Thankful Thursday

At 0900 the reminder on my iPhone told me it was Thankful Thursday.  Again?  I really must find a way of slowing time down.  So much to do and so little time in which to do it.  How many times have I said that?

I spent quite a lot of time today thinking about what to post because I have so much for which to be thankful.  Indeed the list is endless.

Today, however, I have decided to be thankful for sleep.  Whilst I was staying at a friend's in Tauranga over the last weekend I slept the sleep of the just or the dead or whichever saying you use.   I slept well.  I slept without nightmares.  I always have when I have stayed there.  Many I know do not sleep well in a strange bed but I think that sometimes one can have an affinity with a house and I have one with that house.

All my life I have been blessed with the ability to sleep soundly and most of my life I never needed much sleep - 5 hours was my usual.  As we get older convention has it that we need less sleep.  I sleep longer than I used to do.  I rarely go to bed before midnight but I am asleep within minutes and I often sleep for 6, and sometimes 7, unbroken hours.  I very rarely wake in the night (the occasional natural comfort break excepted and then I'm usually fast asleep within a minute of replacing my head on the pillow).   I'll skip talking about the nightmares.

So today I am thankful for the gift of sleep: long, deep, unbroken sleep.  I wish it for you too.

Time to Water

The last few summers here in Hawkes Bay have not been dry nor, by the Bay's standards, very hot and sunny.  Although the orchardists have not had to irrigate nor have they had the sun at the right time for really good quality and quantities of apples.  The irrigators in the orchard in front of The Cottage have not been used for several years.  In fact the last time I mentioned irrigation was in 2008.  When I arrived back here at the end of October the hills of the Bay were verdant.  However since then the amount of rain has been small and in many parts of the North Island only 5% of the average rainfall has fallen this month.

So the irrigator which stands like something I imagined from the original War of The Worlds (the one with music by Jeff Wayne - ah, memories) is back in action.  What is striking to me when I look at the following photos is the brown paddocks on the hills behind the orchards.

The water for the irrigators comes from a natural water reserve under the geological bowl in which the orchards and The Cottage are situated.  It's the same reserve that we get our water from.  Fortunately despite the huge amount used by the irrigators it's never run out.... yet.

Our very own rainbow.

Not For Men

The subject of personalised number plates surfaced on the blog of Frances Garrood recently and I think that there seemed to be a general feeling that it was something men did.   I have no thoughts on the matter but these two in Tauranga were unlikely to belong to the macho NZ male!  I thought that Spesh might like the VW not for its plate but for its colour!

Too Late

We went to the Tauranga Art Gallery this afternoon.  Two decades of Paramount Award winning works from the Wallace Art Awards were on show but I particularly wanted to see the Victorian paintings which were on loan from various art collections in New Zealand because I'd had popped in on Saturday to see what was on and espied what I took to be a Pre-Raphaelite and a Millais and was very excited to return for a more studied look.  When we got there today the Victorian Exhibition was closed and being dismantled.  There was, they told me, a Pre-Raphaelite and a Millais.   I was rather disappointed.  I didn't really take to any of the Wallace exhibits but I did like the collection of work by the New Zealand-born, Australian-based artist Emily Valentine who uses feathers for her artworks.

She creates mythical beasts - winged dogs, cats, lizards and airplanes - and wants to "stimulate the viewer with the uncomfortable nature of the feather, to question our callous treatment of animals and birds, and ask how we subconsciously classify animals - pet or pest, valued or worthless, beautiful or plain, and why".

After we popped into the Comida, a new Tapas Bar by the Art Gallery, the for a cold drink and a coffee.  We were tempted to have a Spanish Donut or Churros with hot dipping chocolate though. It was absolutely wonderful. What really struck me was the superb service.  It's a new place and I hope that it does really well.

Tirau

On the drive from Napier to Tauranga on Friday I stopped, as is my want, at the small town of Tirau. It has a population of just over 700 and is an attraction for tourists and motorists traveling on the three State Highways that go by it.  It is an important junction on the state highway network.

It is famous for having lots of things made out of corrugated iron.  Such as the Information Centre in the shape of a dog and the church's Good Shepherd:

The building shaped like a sheep"

Many shop signs of which these are a couple:

The school sign (which I've blogged about before for Heather):

I was, however puzzled by this sign:

...but then it was 2.55 in the afternoon.

White-Tailed Spider

New Zealand is fortunate in having very few poisonous creatures which are likely to be a problem for humans.  One that can cause a nasty bite however is the Australian White-Tailed Spider which was first discovered in New Zealand in 1886 and which has now become established throughout the North Island.  This evening I met the first one that I can recall seeing at close quarters and photographing.  I'm sure that if I'd photographed one before then I would have blogged about it.

Their preferred habitat is under dry bark and plants but will often be seen inside houses, where they look for shelter from the light, after hunting at night. The spider often hides in clothing, especially if it is left lying around on the floor.  Note to me: 'Keep clothes in case whilst in Tauranga!'

This one is a fairly small young one (the light bars on either side of the abdomen fade when they become adults).

Away Again

Some of you will have seen it before but this is the view from my bed before 7am on a morning like today:

and a little later as the sun rises above the rim of the bowl in which The Cottage is situated.

Today I'm off to Tauranga to visit a friend who has invited me to her Aftermas gathering.  Hopefully I'll manage lots of photos of the journey.  In the meantime I'll leave you with a photo of the Highland Bull in the paddock in front of The Cottage with a Mynah Bird on its back.

Thankful Thursday: Apple

Why is it that blog posts are like buses: you wait for ages for an idea and then three come along at once?  The 'Apple' I'm talking about is nothing to do with the fruit trees that surround The Cottage for hectare after hectare in this, New Zealand's fruit bowl.  No it's the Apple.

0500 hrs this morning and my iPad 'rang' and woke me.  My iPad rang??  How come? It is wifi only.

One of the beauties of the iPhone is that it has a programmable sound notifications so that I have it set for no 'ringing' during the hours of midnight to 0630.  It's also programmed to take calls from designated numbers or people or from anyone who tries twice in quick succession.   However Apple has Facetime which enables people using an Apple device to contact each other orally and visually over the internet free via their Apple device.  It is only recently that a friend in Australia (Fiona, daughter of one of my oldest friends who lives in Canada who is not into modern technology and doesn't even have a cellphone) got me to start using it.

Fiona is in Canada at the moment.  Fiona is trying to persuade her Mum to get an iPad so that she can communicate more effectively with her daughters and friends scattered throughout the world (Fiona doesn't have a landline telephone).  To that end they were in an Apple Store in Canada.  Who better to demonstrate Facetime on but someone in New Zealand.  They miscalculated the time and were quite surprised when a rather sleepy voice answered his cellphone wondering how it could have rung and why it was still dark.  It was, in fact, the iPad that had rung but my sleeping brain hadn't computed that.

Frances Garrood would, I am sure, say that that demonstrates all that is bad about modern (ie post 1970) technology (see Pre-1970s - The Best Inventions) but for me it demonstrates all that is good with the ability we now have to communicate with each other in this physically large and yet very small earth.  

So whilst I might have some misgivings about being woken at 0500 I am very thankful for the ability to communicate with my friends so easily.

On Gifts and Giving

Frances Garrood is a novelist who blogs under the unnervingly original title of Frances Garrood.  Her posts can be irritatingly controversial.  I say irritatingly because often I want to disagree with them but there may be a theme within them with which I agree.  Frances wrote a post last December (which many of my readers may have read): "Gifts". A brief guide.

I quote: "'Gifts' are things that are bought by the desperate for the ungrateful. They are things that you don't need.  If you needed them, you would (probably) already have them." 

Now the problem is that I fundamentally disagree with the statement whilst, unfortunately, also agreeing that there is an element of truth in it.

I love it that someone has spent the time and effort to give me a present but if they don't then it doesn't put me up nor down.  Mind you I seem to be fortunate in that music and books make up many of my gifts and I love those.  Some of my friends also have a wonderful knack of giving me things which will mean something intrinsically for as long as I live.

I love giving presents too.  On the other hand I loathe having to give presents to order ie for Christmas and birthdays.   I love spontaneity.   I love seeing something and thinking that would be wonderful for X or knowing someone needs something but perhaps can't justify (or afford) it at that moment when I can.  It might be for a birthday.  It might not.  I would love the freedom to give as and when I felt like it without the need for a specific reason or event requiring me to do so and without feeling guilty that I'd failed to mark a special event with a present (although I always try and remember to send birthday cards) or being looked at oddly when I do buy spontaneously and asked "What is that for?"

On a matter of detail one of the things Frances singled out as a no-no for men was handkerchiefs 'because most men use tissues'.  Well I, for one,  can't abide tissues unless I have a streaming cold.  I use at least two handkerchiefs a day - usually for wiping my eyes which stream a lot if there is any cold air or wind around (and I live in New Zealand and the Hebrides!). The other I keep for emergencies and cleaning my specs.  Have you tried to buy 'proper' men's handkerchiefs? It is almost impossible. The things masquerading as handkerchiefs even in M&S are little better than tissues. If anyone bought me proper ones (I can't repeat handkerchiefs again) for any occasion I would be happier than a - very happy person.  Try finding them though!

I would also love to know how is it that very polite children brought up to do all the correct things seem to have lost the ability even  to say thank you for a present never mind write a letter or send an email or a text or a Facebook message or any one of the other means at their disposal? I stopped sending some children presents because I never even knew if they received them.

A Shallowness of Mind

Driving home from town this afternoon I pondered on life, the universe and everything and came to the conclusion that Deep Thought was wrong and the answer is not 42.  Of course in reality we don't actually know what the question was but wotthehellarchiewotthehell. 

Why was I pondering?  Well my day has, so far, been spectacularly good: in a superficial sort of way that is.  Actually in a very superficial sort of way.  However (I was going to use 'but' but I keep getting chastised for starting sentences with conjunctions so I thought I'd use however which is usually an adverb and the purists might not notice I've used it as a conjunction) quite a lot of not-so-good is happening to some of my friends at the moment and it's been affecting my thoughts because I can do nothing for them.

In fact these photos reminded me of my mood: full of admiration for the beauty of the nature they portray but full of foreboding for the storms they presage.

One of the emails I received was from a friend who is always amazingly cheerful and really does live by the mantra given to her by her father when she was a child: smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.  It was a very cheerful email which just happened to mention that she'd been burgled a day or so previously whilst she was out (doing voluntary work) but the the burglars had been very neat and tidy and even put everything back on the bathroom window ledge whence they had gained entry.

On reflection it makes me realise how shallow I have become. I did a puzzle given to me by a friend yesterday and on the first attempt I got 'pretty smart' and on the second attempt 'genius'.  The fact that I'll probably never manage to do it again is irrelevant!  Then my GC partner and I had a  comfortable doubles win in a Club competition match.  Last of all a friend invited me to play a game of Words with Friends (it's like Scrabble played over the internet) and promptly put in a word with a score of 71.  I think the highest I've ever achieved is in the 40s.  After thinking and experimenting (I had two wildcard tiles) for many hours I came up with a word scoring 95!  I have absolutely no idea what the word means but I tried to put in a word and had one tile left over so just fitted it somewhere until the computer accepted it.

So perhaps the answer to the unknown question is 42 after all.