Too hot today to go out until evening. So after dinner we had an eight eel walk with dog alongside the stream that runs through Ōtari Bush.
Record eels spotted is nine, so we did ok.
To the top of Kaukau this afternoon, where there was a gentle cooling southerly and a feeling that rain is coming, which has only intensified on the way back to home.
I saw 64 grey rabbits, one ginger rabbit, and six quail; all this was around the less human-disturbed Crofton Downs end of the ride.
I posted about my new mountainbike a week or so ago, and on Friday I got to pick it up from Jonty’s shop just in time for the long weekend. It could not have been better timed considering the good weather forecast!
I rode it home but with a little detour up Silversky to take a glamour shot of the clean and shiny. It may never look as nice as this again.
I hadn’t ridden my old Kona Satori much since getting a fat-tired road bike, first the Surly Straggler and more recently a Ritchey Outback. By comparison the dual-suspension Satori increasingly felt heavy and sluggish, with the rear suspension feeling like it was sucking energy from me on every uphill pedal stroke. And for lots of easy mountain bike tracks the fat tired road bikes were just fine.
I still felt there was room for a mountain bike in the shed though, so long as I could be guaranteed to ride it more. So I decided I wanted a nice steel hardtail, and settled on the Ritchey Ultra. I like the bike brand (and love my Outback); and its geometry is pretty much identical to the Satori.
Most steel hardtails seem orientated towards people who like far more exciting terrain than I do, whereas the Ultra seems way more balanced and hopefully won’t make any statements about me being some kind of insane shredder. I’m not breaking any records anymore, and I’m not even breaking any of my own from 5 years ago. I just want to get out into the trees or hills and return tired and happy.
Given the value of the Satori after 10 years was probably about $0 (despite it only having travelled about 3,500km) I figured I could save cost and waste by using as many components as possible off the old bike on the new bike.
Jonty did a whole lot of magic to make this work.
That was probably the easier stuff. Since 2013 lots of small things have changed; a major one causing issues here being the presumption that a mountain bike will only have one cog up front so Jonty had to source a special front derailleur hanger to fit with the one off the Satori.
He was able to reuse all the drivetrain (chain, gears, and cranks; reasonably nice Shimano SLX stuff) and brakes (more SLX stuff). It was a bit tricky to fit the mechanism for the front derailleur into the tiny space between rear wheel and seat post, but he did it and it changes flawlessly.
We had to get a new dropper post as the old one wouldn’t fit, and Jonty advised me I should also get a new wider handlebar and shorter stem so we did that too.
So after all that how does it ride?
I love it. It’s only a kilo lighter than the Satori - using all the same components, especially the old wheels doesn’t help here - but it feels a lot lighter and the uphills seem more fun and direct without the rear suspension.
The short stem and wider bar make it more maneuverable and my longer ride today at Makara Peak, whose twisty downward tracks I haven’t ridden in over 5 years, were lots of fun.
So. Now I just need to get out and make a point of using it more.
Looking forward to this fine steed being ready to ride soon. Most of the bits come from my old dual-suspension MTB and Jonty at Revolution Bicycles has had to expend some effort to get the decade-old components to work with the brand new steel frame.
Better to reuse as much as possible though.
I think it’s some kind of magnolia, the colour so vivid on a grey day.
It’s spring again! And so our cherry tree in blossom is host to a now-traditional tussle between the tūī and all comers.
Today: ding ding! it’s a pair of Rosellas!
(Apologies for the quality of the photo - it was taken through our winter-crudded windows.)
The tūī chased the rosella about a bit but it didn’t really go all that well in the end as the pursuer became the pursued and was chased off in turn. And the rosella went back to snacking on the blossom.
Round One: rosella!
Previous springtimes:
Being a fine morning R₂ and I went for a stroll to the neighbourhood cafe, taking Èibhneas with us.
On the way back I said to R₂ it would be good kōtare spotting weather.
And so it proved, with this dangerous looking specimen perched on a wire above a busy road.
That beak is pretty badass looking!
We see them a lot around here but it’s not always easy to get a close in shot, so I’m reasonably happy with this one.
I’m also wondering why they seem to like the wires above roads — are they waiting for potential prey to be hit by a passing car?
Or do I suffer from a cognitive bias and I simply see them above roads because that’s where I happen to be and where most of the wires for perching — and easy visibility — are?
Other kōtare:
iNaturalist tells me this is Zealaranea trinotata; back in February all I saw were the amazing yellow spots.
On Friday I discovered that the Wharf Inspector’s working vessel is called the…
So this happened back in November.
We do get a few of these rare native parakeets about, but they’re always a bit flighty and are way more often heard than seen.
This one, unusually, stayed in this very spot just off our deck in a large flowering cherry tree for about 20 minutes. Most of the time it seemed to be calling for its mates, who seemed to have abandoned it.
It flew off when they returned, but not before I’d managed a couple good shots. Once again, we live in a bird paradise here…
Now migrating my old blog postings across to another platform (to here!) for I think the sixth time in over 20 years. I’m not 100% sure why I bother, although I do like looking at my old nature pictures in context and hopefully I can do more of that.
My old opinions have matured less well and somehow there are fewer of those kinds coming across with each migration. It’s the same thing, maybe self-preservation? that makes me set my Mastodon postings to self-destruct after a month. I don’t know everything, and with each year some certainties are eroded and new ones formed (but generally: fewer than before).
Also I am increasingly uncomfortable with my words, insignificant though they are, being grist for some dark capitalist mill I have no control over.
I do not know how to resolve this.
This one’s from a couple weeks ago; another fine day riding my gravel bike up an MTB track on the way home from a shopping expedition in town.
Magpies, ominous; plovers with fake breaks; quails warning zzzt; kingfishers yap agreeably; pipits sing; fantails flit; the usual blackbirds, sparrows, and starlings everywhere. The wind assists, except when it does not.
Springtime rolls around once more.
Today was a lovely calm day and I remembered that I have a decent macro lens now. So off I went around the house in search of subjects.
I got better than I expected in a patch of wild flowering bulbs up in a less tended part of the section. A little House Hopper spider was working its way from flower to flower:
It’s not obvious in this crop but there is some really nice detail captured - and I really should get out there with my camera a bit more often.
Previous springtimes:
Èibhneas is a bit bigger these days.
Not that weed.
Just a flower in the grass, after some spring rain.
Previous springtimes:
I’ve been hankering after a new bike for some time. No really good reason other than my beloved Surly Straggler is now outfitted for commuting for work and around town duties with practical mudguards and a heavy rack. And this meant that I had been doing less and less riding at the weekends. I ascribed this to the bike rather than my motivation, in a classic middle-aged bloke way.
So I have been looking at new bikes I could take out and about on the weekends, and in summer particularly I could take away down south for those long warm days on high country gravel roads.
For various reasons, I eventually settled on the Ritchey Outback. Not only is it nice springy steel from a legendary manufacturer but it can take really nice fat tyres for comfort… and… the pièce de résistance… this particular version comes with a suitcase and can be broken down for travel.
In my dreams I am catching a train somewhere, unpacking my bike at the end of the journey, and exploring a new place.
Those are some good dreams.
You know what? These last 12 months or so haven’t been great for lots of people, and while we’ve been spared the worst we still want to look out for something good to hold on to.
The rest of the family have always wanted a dog.
Now I love dogs, but after growing up on a farm I was certain that I would not want to restrict any dog of ours to the narrow horizons and confined behaviours of town and our less-than-large section in the suburbs. Our place is unfenced, and we also have chickens to look after.
And then there’s all the work to train and amuse and feed and exercise and toilet and keep healthy; the cost to us and the planet; the logistics of moving it about town with us and finding places for it on holiday (or pet-friendly places to stay). It all seemed too much…
…but I lost that battle…
…and now my whataboutisms melt when faced with this little creature:
This is Éibhneas (a lovely Scottish Gaelic name meaning “Joy”) who we could call “Eve-ness” to approximate the correct pronunciation but who we just call “Evie”.
Today I’ve been working from home and Evie is bored. She’s been playing with her toys but what she really wants is for me to stop with all the zoom calls and endless mechanical keyboard clacks of fury and play with her instead. That look on her face… is hard to resist.
She’s a 14 week-old Tibetan Terrier, and for extra goodness her sister Pipi lives with R.’s sister’s family on the other side of town. So… in theory we can help each other out with dogsitting / holidays but in practice we have found the two girls just playfight all day long and it is impossible to work from home with the two of them in the house.
She’s been with us for about a month or so and yeah, she’s changed up things quite a lot in our household. It’s taking a bit of getting used to! While nowhere near as disruptive to a settled existence as a new infant human there’s definitely some similarities.
But I guess soon things will settle down (sooner than with an infant human I’m hoping) and we’ll find a new normal with our most recent family member.
In the meantime she brings the cute. Lots and lots of it.
The big new distraction. Her name is Èibhneas.
Well, that was interesting, but something we would not want to repeat; here’s hoping.
Spring rolled around again, as it does, and well, what to do but yet another gratuitous photo?
Yesterday R₂ and I went for a walk around the neighbourhood; there were lots of kōwhai flowering and the inevitable tūī:
Then this morning: my usual Sunday breakfast of white clover honey smeared thickly on our home-baked toast and washed down with a Chemex full of finest filter.
I am grateful to be here.
Previous springtimes:
With the government over the last weekend unveiling a new four-stage pandemic alert scale, and declaring we were on level 2, both R. & my places of work told us to start working from home for the foreseeable future.
So on Monday morning we started, with a renewed sense of being fortunate for what we have and being able to work through this and not suffer the uncertainty that so many others are carrying right now. In the 7am dark we went for a walk to get some small exercise and simulate the morning commute. We worked, not quite as normal, on the dining table: four screens and two laptops, keyboards, and mouses.
We established variants on the in-office rituals: R. starting a Zoom conference so that she and her colleagues could continue doing the newspaper quiz each morning; me and my workmates making a coffee and stepping outside into the sun for a FaceTime chat.
But then in early afternoon, it all changed again. The government made a new announcement: that we’d be going to level 3 for two days then level 4 from Wednesday at 11:59pm. Wherever you were on Wednesday night was where you were going to stay, in lockdown, for at least 28 days.
We hit the Air New Zealand website but we were too late to get B₂ on a flight back from Dunedin; they were all booked solid. She seemed ok with this and so did we seem to be. There was not a lot else R. and I could do in any case: it would not have been wise to send her to her grandparents on the farm an hour and a half away from Dunedin.
The next few days passed, busy with work and adjusting to this new normal. We would walk out before work, and again in the evening to end the working day: a 1.4km circuit where we would occasionally come across other people doing the same, and of course giving them all a 2m space (a lot easier now that the cars on the road had dwindled to almost nothing). The meme whereby people were to put teddy bears into their windows overlooking the street for the kids to spot seemed to be everywhere, and here and there Girl Guide troop members had chalked the pavements outside their homes with messages of support and encouragement.
B₂ and us decided that we weren’t that OK with being apart after all, but luckily for us on Wednesday the government announced an extension to the domestic travel rules allowing non-essential travel on internal flights, for people getting home, until Friday. We got B₂ on a very early direct flight from Dunedin, the better to avoid transiting a third airport and hopefully a quieter time. I bent the rules a little and went and picked her up; I felt that getting her in person, especially if she came to our car outside the terminal, was in total less risky both for us and the wider public than making her get a cab from the airport.
R. and I relaxed a little. The weekend rolled around, none too soon. Early school holidays started for R₂. With B₂ back our family was together again and she started doing some of her Uni work remotely. The weather packed up with the first vicious southerly of autumn and we had to put the fire on. We all helped build our remote island getaway.
On Sunday I went to the supermarket, which was a slightly weird experience. I picked one that had a large covered car park and sure enough, I could wait under cover from the rain, with 2m gaps between people in the queue marked with red tape. It was good to see the trolleys being cleaned between uses. I noticed that more people were starting to use masks and other protective gear; a very few were in N95 respirators and one cautious person was in surgical gear: hairnet, mask, goggles, and disposable outer overalls. I began to feel slightly under dressed; hopefully my new facemask will arrive in the coming week. (Yes, I know they are not considered essential by many authorities on the matter. But they also help prevent an infected person from spreading the virus, so from that point of view I don’t see them as useless.)
Overall this feels doable - at least for us in our lucky bubble. I don’t know if we will feel the same way after a month… but for now the pace of life has slowed dramatically in one sense while also becoming more anxious and frantic in another (limiting news intake is helpful here). The city is so quiet now and the traffic is gone; the birdsong seems more intense and when the sun shines, which earlier in the week it was almost continuously, we seem to have stumbled across great fortune.
We will need to hold onto this feeling in the days to come.