Shelter From the Storm

One of the down sides to being a recidivistic Loopy is that the most insignificant things can ruin an otherwise great day by grabbing the scruff of your neck & plunging you into a really blue & introspective mood. It happened to me today. You see, the music on Hauraki is getting a touch progressive for my liking, so I listen to the Morning Pirates till 9.00, then switch over to Solid Gold & lose myself in the 60's & 70's. The track that did it for me today was a Simon & Garfunkel one, namely Slip Sliding away. A lovely song, but the lyrics affected me badly.

Another downside, while on the subject, is that I seem to have difficulties starting new projects, especially if they involve something that I'm not really terribly conversant with. For example, I have a bit of concreting to do round the place. I bought a mixer, have bags of premix, know what to do & have the tools to do it with, but.......................... Another example is the spouting on the house. Its not a high house, & I have completely redone at least two houses in the past, but again.............. I don't know what it is. I have spent a lot of time thinking about why it is. The nearest that I can come up with is a cross between lack of motivation & loss of confidence. I don't know. Herself has been very patient with me, but the work still isnt being done. Being a perfectionist Virgo, I like to do it right & things like concrete are very difficult to fix if you happen to fuck it up.

Anyway, back to the blues. I have by trial & error come up with a way to cut my bluesy bits down from 2 or 3 days to 2 or 3 hours. Just put some Bob Dylan on quite loud & listen to it. Dylan to me at those times produces the same sense of security as snuggling down under a favourite eiderdown in the height of a thunderstorm. It doesn't actually provide any physical protection. It just makes you feel warm & secure. Emotional shelter from the storm in both cases.

Eight miles high

About the only good thing about my recent sojourn care of the Health system was that it enabled me to catch up on some serious music listening. You see, I asked Herself to bring in for me my CD Walkman, my wallet of CD's & a generous supply of AA batteries. I listen to music on two separate levels you see. If I am working around home, I play a disc, generally either Blues or Irish music, quite loud & warble away melodiously, much to the probable disgust of the neighbours.

On the other hand, if I really want to LISTEN to music, I will sit down with headphones on & the volume at the appropriate level, (sometimes quiet & some times loud), close my eyes & immerse myself totally in every nuance of tone & melody & lyric, so you can understand that this was a preferable option for me over such stimulating pieces as Overture for Bedpans in A# minor, or similar opuses, or should that be opi, after all, the plural of octopus IS octopi isn't it? I don't know. If you want to know, go Google it. I really don't care.

Anyway, so here I was with earphones on, eyes closed, & the dulcet tones of Dylan warbling through his latest album, Modern Times. At times like this, its very easy for me to get to a special quiet little place in my head that I can otherwise get to by means of meditation. Please remember also that at this point I was high as a kite on morphine. All of a sudden I came to the realisation that not only had I reached my place in the sun I had gone beyond it, & the music had taken on a whole new level of depth & that I was seeing it with enhanced perception. As I lay there absolutely entranced, & really digging all this, there came a hand upon my shoulder & the cheery voice of the orderly, "Come on James, its time for your ultra sound scan. What are you listening to anyway?" Somehow the answer, "The vibrations of the cosmos." seemed somewhat banal, so I just said "Dylan" Turns out he is a big Dylan fan as well, so we had a great old chat all the way down in the lift. Mood gone forever.

Y0u needn't worry , gentle reader, about the possibility of me becoming a dope fiend & wasting away my life on a search for that elusive first high. The trip to that place is not one that I care to make except under extreme duress. Vomiting & unconsciousness has sort of lost its appeal over the last few days. Anyway, it takes too long to get straight again. I still feel decidedly strange....

So it's Labour Day.

I suppose you are expecting me to compose something that waves red flags & blathers on about Brotherhood, Solidarity & Up the Unions. Well, I'm not going to. Do you know why ? A couple of reasons. One is that I have never really been that big on the whole Solidarity/Trade Union/Glasnost thing. Don't get me wrong, I acknowledge & accept the part that unions have played over the years in achieving a safe & reasonable workplace/wage environment. It just seems to me that every time I hear a union official making a point in the media, I hear a Pommy, (English) accent. The inference is that Kiwi's have been around sheep too long & lack the ability to achieve significant results for themselves. Apparently, in the UK, Kiwi's are sought after as workers because of their "can do" attitude. So why do we need Poms to run our unions? Is this one thing we "Can't do ?"

I really would like to have been able to say that we have been fishing all weekend too, but I cant even do that. We have had a traditional Labour weekend weatherwise too. Cold & shitty with lots of wind.

The main reason that I haven't been anywhere, done anything though is that I have been sick. Three days of a bad tummy bug. Real bad. Three days of saline drips & morphine in the hospital. I really cant understand how anyone can get addicted to Morphine. OK there is pain relief. That is wonderful. But for me, its accompanied by vomiting & passing out. Sometimes simultaneously. Once I even managed to vomit through my nose at the same time. Who says men are incapable of multi tasking ? It was just as well that my step daughter had dropped everything & come down to give herself moral support. She had to come collect me from the Hospital, because Herself was home in bed with the same bug. Fortunately Herself's bout of it wasn't severe enough to warrant hospitalisation.

Anyway, we are both muchly improved, though still feeling like hell hit with a brick, so just gonna spend Labour Day quietly at home thinking of excuses why we can't mow lawns & do gardening etc.. Happy what ever & back to work tomorrow.

I've got babies....

I was gonna clean out my fishpond, honest, but it got deferred somewhere along the way in between going fishing & tidying up the courtyard for a visitor that ain't bloody well coming now anyway. But I sorta just had it forced on me a bit. Went out to the courtyard, & here is one of the Ginger Ninja's with one of my prize fish flopping around in the cement dust that I've been sweeping into the cracks. It looked like it was a lost cause, all nicely dredged in cement & ready for the pan, but no, a mouth gaped & a tail weakly flopped, so I picked it up & carefully wiped as much of the cement off it that I could, tried to drop kick the cat, with about as much luck as Daniel Carter, & carefully placed the said fish back into the pond.

To my surprise, it very carefully swam off. A little lop sided at first but it soon came right & off it went. While I was watching I noticed some baby goldfish swimming round. About 6 or so of them. This is very cool for me as I have never in my long history of goldfish keeping actually had any breed before. So I cleaned out all the dead leaves & topped the water up to give them all a fighting chance at getting below periscope depth to avoid the Ninja's, threw a clod of dirt at said Ninja, (Fattums) & sat & wondered at the marvel of creation & procreation for a while. Now I gotta go put the shade sail back up... then, once the cement drys, I gotta move the spa pool to its summer location & fill under that, finish off the back fence, make some mowing strips in the back yard, put up some more trellis, replace the spouting............... Did I mention that I'm on holiday ?

We went fishing yesterday

Wasn't exactly optimum weather for it, but we ended up with our limit of nice fish. Herself ended up feeling a bit blurky. Something which I will admit is MOST unusual for her. To be fair, the boat was sitting about three quarters on to a nice little 1 metre swell, which wasn't exactly comfortable. I will admit to feeling a touch unsettled my self. I was disappointed that she turned down my offer of sardine sandwiches though. You see, I always tie a burley bomb to the bottom of the anchor warp. As a purely academic exercise, I would be interested to learn if a bit of surface burley would have helped as well.

Still everything considered, a day on the water with herself is always enjoyable as it combines the two loves of my life. Its a nice bonus to come home with enough fish for tea & the freezer plus the satisfaction of being able to give some to a few good friends.. We off to see my Mum this afternoon.

Some of me pictures...

CITY AT NIGHT...

This is the view from the balcony of our apartment on the 8th floor of Quest on Eden, where we stayed for the Steely Dan concert. If you look, you can actually see the Vector Stadium sign where the concert was. Thats how close to it we were . I never took my tripod with me so this pic was taken by steadying my elbows on the balcony rail. Don't ask me the exposure time. I just let the camera take care of that....

I have just started two weeks holiday. You would never guess it by the crap weather we are having at the moment. So much for getting some fishing in. Gale warnings with gusts to 100km/h all over the place. Herself & me decided to Tiki Tour on Monday, so we did. Across to Port Waikato, then down through one way metal roads, through Te Akau down as far as the North side of Raglan Harbour, then up through Waingaro, through the old coal mining area, across the Waikato river at Huntly, then up SH1 as far as Te Kauwhata, then through the back way & home. These are one or two pics we took..

At one point, there was a flock of Peacocks on the side of the road. They were pretty shy & took off through the fence & down the paddock fairly quickly & the sound of the camera shutter made them run even faster. I did, however, manage to get at least one reasonable shot of this fellow. Pretty isn't he ? I have only ever seen one white peacock before & that was at the Auckland Zoo & he was nowhere near as magnificent as this fellow.



A little further on, we came upon a brace of Hares taking the sun in the middle of the road. They took one horrified look at Sherman bearing down on them & headed for the boonies. They didn't go very far though, just hopped about 10 or 15 feet up the bank & froze. I pulled up very gently, fired up the camera & carefully holding it in my lap opened the lens to the maximum zoom & took these two shots. I needn't have bothered being quiet or anything, because even extending my arm out the window & shouting "BANG" at them could induce them to move. These two pics were taken at a distance of about 10 ft. The closest I have ever come to one of these magnificent creatures in the wild. We also saw more pheasants than you could shake a stick at & at one time had a Rosella flying along in front of us.
Talk about waiting for God. We saw this old truck in the middle of nowhere. As you can see, its been there just a little while. I would love to know the story behind it. One would assume that the poor old thing had a major haemorrhage in the middle of the paddock & whoever was driving just got out & walked away, not even bothering to close the door.

This is typical of miles & miles & miles of road along the coast. These stunning pancake like limestone formations. In places that are close to the sea, you can actually see where windblown sand has ripped the softer intermediary layers out.

This is the view from the old boat ramp at the end of the road back across the harbour. Pretty isn't it ?


This is Herself posing between two rather striking rock formations. It was blowing half a gale at the time... Aaah the things she does for love. The view is up the harbour towards the ocean. From there , we headed home & the scenery became a lot more mundane. 320 kilometres later, we very happy to get back to the Flatcattery. We have decided that each time I have holidays, we are going to go at least one place that we haven't been before. This holiday it was supposed to be on the water, but the weather put paid to that, so we did this trip instead. We had fun.