lessons from a short break Tuesday, 24 January 2012 link

A few things I've learned over the weekend.

Occasionally, you do get large pods of dolphins following the ferries across the straight and playing in the wake.

The Takaka Hill Road has a fearsome reputation, and for good reason. No-one vomited on the trip, but we did have to stop once or twice for fresh air.

Golden Bay is a really nice part of the country, and I can highly recommend The Innlet as a place to stay.

If you ever want to have everyone in a room avoiding making eye contact, be in the main lounge of a backpackers with two screaming, weeping toddlers.

Craig Potton is a genuinely really nice bloke.

The Free House in Nelson has a yurt. It's pretty awesome inside, and gives a good, warm audio response for live music.

The duckpond in Queens Gardens in Nelson has eels. Lots of eels. Why doesn't the Wellington Botanic Gardens have eels in the duckpond? Eels are awesome.

A ferry ride on a calm day is great. A ferry ride with a 3m swell induces vomiting in those susceptible to motion sickness. Such as myself. Full credit to the band members who looked after the kids during vomit-related immobility.

Related: if you're not sure whether to vomit over the side, or into a vomit bag, why not do both? Then you can compare the two experiences.

So: a good long weekend away, with some excellent performances by the Klezmer Rebs. If you're around Wellington, they're playing at the Dowse Museum in Lower Hutt at 7pm on the 2nd February (admission by koha, and there's a cash bar!); if not, you can get their latest album, Anarchia Total, on Bandcamp for US$5. It's a damn good album; treat yourself.

  at least i'm consistent Friday, 2 December 2011 link

A couple of months ago, when I got my last tattoo, I went and picked Maggie up from nursery afterwards. As is the custom, I had my fresh tattoo wrapped up when I left the studio - in this case, meaning that my leg was covered in plastic wrap. The older kids at the creche were fascinated by this. I found out a few days later that the next morning they'd all been asking the teachers to draw a picture on them and wrap it in plastic wrap, too.

Which is why, when I attended the Christmas dinner for our local community-run childcare centre (in my capacity as the secretary of the management committee), my award in the prizegiving was... a tube of Glad Wrap.

  subtle political allegory that also happens to be true Friday, 25 November 2011 link

One issue I've had this election campaign is: as a cyclist, what should I do when I go past a demonstration of people waving placards encouraging a particular voting choice? In a car, I honk; on a bike, I feel like going "woo!" as I go past is probably the equivalent. But I feel a bit foolish doing that. A conundrum.

And they're everywhere. If you define "everywhere" as "by major intersections". There's clearly some time-sharing arrangement; either that, or pitched battles fought early in the morning to claim the spot. Inside my head, I like to think of the nice, middle-class supporters of Charles Chauvel and Katrina Shanks meeting at the foot of the Ngaio Gorge, at 6am, in the Spotlight carpark, and shanking each other with improvised weapons until one group retires, muttering about the next morning and waving tyre irons.

The intersection at the corner of Evans Bay Parade and Cobham Drive is on my commute. The other day, there were Labour supporters there. They stood at the intersection, but behind the (waist-high) fence so they weren't on the combined foot/cycle path. They were impassioned but polite. Tonight, it was National's turn; three people in their early 20s waving signs. They weren't behind the fence; they were in the middle of the cyclepath. Blocking it. And they were so intent on the passing cars that they didn't notice the oncoming cyclists (well, me) until they were right upon them; and then only grudgingly stepped out of the way to allow me to get past.

It's not a subtle political point, but it did happen. If you haven't cast an advance vote, get yourself out tomorrow and cast your vote. If transport is a hot-button issue for you, check Smart Transport's assessment of party policies.

  of course, i did sprain my ankle that time Monday, 14 November 2011 link

Went to the Santa parade yesterday. It was a good parade, though Rebecca made the very reasonable point that it's not Christmas for another six weeks. One thing was a bit disconcerting: a guy walking along through the crowds, keeping pace with the Baptist float, with a small handwritten sign. On one side it said "IS SANTA FAKE?"; then he turned it, to reveal on the other "IS TAX THEFT?" I'm not quite sure what his point was, but he seemed very intent about it - kept trying to make eye contact with the young women dressed as angels. We avoided him.

Two more weeks until the election. Roll on democracy. Vaguely tempted to vote early, except that I do rather like the theatre of going to the polling station on the day. Our current question is whether or not Peter Dunne will get in. Based on the Johnsonville School gala a week or so ago, Dunne is campaigning hard and getting his face out there. Mind you, so was Chauvel and Shanks - Chauvel took a turn on the barbecue for the sausage sizzle, while Shanks was just running around showing her face. I was slightly weirded out by the way that the National team had small children in T-shirts singing the praises of our Prime Minister; if you're under 8, you're too young for a cult of personality in my book. It'll be an interesting race to watch. Dunne's held Ohariu since time immemorial, but the way the polls are running, we could get lucky.

The Ohariu electorate is often sneeringly metonymised as "the voters of Churton Park", but the electorate actually extends from Crofton Downs to just before Tawa, including Ngaio, Khandallah, Broadmeadows, Johnsonville, and across to Korokoro, Maungaraki, and Normandale. As well as Churton Park. While the electorate does indeed include the (admittedly) pretty boring new-build suburbia in the northern suburbs, it also includes rather a lot of Wellington's most well-established, most expensive, and most conservative suburbs. From my chats with people who actually live in Churton Park, most of them are people with young families who're living there because it's what they can afford and has decent transport links. I think the powerhouse behind re-electing Dunne isn't the endless winding roads of the new-build suburbs encroaching on farmland, it's the narrow streets named after old Imperial conquests, lined with mature trees and with gilt-edged property deeds. Or to put it another way: it's easy to make fun of Churton Park; and lazy, too.

I'll confess to a slight fondness for Churts - partially out of simple contrarian "if everyone hates it I must find something to like", and partly due to having actually spent a bit of time wandering around it. Yes, it's a soulless dormitory suburb, suffering the short-sighted planning decisions and poor oversight of decades past, with no suburban centre and an infrastructure so car-dependant it makes my teeth itch. But there's a good park, a sporting field/playground which acts as a de facto suburban centre for families with young children, a decent hidden valley, and a lot of hidden cut-throughs, walkways, and strange little byways. It's even getting some shops, enabling people to buy food without driving 3k first. I still wouldn't want to live there myself - I like being able to walk down the hill to the supermarket, or to catch the train - but it's got potential for becoming less of a dormitory and more of an actual community.

  doing something right Friday, 21 October 2011 link

How other people perceive you is a funny thing.

Work party last Saturday. Spent an hour getting down + getting funky / throwing shapes on the dancefloor (ironic 90s raver flashback mode). In the days since, two separate people have felt the need to tell one of my team members that they saw "your team leader dancing". Clearly, I am giving the impression at work of a dour, humourless, non-dancing person. This amuses me no end. And that spitting sound you're hearing right now is all my UK friends as they read this paragraph, many of whom will remember the work Christmas party in around 2004, when at one point during the evening I decided to remove my shirt and leap onto the dance floor, on the basis that I was channeling the spirit of Robbie Williams.

On the other hand, this afternoon at nursery, one of the teachers was telling a story about a monster. Introducing the monster, she paused, and asked the children: "Now, can anyone think of something big and hairy?" M (aged 4) leaps up and yells "MY DADDY!!!! AND HE HAS TATTOOS ON HIS BODY!!!!"

So I'm probably ahead on the game.

  i am very much not that sort of person Thursday, 6 October 2011 link

The other day, we had underfloor insulation put in.

Always start a story with a bang, I always say.

Anyway, we had insulation installed. In preparation, I spent Monday night moving a lot of boxes out from under the house. One of them was labelled, simply, "Star Wars Stuff". In a childish hand. My childish hand, in fact. Trembling, I looked at the box. Could it be? And opened it. Yes, it was. All my Star Wars toys from childhood - probably my most valued possessions age 5-11 inclusive. A little dusty, but all there. Awesome.

I took the box upstairs and spent a happy half hour rediscovering a key element to my childhood. Nostalgia was committed. There's the Han Solo figure I got at Hamleys when I was five; there's the Admiral Ackbar that I didn't get for Christmas in 1984 and screamed for an hour until my parents agreed to go and get it on Boxing Day. Ah. Memories.

And then I thought, well, what do I do with the damn things now? Back under the house? Flog 'em on TradeMe? Preserve my childhood memories in aspic so I can revisit this again in twenty years?

Nah. I don't want to be that person. So: "Hey kids! Look what I found under the house! You can play with them as a bedtime activity!" It's like in that movie, I forget the name: toys are made to be played with. They're items with a purpose: fuelling kids' imaginations. They've done mine; time for the next lot to get their turn.

And that is why a vintage 1981 Princess Leia figure is tucked up next to a Bratz doll in a toy bed on Maggie's dresser.

  harder going up Sunday, 31 July 2011 link

When I were a lad, all this were fields, and we sat around in them drinking shite beer. The New Zealand brewing industry has come a long way - from the fizzy, basically tasteless stuff that made up the main consumption for decades (have you tried a DB Export recently? It's worse than I remembered), we now have a decent crowd of small breweries making craft beer. I remember when I went over to the UK in 1998, being extremely pleasantly surprised by the ale culture there. The fact that you could walk into a pub and get a beer that actually had some flavour, wasn't carbonated, and wasn't served cold enough to numb your tongue was a happy revelation. When we moved back to NZ, I resigned myself to not having any really decent beer for a while. But by that time, the small craft brewing revolution (originally lead by Macs Brewery in Nelson, and whatever's happened since, don't forget that they are largely responsible for establishing a commercial market for small craft brewing in NZ) had kicked in. So on the one hand, I could go to Pak & Save in Petone and buy a bottle of Old Speckled Hen (brewed in Bury St Edmunds and then shipped to the other side of the world), but I could also reach to the shelf above it and buy a Tuatara IPA. This is very much a good thing, and it's now easily possible to get decent beer - and, provided you pick your pubs carefully, to even be served it in a pub.

That said, I'm finding myself conflicted about a couple of recent issues.

Firstly, the radler debate. On the one hand, DB are clearly evil for enforcing a trade mark on a style of beer. This is like someone managing to trademark "cheeseburger" - it's made a lot of people very angry, but seems to be watertight under the way NZ trademark law works. On the other hand, I'm not a fan of radlers, and I definitely can't stand their radler (which isn't a 'proper' one anyway - it's full strength but faffing around with loads of fruit etc). So while I should be excised about this, and I'm steering clear of anything produced by DB, I'm finding it hard to care as much as I probably should.

Secondly, a deeper conflict. Moa Brewing produce very good beer. But their advertising ranges from "what a load of wank" to active homophobia. I'm presuming it's an attempt to capture both Tui drinkers who'd like something that actually tastes decent but who need a somewhat dickish ad campaign to bring them in, and 42 Below drinking hipsters who need to be cajoled into trying beer. And I'm sure that the ad agency would say that their ads are ironic, or tongue-in-cheek, or some other bullshit like that. But, basically, in my book that's just a load of smartarse justification for using homophobia to try and make a buck. So, y'know, fuck them. But. Moa make really good beer. Their 5 Hop is a very, very nice pint. So I'm torn between my desire not to support homophobic advertising, and the fact that the beer is really actually very tasty. Moral dilemma time.

Had a nice day out with the kids today. Took them for a walk in Belmont Regional Park. Unfortunately R realised what I was up to, and tried to negotiate a way out of it. Best line was - after I'd told her that it'd take about an hour - "I can wait in the car! I've got a book. If I get hungry, there's shops around the corner and I've got my pocket money!" Worth a try, I suppose.

  framing Saturday, 23 July 2011 link

Bad:

"Jiggery-fuck, we're out of whisky. You watch the kids, I'll be back in 15."

Good:

"We're getting pretty low on milk. I'm not sure we've got enough for the kids' weetbix tomorrow morning. It's raining pretty hard, and that wind's not getting any slower. Tell you what - you stay here in the warm and I'll whip down to the shops. I'll pick up a couple of other things we need while I'm down there. Back in about 20 minutes."

All in how you frame the discourse.

  relative preference weighting Friday, 22 July 2011 link

As Telecom is finally pulling the plug on the CDMA network, I've got to sort out a replacement phone. I currently have a pretty non-smart phone - it's a Nokia, the sort of thing everyone had about five years ago. There's a basic camera, it's running some old version of Symbian, it takes a microSD card for memory, that sort of thing. Pretty basic. And it's going to stop working in a couple of months, so I definitely need to replace it. And thus, the question was raised again, should I get a smartphone?

I looked at the plans. I did the math. And I pondered.

And I realised that for the out-of-box price of a smartphone - never mind the data tariff - I could just get a pretty basic dumb phone, and have money left over to afford a tablet computer, to do all the smartphone stuff that I'd want. Or upgrade my bike.

Or, thinking about it, get another couple of big tattoo sessions.

I've never had a smartphone. Never particularly missed it. I can only think of one occasion in the past year that one would have come in handy. And I have a big thing about paper maps instead of GPS.

And a man has to have priorities.

So: not joining the smartphone revolution yet. Am going to get a fair whack of ink on my leg instead.

  true horror and a penguin Thursday, 30 June 2011 link

Young family moves into new suburb, buys a house. Father, mother, infant daughter. One day, while browsing about local history, the father discovers that their house is located near the site of a famous series of murders of newborn infants seventy-five years earlier. After the murders, the farmhouse where they took place was destroyed... and the family's new house was built a few years later. No-one talks about exactly where the murders were committed, except to confirm that it was somewhere on the same street as the family's house. Looking further, the father discovers that the murderer had the same surname as his great-grandfather...

No, not the start of a Stephen King novel. It's what happened when we moved into Newlands, when I found out about the Newlands Baby Farm scandal of 1923. We bought a 1930s house on Newlands Road, which must have been somewhere nearby the farm where a number of newborn babies were killed. That said, I can't find any details on exactly where on Newlands Road the farm was - which is probably for the best. Bit freaky to see a family name in the mix, though I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Given the nature of the crime, it's a reasonable bet that the people involved were not ancestors of mine.

Took advantage of a bout of sickness last week (Heather was sick, I hadn't yet come down with it, so was at home looking after the kids) to whip up the coast and see a live Emperor Penguin in the wild. We got there shortly before the penguin (gender unknown as of this date, hence lack of pronouns) was evacuated for medical treatment - when we saw it, it seemed pretty perky. Well, perky for an animal that spends much of its time basically standing still and occasionally defecating. The kids were enthralled; we took off at 3:30pm, got there by half four, and staggered onto the beach as the daylight died and the wind got up. It was freezing cold, raining, and there was a crowd of about fifty people. I'd been worried that we might bowl up to Peka Peka beach and not be able to find the penguin: Peka Peka is not that kind of place. It's basically three houses and a carpark. The penguin was about fifty metres down the beach. The road was a rolling boil of cars arriving and departing, as a steady stream of families took what was looking like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see one of these. As I stared at the penguin's oleaginous mass, I overheard the woman next to me comment that she'd spent a season in Antarctica and hadn't seen one there, so this was a bit of a goal for her. After ten minutes, I bundled the kids back into the car, one of mother nature's miracles ticked off the list.

That said, who the hell nicknamed the penguin "Happy Feet"? For one thing, that's the name of a movie about penguins, not even a character within the movie (the Wood-en faced protagonist is called Mumble). For another, it's an annoying movie (Surf's Up is genuinely a much better movie on a number of levels, despite the incredibly annoying concept - I am absolutely not joking about this). And for a third, if you're going to nickname a penguin after an animated character, how the hell could you go past Kowalski?

I'd also like to recycle the standard joke based on the fact that Peka Peka is notorious as a gay nudist beach, and point out that the Peka Peka pecker pecker would also have been a good name. Bit cumbersome for the kids though.