Five Question Friday!! 5/25/12

Posted on 26 May 2012 by SJPONeill

1. Are you a napper?
Nope…not really…if I let myself nod off, then I will probably be out for hours and wake up at o-dark-30 all refreshed and energised which just perpetuates the problem. If possible, I prefer to push through to a normal(ish) bed time for a rest…of course it doesn’t always pan out according to plan…

2. What was your favorite subject in school? Most hated?
I liked English, reading and writing from the very start – had my first story published in the Sunday Times when I was seven and found this year that I still have the first exercise book in which I wrote stories…it’s all in pencil so I need to scan it soon before it all fades away…hated maths from Day 1…

3. Did you have the something old new borrowed and blue at your wedding? What were they?
Old was probably me, new would have been the wedding cake (rings and wedding dress we have bought a few years before), borrowed would be the two witnesses that we met at the hotel, and blue would be the lagoon behind the beach where we had the service…I’m travelling at the moment so don’t have access to any of the pictures so will update this is a couple of weeks…

4. What one thing are you determined to do this summer
Noting that we are the bottom of the planet, summer is a few months away..reroofing the house was the main objective for the ‘summer’ just gone and we got it done in the only four day break of decent weather all ‘summer’ – finished at 8-30PM on the Thursday night and it was bucketing down by midnight! This coming summer might be focussing on levelling out the lawn and pushing civilisation all the way to the fence around the house…

5. Ice cream or Popsicles?

Is that even a question? Ice cream -hands down!!!! And none of those dodgy marketing flavours…good old-fashioned vanilla or hokey-pokey will do nicely with fresh fruit in summer and melting over a hot butterscotch pudding in winter…

Cutting and running today as I still have to finish packing etc…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Together

Posted on 28 April 2012 by SJPONeill

…at first Ruby wasn’t too sure about the new dog in the yard…

Five Question Friday!! 4/27/12

Posted on 28 April 2012 by SJPONeill

Do you make your kids finish all the food on their plates?

As a general rule, yes…but sometimes a battle is simply not worth it…equally generally, they are pretty good about hoovering up whatever is put in front of them…(talking grand-kids here so the rules might be a little different…)

Do you give an allowance?

Nope…they have both left home and are on their own, despite occasional hints … but we still feed them when they come round home though…

Do you actually park your car in the garage?

That’s the general idea and , yes, there is a car in there…with winter coming down here, we will probably have to get our act together so we can get the truck in there as well – had a couple of windfalls with ‘in-theme’ windows for the cottage/sleep-out and the big box things are displays cases from the Te Rapa Payless Plastics that Carmen scored from their closing down sale last weekend…both items need a temporary home til we get round to shifting them to either the storage garage (no, that’s not it in the picture; that IS the car garage!) or installing them…

What is one food you will NEVER cook?

Kina aka sea urchin…looks like snot and not interested in investigating further before the zombie apocalypse strikes…

I rest my case…

Do you have anything exciting planned for the summer?

Not really…just being able to bask in the sun and enjoy the great weather we never got this summer…first summer trip will probably be Brussels but it’ll be coming on to winter there so not sure if that will count? Hoping for an Aussie trip before Christmas though…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun

Posted on 21 April 2012 by SJPONeill

This was my first crack at Sun…I normally try to avoid it it for the obvious reason that it tends to wash out my shots and I’m too lazy to remember what camera settings will mitigate that effect (OK, that’s two obvious reasons)…in the flesh, this looked awesome as the sun burned through cloud directly over the cone of Mount Ruapehu – which is an active volcano so at first glance it appeared that it was acting up again…

But then, while aimlessly driving through Picasa, I came across this…

While not directly including the sun in the picture, the two sand buckets evoke sun, sea and surf, and the shadows on the snow offer quite a sharp contrast in both the imagery and what you can assume the ambient temperature to be…this is just one of those shots that appears a good idea at the time but which I can no longer remember what that idea might have been…and it was only last winter – or maybe that should be ‘this’ winter as the intervening summer doesn’t appear to have happened…

Note: another reason for placing my ‘best’ picture last in sequence on the page is that, when sharing or publicising via Facebook, it is always the last image that is the thumbnail for the post. I think that’s dumb too but, hey, it’s Facebook…let’s not look to closely for signs for life or logic in the machine behind the Timeline…

There is no truth

Posted on 5 April 2012 by SJPONeill

…in the rumour that a crazed digger driver attacked the Lodge while I was away last week…the results look pretty damn fine…unfortunately we don’t have much in the way of a logical before/after sequence (will we ever learn?) but what looked like this…

Raurimu snow 009

Looking off the front deck…all smoothed out now – might be able to add a hairpin to the twins racing track…

Raurimu 018

The water tanks all better now – a Boxing Day team effort….

Raurimu Mar 04 - 10 Rainy Day 001

Nasty tight damp back path and the BBQ on the edge of the wilderness….

Water tank 007

…It’s now looking rather different with clear access all a round the back of the house now and with the lawn extended past the punga grove….first rain should let us know if the ‘fall’ towards the pond and the stream is set up right…it probably makes more sense if you’ve been here and know how it all goes together….

Raurimu renovations 004

Raurimu renovations 002

Raurimu renovations 008

Above: what WAS a narrow path you you barely get through with an armload of washing….

Raurimu renovations 007

Above: A shot of the redeveloped (after Treescape and The Lines Company butchered it in 2005) punga grove – two weeks ago that was just a ditch with pungas overgrown with bracken and blackberry…

Raurimu renovations 005

Lulu looks a bit unsure about it all – there’s probably a good bone or two buried way deeper now than they were a few days back…

It will look better once it’s all green again…hopefully in time for Terri’s next visit….

Weekly Photo Challenge: Contrast

Posted on 19 March 2012 by SJPONeill

Got a bit idle and almost missed last week’s photo challenge…please not the contrast between the old chicken coop, designed for 10 chickens who are all pretty friendly, and the new version, almost designed for 10 chickens but with enough room that they can all have their own space and don’t have to even like each other…chickens last seen heading off for Danske Mobler to order in lounge suites and a big plasma TV…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unusual

Posted on 18 March 2012 by SJPONeill

What’s so unusual about this? Both daughters were home and a pavlova and a lemon meringue pie survived untouched on the bench for over five minutes…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Down

Posted on 18 February 2012 by SJPONeill

‘Down’ is the theme for this week’s photo challenge…

Looking down into Raurimu from the (very steep) roof of the Chalet…insights from chimney cleaning….

Weekly Photo Challenge: Heavy

Posted on 6 February 2012 by SJPONeill

No, folks, you haven’t missed the latest WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge email…but I sure did as it has become a feature of my weekly programme, one which ensures that, if nothing else, I do one post a week…I missed it so much that in the absence of a formal challenge form WordPress this week, I’m selected my own…anyone is invited to kick in as well if they feel the need – or just have a big gaping hole where the Challenge usually lies…

‘Heavy’ came from yesterday’s task: digging in this sump to capture surface water and sediment from around the garage and to get it (the water) into our storm water system while dumping out the sediment which tends to clog the pipes…The prefab sump unit is 70cm high with an internal dimension of 40cm on a side – the walls are about 5cm thick: THIS THING IS HEAVY!!!

Our first attempt the hole wasn’t quite square enough and the whole thing wedged in about 10cm short of its target depth and too damn high to capture any anticipated run-off. If lifting it in was a challenge, lifting it out was quite definitely ‘character-building’. Edging out the hole by 2-3cm on each side (mostly done to free it up for the remedial lift) did the trick and the sump is now emplaced.

Over the next week or so we’ll shape the ground around it for optimal water capture and then concrete it in, using river rock for the final layer…

As a bonus, we also have some free Flintstone tyres from where the inlet and outlet holes were cut…one more sump and we’ll have enough for a go-kart….

Stupid?

Posted on 18 February 2010 by SJPONeill

Should I be concerned when WordPress tells me that people are using the search term ‘stupid‘ to find this blog? It is often quite interesting to see what terms that people are using that bring them here…

There is a steady trickle of searches for Interbella which is good as it shows that a few people out there are starting to get the message that we need a new way of thinking to truly grasp complexity and uncertainty.

There is a lot of interest in the UK’s training simulation JCOVE that I mentioned in Microcosms – I never did get around to reviewing this, or even playing it that much – I simply don’t have time at the moment between job-hunting, blogging and doing the work I do have. I am hard-pressed to consider spending too much recreational time in front of the PC. Hopefully I will get over this, possibly when the weather packs up for winter, and I do enjoy sims and have done since my first Sega system in 1988. Sims and training still have a long road to ride together.

At least one person has been feverishly beavering away looking for a paper model of the mighty TSR.2. I can help there as there are four that I know of: the first three are fairly simplistic and should be easy enough to find online. The fourth is a magnificent creation in 1/33 by Waltair at Kartonbau.de – unfortunately there seem to have been some issues with the design and he has put it back on to the back burner til maybe this year…

Note: Waltair’s TSR.2 released a year or so later…it’s a beauty!!!

Papermodeling.com is still down. It’s been four days now and I think that this is the longest that I have ever known a website to be down for technical reasons. Apparently the problem is that the back-up is very large (very graphics-heavy at a guess) and won’t upload properly. Best laid plans of mouse and men etc but I wonder what liability forum and blog hosts actually have when something like this happens. If this site can not be recovered, an incredible amount of knowledge (on a narrow topic) will be lost. We used to laugh when the Army went to an online personal records system in the early 90s and all the clerks had to maintain paper records of all transactions: there was actually more paper produced and stored than under the old paper-based system! Looking back, maybe they weren’t so dumb after all…?

I have done something to my back that kicks in whenever I sit at my desk in the study, especially in the evenings – any more than an hour or so at the keyboard and it becomes quite uncomfortable. The upside is that it goes away if I keep moving about so in the day I guess it is a good motivator to do some work outside…so today’s rehab has seen part of the vege garden dug up and replanted with beans, the goats and sheep set to work cleaning up the edge of the front lawns, and a start made on a Colditz fence so they can level all the crap that has grown at the top of the back garden without breaking out and obliterating the garden.

I have a few less options after dark but stretching out on a couch seems to help so I’m off to finish watching The Wild Geese, a favourite from wayback – should I feel old when I remember seeing this when it was first released in 1978…?

wild geese