I shouldn't have looked at the pics of my last writing, big mistake. We have finally hit the winter button and those pics remind me just how far away from warm we are. Actually until this week the weather has been fairly warm, haven't even had the fire lit much, just in the evening, on low, to lift the temp from 'ok' to 'comfy'. However yesterday an arctic blast headed up the country and doused it, especially the South Island, in snow. There have been storms and rumours of storms... Schools closed, no work, roads closed, airports closed, you name it it's been shut down. It seems to have swung on by Rotorua except that the temperatures have dropped, blue skies and cold wind. The fire's ablaze.
Auckland had a lightning and hail storm that included a huge lightning hit in one suburb - 'The top half of a Norfolk pine, believed to have been the point of contact for the lightning, snapped off and fell into a nearby section. The roots of the tree were unearthed and bark peeled off the trunk. The front door of one home had been smashed in and a big branch had gone through the roof and into the lounge. A bedroom window had been split in two by the large Norfolk pine and another room had holes in the wall and ceiling. Two cars were damaged by falling debris and tree fragments were flung over a 400 metre area. Another home sustained substantial damage from the lightning with seven windows blown out, and boarding around the basement cracked. The bolt that locked the garage shut came right out of the concrete floor and the manual door opened itself. The neighbours' car windscreen shattered. In another home a lightning bolt came right through the lounge. ''It blew things off the wall in the kitchen into the dog bowl in the dining room".
Now I guess there are some people who will read this and think, so? so what? that's not even a storm, where I live... but the thing is that we just don't have that stuff going on over here. This is a fairly quiet might I say boring country. We don't do the storm thing and we only (used to) rarely do the earthquake thing. Well I guess that has all changed. With Christchurch continuing to rock and roll we are also hearing more and more of unusual (to us) storms hitting here and there. A twister in New Plymouth and one in Auckland. A waterspout in Auckland. Yep things are changing, Mother Nature is heading into a new phase. Will that new phase include purging the earth of it's latest virus? Yes people we are entering an interesting time. We just have to live to see how it plays out.
Technology is expanding exponentially, I'm starting to feel how I know now my mother did when she got a tv with a remote and a video player. Her way of handling her lack of understanding of the technology was to find out how to turn them on, how to operate channel 1, 2 & 3 on the tv and 'play' on the video. That's where I am heading, I just have no desire to learn all the stuff that surrounds what I want to get done any more, I'll leave that to my kids, lol.
We have changed a few small things in the house since the big operation of the bi-fold door going in. The kitchen is finally finished, we are gradually getting used to the new lino and maybe even liking it a little bit. We've pulled the microwave shelf off the wall and put it to use in the laundry. It was blocking use of the bench in the kitchen and Kent is going to design and build some smaller corner shelves to replace it. We finally put some nice lights above the kitchen cupboards and bought a wooden curtain rail for the bi-fold door and lined the curtains to go on it with blockout thermal curtaining. Now if we were rich and famous we would have gutted the kitchen and remodelled but although we had thoughts and did pull the big cupboards out and have a go, in the end it all went back as it was. Baby steps.
Miracle of miracles my Harley is finally finished since I laid it oh so gently down in the gravel in September last year. It now has new handle bars and pipes. It feels nicer to ride and sounds really great. But now the seat really doesn't suit the rad pipes I don't think. Ah well, more baby steps to come. I guess if I didn't have goals and things I wanted to achieve I wouldn't have done what I've done, learned what I've learned, experienced what I've experienced.
What about you???
