago, around 2000, (yes, again, another missed opportunity to make something of myself!) I thought about posting eating reviews on a website somewhere but couldn’t find a suitable one and this whole blogging thing was then it’s infancy…I think I might kick this off again…Reading into JB’s comments about the quality of non-professional food blogger’s, I wonder if he also might have tapped into an insight for the future? Might it be that soon we will be more reliant on informal blogs (the ones we think best suit our own tastes and preferences) for information that we will be in the professional media. Could this be the start of the Information Militia…?

The Strategist has an item on the UK going back to someplace it is far more comfortable than the current war: back to the days of the Raj on either side of WW1…this has really got me thinking and I need to retire to the hammock to cogitate on it a while before commenting…stay tuned…

Churning the grey matter…

Posted on 22 September 2009 by SJPONeill

…it’s been a good day today in every way: forecast rain never turned up, packing has been painless i.e. haven’t had to ransack the house for anything, and have been coming to grips with stringing words together into coherent chains and I re-establish contact with the world post my silent time…as always there was some stimulating new content on both The Strategist and the COIN Center blog…and I have been able to start catching up on all the ‘gunna’ things that I let slip over the last fortnight…

I’m not taking a laptop with me because it is just something else to lug around but I am very keen on using any down time over the next couple of weeks to scope out some papers for fleshing and completion on RTNZ – often it is quite stimulating to rely on the good old long hand drafting techniques to get the creative juices flowing and get ideas down in a logical manner – the whole backspace/delete edit thing sometimes makes me (I’m sure it’s only me) a lazy thinker so this is a chance to get back on track…

Feral is going to get a thumping soon – after being evicted from the bedroom last night after deciding to play mad cat on 1-30, he ferreted a golf ball off the top of the pool table where it had been hidden from the twins (who can’t or won’t tell the difference from a golf ball and the foam ball in their indoor golf set for tinies) and bounced it up and down the wooden floor for 20 minutes…I’d come stomping down the stairs, he’d hide under the couch, I’d put the ball away, he’d find it again – or something similarly hard and not bouncy and away we’d go again – the temptation to let the big dogs in was mega…

Still no Feral for two weeks + I get to miss out of reruns of BSG Series 2 and 3 while Carmie works out where she got up to…

On the road no late than 0530 tomorrow – the journey begins…

Never say never…

Posted on 4 September 2009 by SJPONeill

…007 got that one right…The cat never goes outside…nope, not til this morning – all packed, ready to go..where’s the cat? Oh there’s Feral – outside – stalking something out by the compost heap…finally managed to entice the bloody thing inside and while I was chasing it around the house trying to get into the cat box, the dogs, who I’d let out to stretch their legs before we left decided to go for a walk…and here’s us having to have them at the kennel by 1200. Made it with 5 minutes to spare – an hour 50 from home to Sanson and fortunately nairy a cop in sight…

A couple of plugs from the trip down…we’ve got people staying in the Lodge this weekend and just after I left I realised that I had given them the wrong number for the keylock – uh-oh – didn’t have time to go back due to the kennel drop-off deadline and couldn’t quite get any of the email addresses right – why did I stop using a PDA, remind me – I was trawling through Levin looking for an Internet cafe and found a very helpful lady in Computer Whys who got me online to do my business – only been open since Tuesday; stopped for brunch (at 2 in the arvo) at the Paraparam Mall and a most helpful lady in the McDs put me onto the Angus burger (AWESOME!!) and then took the trouble to get my opinion afterwards – good service; and finally, after a year’s absence, I finally got back to Charmaines on Royal in Upper Hutt for a decent haircut and a catch-up gossip with the ladies. I was a regular there ever since I first moved to Wellington mid-90s and still remain loyal after shifting up the Mountain.

Had hoped to catch-up with Jim Veitch at Vic this weekend as a prelim to the Kilcullen visit next month but we couldn’t quite get it sorted – think I will have to make a trip to Welly in the next couple of weeks before we go to the UK on the 23rd. Have a growing list of commitments for the Thursday-Friday War including While YOU Were Sleeping for Josh, collating my thoughts on future war as per the challenge on Cheeseburger Gothic, and scratching out some thoughts on Amanda Lennon’s premise from Wednesday’s conference that Coalition interoperability promotes conceptual laziness…had high hops of doing ome work on these tonight but it’s such a cozy little place we’re staying in, with a decent collection of movies, and I got in latish from setting up the Expo that nup, that ain’t going to happen tonight…have already been through Star Trek: First Contact and have The Dambusters on now…

And a final word from our sponsor on Guy Gibson’s dog’s name…I wonder how many of the apparently-outraged also picked up that great classic kid’s story Huck Finn is chock-full of the N word…