A Kiwi at the camera

06 September 2015

Fathers Day

My Dad died three years ago but this was one of his gifts to me --The ability to work out the problem and fix stuff, preferably with the minimum of expense and using materials kept in jars because they "might come in handy later" - and they do.

His workshop was a little tidier than mine but I definitely have more screw drivers !!

04 August 2015

Winter at the Winter Garden

When I first came to Auckland back in 1976 I used to flat in a magnificent old two story house not far from the domain. It is worth over $3,000,000 now and we used to rent half of it for $55 a week which was exorbitant compared to the $33 I had been paying for an entire workman's cottage in central in Wellington ! It had a particularly memorable very large lead light window in the downstairs landing featuring a British bull dog.

I used to visit the Winter Garden regularly and from time to time have long conversations with the gardeners. I've gone back every year since, sometimes with visitors and sometimes as a nostalgia trip as we would often have flat picnics in the domain.

Accessed off the paved area between the two buildings is a sunken fernery which is always nice and cool in summer.

There is a cafe next door, from which you can also get ice cream, by all accounts a very pleasant spot right in the heart of Auckland.

It is also just a five minute walk to the War Memorial Museum and next to the Auckland Domain.

Link to Wikipedia article on Winter Garden

Anyway to cut a long story short I was up there the other day, it being a grey and gloomy one at that.

Canon 5DMkII

26 July 2015

Inside the Auckland War Memorial Museum

This is what I call a Museum

War Memorial hall

When I was at primary School in the 1950's this was the equipment used in the free dental clinics.
Slow speed equipment and pain, lots of pain , and the smell of meths , as a result I am from a generation of the dentist phobic. Not only that, the enthusiastic 'preventive" dentistry meant drilling out our molars and filling them with amalgam which with the passage of time and its different expansion rate to enamel means my teeth are full of cracks. We used to call it the "murder house" because it was a little building separate to the school buildings.

Of course we ate a lot of chewy sweets and had to be nagged to brush our teeth so maybe my fault .........