News from Nelson - May 2019

Hello again!
Another month rolls around and we are nearly half-way through the year. Staggering.

Lots of dog dramas this month with, just as I was about to take them to the vet for their vaccinations, Boo getting kennel cough. Luckily she recovered quickly, but I did think that would derail my house sitting plans, as the house sitter has a dog and kennel cough is so contagious. Luckily, due to her having had vaccinations, she had stopped coughing within a couple of days. Phew: house sitter back on. Then Finn got (a) a skin condition which has made his ears and feet very itchy, and (b) an infected toe which needed surgery. Warren has been left with the care of the invalids and some pretty complex drug regimes... and a trip to the vet on my behalf :-(

Other than that, my theme of the seven Rs has continued this month (Refuse, Repair, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Rot/compost, and Recycle - and if any of you are interested in more of my story, read here), starting with cleaning out the office. After the clean out, then I did exactly the opposite of the seven Rs and consumed... but making timber purchases, and buying as many things from the op shop as I could (as well as re-purposing things that we already had).

I got containers and drawers to put away the things that didn't really have homes, to keep the dusting to a minimum. Jan had lots of computer parts which were gathering a lot of dust in open office in-trays, and the room was smelling dusty. So after cleaning, reorganising and putting away, it is all looking pretty good, and - even better - it will be much easier for me to keep clean. Only a matter of flicking a feather duster around now.

Jan and I talked about what I was doing as I was doing it, so none of this will be a surprise when he gets back. He also had a couple of A4s posters on the wall, which were getting very faded. I put the originals safely away, found replacement images online, and put the replacement images into two cheap wooden frames from K-Mart.

After that, I did the same for my desk, again using timber storage solutions:

So our home workstations are both looking good. Tidy and - even better - easier to maintain.

Shelley & Kevin had a great function at their place, with a load of the old Sealord hands, which was a lot of 'remember whens' and 'remember whos'. It was a good catch-up; and a surprising one - at times - when people turned up whom I had forgotten. Shelley & Kevin have an amazing place with views right across to Separation Point upstairs, and a microlite being built downstairs in the garage! I got this shot just as the sun was going down across the bay with some very dramatic views:

I decided, after thirty years of using an old wardrobe door leaning against the wall as a dress mirror, that I would get a dress mirror ordered and put on the wall in the bathroom. Viridian glass came and did that at the beginning of the month (and allowed me to take their photo):

As instructed, I took down the props holding the mirror in place after a day's worth of adhesive drying. The mirror looks great, and makes the room - already large - feel even bigger. Now my old wardrobe door has been repurposed... to the spare room.

John F & Chris W helped me by felling some of the kanuka on the south-east side of the building platform (the left to middle of the photo below), so that there is room for the fence that the neighbours are going to put in, and room to move the garden beds from the front down the back. They also moved the railway sleepers ready to reconstruct the beds. I delimbed the trees and John & I chainsawed the thicker wood up for next year's firewood. I would love to have left the trees there, but they were in the wrong place. At least they self-seed like wildfire, so the next generation will spring up in no time.

I will spend some time over the coming weekends barrowing the compost from the front of the house to the back. Good exercise. By the time I have done that, hopefully I will have enough in the 'house projects' bank account to get another truckload of gravel to spread around the house.

I caught up with Nane - who is in Nelson for a few weeks and staying at Scott's place - Warren, Tracey, Erica and Jenny at Headquarters in Brightwater. Jenny was up for the weekend. She came back to my place with me, then Ed with Alice, Tom and Max came around to pick her up. Ed and Jo are in the process of planning a new build, and wanted some ideas. While they were all there, I got them to help me move the last item on my 'carpark tidying up list' to a new home: the tally hut that Jan had got from the Port has now been moved around to the end of the shed. I can now do a three-point turn on the car park in the Subaru again :-)

Nane and John came up to stay for a few days before Nane flew back to Germany, which was great. John cooked and, as he too is on a ketogenic diet, we ate wonderfully well. John introduced me to smooth clotted cream, which is fantastic when dipping my chocolate coated almonds in it...

Speaking of chocolate coated almonds, I 'make' my own. Microwave two rows of Whittaker's Dark Almond chocolate for 90 seconds on 60% power, add three hands full of roasted almonds, stir, pat out into a thin cake and refrigerate until set. Snap off a bit when you feel like something crunchy. And dipping a bit into clotted cream? Delicious. And, as long as you either don't eat too much of the chocolate almonds in one day - or limit other carbs that day - you can stay within keto boundaries.

My mother & I caught up for coffee a couple of times in the month, once in Nelson and once in the Moutere. The Nelson catch-up was at Zumo after I had taken Boo to the canine physio: it is a great place to meet, as Boo could come too.

Work is manageable at the moment, though I haven't quite managed to get the pace of the post-graduate supervision right yet. After reflecting, I think the issue is that my supervisees aren't necessarily aware of what their responsibilities are to drive their own programme. I got my latest supervisees to do a survey, asking them what areas are their responsibility, and what are mine. Then we go through that, item by item. The survey I liberated and amended from the one I had to fill out at Griffith. This is a very useful process as it sets the expectations at the outset. Hopefully that will make the supervisee responsibilities very clear to each supervisee, and allow me the time I need to help them with concept editing, and to ask those awkward questions which every supervisee hates... but which makes their projects much stronger.

The under-graduate stuff is going very well, though. Next month there are the research project write ups and reflections to mark, and after that I will be done with marking and teaching until the Semester 2 start in week 3 of July. Of course I still need to set up courses for semester two, but as long as everything is done by the week before we restart, it can be done at my own discretion, and nothing is 'urgent'. The post-grad carries on, but as I only have two supervisees it should not be too onerous. Steady work for a bit over a month sounds lovely :-)

No frosts yet, and the weather has been pretty good here. The views from Rose Road remain a pleasure:

Jan's work as at long last started to slow down a bit. He has had the last four Sundays off, and has seen some of the area. He took some photos when he went to Mission Point, north of Traverse City:

Being spring, the weather is uncertain, and he has been unsuccessful in several attempts to go across the Mackinac bridge. He has been up to see the bridge, obscured by rain, on the shores of Lake Huron:

Hopefully when he returns to Grayling after the Toronto trip he will be able to get up that way in fine weather and go across the bridge to experience what it is like.

As you get this I am on my way to Canada to meet Jan in Toronto. We have a week of things on our bucket list, including catching a baseball game at Rogers Stadium between the Blue Jays and the NY Yankees, Niagara for a day, many museums, art galleries and tours, and a couple of Fluevog store visits.

After that, Jan is here for a chunk of July, with us being in Fiji for a week in the middle of his time back. I need him to help me with some things at Rose Road, as there is lots I want to do that I simply can't do on my own. The garden bed sleepers which John and Chris kindly moved for me still need to be rebuilt down the back so I can get the gardens started in late spring.

When Jan goes back to the US after his July furlough, he starts at a plant in South Carolina. He is currently trying to find some accommodation, but, being summer, the prices of rentals are quite alarming. At least he has a month and a bit to find something, so hopefully the time will give him some better options to negotiate a longer term rate.

Back to you next months with shots of our Toronto trip :-)


Sam (& Jan)

Consequences

I have been reading the autobiography of the Pullein-Thompson sisters, Fair Girls and Grey Horses. The three sisters, Josephine, Christine, and Diana, wrote a phenomenal number of books between them - somewhere in the order of 170 novels. When I was younger I remember avidly reading everything by the sisters that I could get on my greedy little hands on.

Their writing shaped my 'understanding' that the UK was filled with tweedy Majors on shooting sticks, young, vigorous, blonde haired girls who could ride bareback without fear, and outrageous horse dealers who would swindle the novice new pony owner something wicked.

While reading the Pullein-Thompson autobiography, I ran across a reference to the game of Consequences. I have read the name of this game in the past, but I have never known how it was played. So this time, I Googled it.

Wikipedia rode to the rescue, explaining that "Each person takes a turn writing a word or phrase forming part of a set structure in order to build a story", with each part being written on a printed slip, or each part being written in order on a page, then folded so the next person can't see the answer to the previous part. The parts can apparently vary, but the most common parts construction formula is as follows:

Construction Formula	Example
Adjective for man	Mediocre
Man's name	Joe
Adjective for woman	Transparent
Woman's name	Kim
Where they met	at the Bowling Alley
What they went there for	to plot the overthrow of Stalin
What he wore	a seafoam green leisure suit
What she wore	a sandwich board
What he said to her	“During the last storm, we had a little party in the mud”
What she said to him	“She wasn’t that into me”
The consequence (a description of what happened after)	As a consequence, the band got back together
What the world said	“Somehow, I think I saw this coming”

The story - the 'consequence' is then read aloud as follows:

"Mediocre Joe met transparent Kim at the bowling alley, to plot the overthrow of Stalin.

"Joe wore a seafoam green leisure suit. Kim wore a sandwich board. Joe said to Kim “During the last storm, we had a little party in the mud.” Kim said “She wasn’t that into me.” As a consequence, the band got back together. And the world said “Somehow, I think I saw this coming.”

I think this could be quite fun, although you would need twelve people. I was also thinking that this could work well with cards, or with a phone app where each person entered their answer to each piece, then the interlocutor read the consequence aloud. 

Anyone for a game? 


Sam

References: 

• Pullein-Thompson, C., Pullein-Thompson, D., & Pullein-Thompson, J. (1995). Fair Girls and Grey Horses: Memories of a country childhood. London, UK: Allison & Busby
• Wikipedia (2019). Consequences (game). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_(game)

If I had words for Saint-Saëns Symphony No.3 and Gareth Farr's Ripple Effect

Yesterday I attended the opening of the refurbished Nelson School of Music, which was a delight. I found the end of the first half and second half stronger than the beginning, which was interesting in itself, with the first half having two pieces played by the New Zealand String Quartet (a Beethoven and a Bartok). 

However, the first half ended spectacularly with Gareth Farr's composition gift to the school, "Ripple Effect", played by Nelson music students alongside the New Zealand String Quartet. This made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I would buy a recording in a heartbeat. It was fabulous. What a Taonga Gareth has created for Nelson. The percussion sounded like the bells of Pikimai ringing through deepening fog to bring our ships safely to harbour...

Then into the second half, Nelson City Brass opened with the Fanfare for the Common Man; pianist Matteo Napoli with Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 alonside the Nelson Symphony Orchestra; followed by the NSO with a very polished rendition of Saint-Saëns Symphony No.3 in C minor featuring the Cawthron organ, which itself has had a close to million dollar upgrade. Ha, ha: I kept wanting to sing "If I Had Words" (taken from symphony's maestoso by Scott Fitzgerald and Yvonne Keeley way back in 1978, and it is famous itself for loads of mondegreens, including "Sister Moonshine", "if you are not deeply moved, child", and "If I had words to make your dream come true"). A couple of videos below:





If I had words lyrics were by J. Hodge, a UK jingle writer:

If I had words 
To make a day for you 
I sing you a morning golden and new 
I would make this day 
Last for all time 
Give you a night 
Deep in moonshine 

The concert closed with the Hallelujah Chorus form Handel's Messiah, sung by the Nelson Civic Choir with the NSO. 

It was a wonderful opening for the rebuilt school, but I would like to have seen a deputation from Wakatu Marae there, particularly for the investiture of the Taonga Pūtātara. 


Sam (& Jan)

News from Nelson - May 2018

Hi everyone,
Another month rolls around, and here we are, officially heading into winter. The fire is now on most nights, it is dark in the morning, and then dark at dinner time! Our house remains warm and cosy though, thanks to the high levels of insulation we invested in the building process.

Tania has had surgery, a lumpectomy and a lymphectomy, and is at home - and still working, though remotely to save her the added stress of a commute. In early June, once she has recovered from this first round of surgery, she will have a mastectomy and have the lymph nodes removed. Crikey, this is such a process for her. Thankfully once again Tina has travelled to Brisbane to be Tan's advocate, and to be our international correspondent. Hopefully everything will go well.

My mother seems to be well at the moment. She has been getting out and about a bit, having come out to us a couple of times for coffee or lunch. She had to go for a good long drive each week due a problem with her car where the reversing camera was permanently on and draining the battery. The issue took a bit of tracking down, and is now satisfactorily mended. Hopefully she will still want to come for a drive regularly, as it has been nice catching up at cafés around the district. With us focusing on paying off the mortgage over the past eighteen months we haven't been out much.

Jan has been in Auckland at a work-funded Safeguard conference, where he attended a workshop given by one of his safety gurus, Sidney Dekker (which he really enjoyed). Jan had hoped to catch up with Doug & Morv while there, but unfortunately was still feeling pretty low with a cold, and decided not to inflict his germs on the Booth family. A wise decision as he still had the cold when he got home, and it is only just tailing off now (in early June). I caught it from him, but mine, aside from losing me my voice for a few days, was gone pretty quickly. My voice was affected - I think - because the day it all started I had five hours of lectures from 8am to 1pm, and by the end of that I was down to a whisper. I was croaking for a week before I returned to normal, but that was my major symptom ...and not that much of an inconvenience.

John had left the country again, and is now preparing to ride across the USA on his trusty old Norton Commando. It has been shipped to the US and awaits his arrival. This has been one of John's bucket list items for many, many years... let the dream realisation begin!

Our neighbour, Ian B, has purchased a forestry block - but not the trees - at the head of our valley. However, Cyclones Fehi and Gita felled a number of the trees, and the tree owner is currently felling them. This means that Ian will be able to renew his pasture sooner than he had planned. The loggers have been working all month, starting at 5.30 every morning; but not on the weekends, which is nice. They have been doing major repairs on our driveway, having put in two new culverts already, and packing out the softer sections with loads of rock. We will have a very solid pan once they have finished... and all without ny of our own expense. Mind you, I have had three flat tyres this month, so perhaps not entirely without expense.

I caught up with Tracey a couple of times this month for coffee, and have had Warren and Erica come to stay, and Erica on her own. When Erica and Ollie came to stay, we took the dogs right up to the top of the felling area, watched Men In Black and had homemade fish and chips for dinner. Jan lost his broccoli plants (eaten by rabbits or birds), but planted some more under netting on the Western side of the lounge where the tomatoes were. Amazingly Ollie caught a bunny in the front enclosed garden while he was here. Jan now agrees that we need to tear up the front garden netting and re-lay it around the garden beds alone, as there is incontrivertable proof that the bunnies are getting in. 

Warren and Jan put in a base for Jan's set of recovered steel stairs to be footed on, which is what they are admiring at the top of the bank. We aim to have a party at some point where we get our guests to collectively lift the steps into place.

It is cold enough for winter shoes, and the Fluevogs are out again. I do so enjoy them, though am a bit sad this year as New Zealand's only retailer, TimelessSoles in Tauranga, is closing. They are apparently not getting the option to purchase much of a range and it is being limited more and more as time goes on, so have decided to pull the pin.

The limes and lemons are growing well this year: too fast for us to eat them. I might start taking them into work and selling them.

Tessa had her 30th birthday this year (seems outrageous!), and brought Izzy to Nelson to help her celebrate on what would have been my Father's 84th birthday. We had a memorial lunch in his honour, complete with ice cream sundaes, at Smugglers, followed by a shindig at Quebec Road. My voice was non existent, but I still managed to build castles with Izzy using the box of blocks that Mike had made for him.

Jan has completed his first Graduate Certificate in Safety Leadership paper and is waiting to hear if he has passed or not. He is about to enrol on the next paper. He is also currently practicing for two concerts: the NSO's Vienna concert, and then the reopening of the Nelson School of Music (which is now been renamed the Nelson Centre of Musical Arts - NCMA - for some totally obscure reason. People will keep calling it the School of Music until they change the name back, I would imagine).

I have been keeping busy too, with vocational opinions, teaching, research and study. My lectures have now finished and marking is yet to come. My research students are all well-underway with their projects, collecting their primary data, and I am currently almost finished planning for semester 2's intake (where I will have around 50 students enrolled at present and so will need to manage a team of four supervisors - two of whom are new and have never done a paper like this before... that will be another challenge).

Finally I have rewritten my research review article, and will resubmit it to the Australian Journal of Career Guidance early next month. My PhD research proposal is on-going, well-supported by an excellent Skype session with my supervisors mid-month. My next draft is due back to them mid-June, which should go OK as I have time to get the changes made before the last avalanche of marking descends.

Finn continues to grow, still very lean despite shovelling food into him, and now getting very strong. He is a sweetie though:

...and once more the sky has been providing us with a feast for the senses:

I have decided to go dark on Facebook. I will repost the family news on FB, but will not be monitoring, replying to or reading any threads. If you want to read why, my reasons are here. I will still use Messenger, and will repost articles and the family news, but other than that, expect silence.

This month between study and both doing our taxes we have watched Broachchurch series 3, which was very enjoyable, and firmly recommended. We have also watched a Spanish movie about a 'secret agent', called "Anacleto". It was slapstick but quite funny. I have discovered the books of Mavis Cheek, which I am finding a little like an uneasy marriage of Wodehouse (whom I like) and Danielle Steel (whom I don't). They are worth a read if you can get them from the library - as I am doing.

Hartmut and Uta come to stay next month, which will be lovely. 

Righto, time to do my GST. More next month :-)

Sam (& Jan)

An easy correction to sour or bitter soup

I don't usually put cooking tips on our family blog, but I ran into a doozy of a tip today. I was making vege soup, and added too many greens. The soup was bitter when I tasted it.

Gah!

So I went searching, and found a great post by Karen Ahn that went into the ph of everything, and explained what a pinch of bicarbonate of soda would do... and supplied this handy chart to show where items sat on the ph scale.

Two pinches of bicarb later, the soup is spectacular!

• Reference: Ahn, K. (8 July 2014). Use Baking Soda to Neutralize Bitter & Sour Flavors in Food . Retrieved from https://food-hacks.wonderhowto.com/how-to/ingredients-101-use-baking-soda-neutralize-bitter-sour-flavors-food-0156750/

News from Nelson - May 2017

Hi everyone,
Another month has rolled around, and hopefully it will be less stressful than the last one.

We started with a bang: Jenny L came to visit - and stayed - which was great. Warren also stayed for a night with Erica. Warren helped Jan to get the pool table lights finished. Then Jan got one more spotlight to fit over the VERY last electric light wiring in our ceiling, and AT LAST the lights are complete: almost seven years after we moved in.

I decided that for this month I was not going to do any study or work other than that which was already booked: to give myself four weeks break. It was nice to have permission to play for a while.  Jan & I have taken the dogs for lots of walks, and I have been doing at least 11,000 steps per day.

My mother had booked a holiday before my father died: a two week bus tour of the far north. She decided that she would still take the time away, and enjoyed it. It gave her time to think, but also enough structure in her day to prevent brooding. A good balance.

While she had been away, she had all the carpets shampooed. We called around and helped her put her furniture back just after we dropped Warren off at the airport. My mother gave my father's stereo to Erica, who is now a real teen with her own music centre. Except for being ten years old!

I have rediscovered two crime writers: Louise Penny and Jo Nesbo. I now have pretty much all their books as talking books, and am working through them in order. It is proving quite restful. We also got a notification from the Tasman District Council library that the third series of the Danish programme "The Bridge" had come in on DVD. We picked it up and binge watched it.

Jan got access to John's Netflix account, and has been watching all kinds of things. We watched the Crown, which was quite fun. 

Jan, my Mother and I went to see the latest NSO Concert, The World’s Most Beautiful Melodies. It was a good concert, and the spinto soprano was very good in the Puccini ...except for her last two notes (which were screamed, as opposed to sung). Extremely enjoyable aside from just four seconds. There aren't many experiences you can say that about.

We went to visit Kathleen and Frits, taking with us a pair of Fluevogs - Investigators - that I was returning to Timeless Soles as they were too narrow for me. Kathleen got me to open them, saw them, tried them on, and bought them. They are gorgeous on her.

Barb is back in the US, spending time with Joe. She has been to visit the Fluevog shop in DC. I can't wait to see what she has on her feet at my Mother's 80th birthday party in July.

Justine came down for a visit for a few days. We spent some time talking about our experiences in having just lost one parent each, and how we are processing that. We went to small, out of the way places like the Macmillan Gallery and tried to call in on Vickie's Originals (but they were shut. Next time).

We had lunch with Sharon & Ian at the Moutere Tavern, eating inside this time. Another great menu and a relaxing afternoon. Sharon and Ian bought me a shrub to remember my father by, which was very nice of them.

Warren, who is up again to visit Erica, came for a visit in the afternoon with Erica, and we went for a walk down the hill with Ollie and Boo. Jan and Warren had a good chat, and Erica read quite happily. Jan has managed to get Netflix working on his tablet so he can download 50 episodes of Dr Who in preparation for his next hip operation in June.  

Donna suggested that we celebrate my Father's birthday somewhere he liked going, and everyone - aside from me - had a chocolate ice cream sundae in his honour:

Late in the month Uncle Norman had a couple of bad falls, and ended up in hospital with a fractured scapula and broken ribs. He is determined to get home, and is in the AT&R ward again already, undergoing rehabilitation to get him ready to return to his flat. However, when we went to visit him, he is floating in and out of reality: it doesn't seem to me like he can go home in a hurry.

I will be heading for Aussie in July for my doctoral induction, and to have a half-day planning session with my supervisors.

Take care - catch you all up next month.


Sam (& Jan)

News from Nelson - May 2016

Hi Everyone!
The study break arrived at just the right time late last month for me to catch up on all my marking, due to losing so much time from the migraine I had. Since then I bought Dr Stanton's book, and started applying her "Stanton migraine protocol". I usually get a migraine a month, and this month only had one very small migraine (it was very light, and basically meant I went lay down for an hour). Everything else seems pretty normal now.

However, I am not eating any fruit, am limiting carbohydrates (both of those to reduce glucose), along with taking a magnesium supplement. I have hugely increased my salt - I was only eating about a quarter of what the protocol requires before I started. My taste for coffee is still missing in action.

Jan had a concert this month with the Nelson Symphony Orchestra at old St John's. It was entitled "A Night at the Opera", and featured a soprano, a spinto soprano, a tenor and a baritone, with 16 orchestral pieces taken from 10 operas. It was a really great night of music and performance. Tracy and Erica came with myself and my Mum.

I tried a new take on Uncle Eberhard's chocolate mousse recipe: I made caramel and sea salt mousse for the after party. And because it was made with dark chocolate with very little sugar, I could eat a little of it (ha, ha! Ulterior motive!).

Jan photographed this strange and spectacular rainbow from his office window:

We have had a few very spectacular dawns, which I have captured:

Some of my international research students had a lunch to celebrate their project progress thus far in the semester, which was really nice:

While I am not really feeling quite sociable as I used to - I wonder if that's an after-effect of the migraine? - we are trying to ensure we catch up with our friends. Jan feels more sociable than I do, which is a change. We caught up with the Cools's at our place for a morning tea, had a dinner with John and Aniko (who is here from Hungary) at Rose Road, and went to Tracey & Erica's for dinner with Jenny, and had a farewell dinner for John in Richmond as he has now headed back off to Europe for the winter. 

This means that Bonnie is now back with us for the winter, which is great. As John has been living down in Waimea West for the summer, Bonnie has been with him for most of the time, and we have been dogless. It was particularly awful when Jan had to be away on some training trips, and I was completely alone. 

The time is coming for a new puppy...! 


Sam (& Jan)

Graduated

Hi All,
A very brief post, with more to come shortly. Things to do: graduate <tick>

Sam