Red Skies

Nicky has just popped out to mow the lawn as I sit down to write this. She invited some of her work colleagues to come round for a game of mah jongg after they closed the library up at 4, but they haven’t arrived so we are onto other things. As ever at the moment, our Sunday evening will be filled with tellyboxing, so I am getting this done while I have chance.

Nicky hasn’t had the best of weeks, coming down with a virus on Wednesday night that kept her off work Thursday and Friday. She still wasn’t too good yesterday but perked up late evening and has been feeling much brighter today.

While she was at prison prayer group on Monday evening, I went into town for my first Auckland Conversations event. These are events organised and hosted by the council to discuss the issues facing Auckland in the 21st century. This event’s topic was transport, which attracted some 700+ to the Aotea Centre. This is directly relevant to the current public consultation on the 10 year plan, both in terms of which two transport plans should be adopted (basic or recommended), and how should the recommended plan, should it go ahead, be funded (tax though rates and fuel, or motorway usage charge). The first half hour was taken up by short speeches from the Mayor (Len Brown) and the 5 panelists. The remaining hour was for questions from the floor. Quite a range of views were aired as you can imagine, but the one that people kept coming back to was than none of the councils plans included the promotion of cycling to public transport hubs. The complaint was that the council seem to assume that people will get to work either by train or bus, or by bike, once they can be prised out of their cars, but there was nothing to encourage people to cycle to the train station.

During the discussions, a couple of interesting statistics came out about the two funding options, both of which would raise the same amount of revenue. If a motorway usage charge is used, then 44% of the revenue will effectively come from the business community, but if taxation is used, 32% will come from business. If taxation is used, 15% of the revenue will come from low income families, but if motorway charging is used 11% will come from this group. Setting up the road usage collection system will cost $108M, whereas the system to collect the tax are already in place so this option would cost very little to implement.

On Tuesday morning I took Nicky over to Botany for her annual hearing aid check. The good news was that her hearing hasn’t deteriorated in the last year. She had her aid’s tweaked a little to try and improve mid-range (voice) discrimination. Later in the morning I had a dental checkup (OK but a molar now has a watch on it - I can’t hear the ticking which is good). Jancis came over for dinner followed by mah jongg so we had a good evening.

Nicky was out at the church AGM on Wednesday evening, even though she had started to feel a little off-colour. I went for a swim at Herne Bay on Thursday morning which was very nice until I was leaving the beach and then spotted the NO SWIMMING signs (the council test the water quality 2-3 times a week). It turned out another chap had had the same experience the previous day because they were not positioned in an obvious location when going onto the beach. Nicky decided to go up to the Doctor’s on Thursday morning with her not feeling well and she was due for her 3 month regular prescription visit anyway. While she was there she mentioned that I had be swimming in “unclean” water and that I was still not right after my vertigo at the beginning of the year. The Doc said that if I came out with a rash or had gastric issue I should go and see him (due to the swimming) and sent her home with a request for blood tests for me (for still not feeling 100%). I haven’t come out in a rash or had any gastric issues (other than those related to chocolate abstinence!) so far so that’s good. I had my blood taken on Friday morning and got a call from the surgery on Friday afternoon (!) with a request to “not urgently but on Monday morning see the Doctor”.

I have had a reasonable amount of work on this week, and on Thursday afternoon went to the West Auckland Business Club showcase. This was a small exhibition and some seminar presentations on various topics. I went to a couple of the seminars, one of which was interesting (on social media), and decided to join the Auckland Chamber of Commerce to try and make some business contacts to increase my work turnover.

The weather has been sunny and warm until this weekend, when we started to get some rain showers. One came on yesterday just as I was going off to a house auction on Lewis Street (Nicky didn’t feel quite up to it but wanted to know what happened). It eventually went for $980K, but I though $850 was a more realistic value (this was where the bidding became a real struggle for the auctioneer) as the house was south facing and the sea view was compromised by the other houses. We ended up having a quiet pottering day at home which was good.

Today Nicky went to church and I went to Karekare, which was windy but wonderful. A very high tide was coming in and reaching parts of the beach I have not seen it get to before. We have had a bit of time on the Ratigan with cups of tea this afternoon, along with books and sewing.

We have had some lovely sun rises and sunsets this week. I wonder what do shepherds do when the sky is both red at night and in the morning? Go down the pub and have chips?

Take care, Rick