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Monday, January 1, 2001

We did manage to stay awake last night to see the magic turnover of the digits on my watch to display '1-1-01'.

<rant warning> For a change, it showed the digits the right way round, instead of that idiot convention [imposed by Americans] that the month digit should come first. Along with archaic measures [discarded by the rest of the world] such as pounds, and Fahrenheit, and gallons, and inches - and paper sized as letter, not A4, so that Microsoft can impose its defaults upon us willy-nilly. I can tell you, that date thing causes untold hassle for genealogists who work internationally: "Is that date 4/6/2000 actually 4th June, or is it supposed to be April 6th?" </rant>

Finished the cabinet referred to yesterday and transported it over to Don and Joanna's house in Lisa Crescent, together with the cooking top. The oven will have to go over tomorrow. Again, today we had intermittent showers, just when it looked that the weather was fining up - which meant that the camper-trailer still hasn't been cleaned out ready for our break. Hopefully, that may change later in the week.

I spent the afternoon attending to Linley. You will remember that I had formatted the drive for a dual Windows/Linux setup, and today installed Win98SE. I then installed PowerQuest BootMagic, changed the BIOS to CDRom boot, inserted the Mandrake 7.1 distro, and lit the blue touch-paper. This time through, I remembered to tell the install program to put the boot info into the Linux partition instead of the MBR - which last time let LILO walk all over BootMagic. Rebooted, changed the boot priority back to A,C,CDRom; rebooted. Bootmagic came up, I selected Windows - and there it was! Reboot, select Linux - SUCCESS!

At that point I had to leave computers and drive us over to Lisa Crescent, where Joanna had prepared a New Year's Feast: roast loin of pork to a recipe of the English TV personality 'Naked Chef', with vegetables. Then a dessert by Martha Stewart - pear and ginger trifle. All accompanied by a nice Australian white burgundy and the remains of a traminer from earlier in the week.

Back home to attack the site housekeeping that takes place at the start of each new week. Do some research and preparation of new Life in NZ topic, write this drivel, now to upload and get off to bed. CUL

Tuesday, January 2, 2001

The day started reasonably, with intermittent bright sunshine -- but dry. We hurried through our breakfast and headed outside to deal to the camper-trailer. A list of jobs was waiting for me: nothing major, but little problems that had turned up last time the camper was used -- back last April I think. The canvas sides had been letting in a little water when we had experienced some heavy rain, so I found a tin of waterproofing stuff and brushed it onto the corners. I think a certain amount of friction here had disturbed the proofing. The stuff had a petroleum spirit base, and we wanted to have a reasonable amount of sun on it to disperse the vapour. Of course the inevitable shower came along in the afternoon, and we had to hurriedly drop the fibreglass lid down to keep things dry. Hopefully I'll be able to finish airing it tomorrow.

We also had to locate the bedding in our storage area -- sleeping bags and pillows put away for the winter. Actually we are surprisingly comfortable in the camper; even down to a microwave and a six-inch colour TV. Joan got busy and took all of the cutlery, plates, cups etc inside and ran them through the dishwasher; cleaned the cupboards and the floor, so now we're ready to go -- when the weather improves. We've had some amount of rain most days for the last month.

Lots of time spent [while it rained] trawling through my fellow Daynoters' sites. I realised that if I only look at 12 sites for four minutes each, that takes 48 minutes; so I'll have to be a little selective. The problem is, every site is interesting <g>. Just have to work out a rota.

Back to Linley after tea and TV, to find that my Windows install boots OK, but Linux has done something to the Logical drive D where I had put programs and data. In the immortal Syroid phrase, WTF??? Nothing for it but to boot up with my Partition Magic floppies, to find that the partition was there, but made primary and totally inaccesible to PM. So I had to delete it, convert to an extended partition and create another FAT32. Reboot and confirm that Windows was back into shape -- but has anything happened to Mandrake??

Reboot and check; on the load there are two <failed> messages. When KDE desktop appears, I click on the icon for Win drive D and was informed it could not be mounted. Aha! The installation process, or setting up LILO must have been the culprit -- it desperately wanted to look at that partition so just converted it to Linux's way of thinking. Just goes to show that different OSs really don't like each other on the same hard drive. Probably should have installed Win98 after Linux was happy.

One more step up the learning curve; I feel like deja vue all over again -- remembering going from Commodore Basic to DOS to Win3.1 and fumbling along from crash to crash. But at least in those days I didn't try to do it on the same machine simultaneously -- not that I would have attempted anything so smart with a 10 MB hard drive and 512 KB RAM.

Wednesday, January 3, 2001

The doorbell went at 8 am this morning: Rebeccah and her friend Ana. She had slept over at Ana's house, and walked around to us, as Ana's parents were off to work. That got us going, as the festive season is inclined to make one slothful.

Opened up the camper to air the canvas and let Joan put all the clean kitchen stuff back in the cupboards. She went off to town with the two girls by bus, and left me in peace to catch up with office work. I had lunch and drove over to Lisa Cresc to collect Joan, and to transfer Don's Excel cashbook files over to their computer so Jo can work on them at home instead of coming here.

Closed the camper up when we came home, then mowed the lawns -- now nice and dry, even though long, lush, green grass has taken advantage of the warmth and moisture of the last two weeks to become rather intractible. When I moved to Rotorua, I disposed of the large self-propelled mower I had in Wanganui because it was heavy and awkward to manoevre on the much smaller lawns here. I bought a small Honda rotary mower which is light and easy to push, and being a Honda, it starts first pull of the cord. The problem is that it has a small-capacity bag to catch the clippings, and when the grass is long it tends to clog in the bag mouth. Consequently I have to stop frequently and empty the clippings; these are sought after by the Head Gardener so I have to carry the bag round to the back of the section [USA= lot] and dump in places directed. But the lawns do look good when I have finished.

I am updating these Kronikles early tonight, so I can transfer the site to Ace the laptop. I will be taking my Nikon Coolpix 800 camera and a PCMCIA adapter for the CompactFlash, so should be able to post some pix while we are away. We're going to drive an hour or so to a small town called Cambridge, leave the camper in the camping ground for the day, and drive up to Auckland to visit my recently-widowed sister-in-law Priscilla. We'll overnight in Cambridge, then move off to Wanganui, about 5 hours drive south on the west coast.

Thursday, January 4, 2001

Up smartly this morning, breakfasted, and packed the camper. It was 10 am before we left; no matter when we start, it always seems to be 10 before we're ready. <g> The traffic was heavy, and slow -- which didn't make much difference because I was slow too. In NZ, if you are towing a trailer, you're limited to 80 km/h (open road speed limit is 100 km/h = 60 mph). It doesn't take long to collect a whole string of cars behind you, as most of our roads are single-carriageway (to use the Brit's terminology). Every so often there are extra lanes on one side or other -- usually when going up a hill -- which allow traffic to pass. The considerate trailer-tower takes any opportunity to pull over into wider road areas.

We looked at the traffic ahead of us, then decided to give Cambridge a miss, go to a much smaller town called Morrinsville to leave the camper, then drive up to Auckland on a much less-travelled route. This worked out well, although the traffic was still reasonably heavy. We parked in a cark-park in central Auckland about 1.30 pm, and met Priscilla at a Chinese restaurant for Yum Cha. To introduce her: Priscilla is our Chinese sister-in-law whom we love dearly and look out for, now that my brother has passed on. She is a chartered accountant, but is working for IBM; she has been specialising in implementing teleco billing software as a project manager, but is now moving into sales. She is always jetting around the world to some country or other, so we don't see as much of her as we would like.

After eating, we drove north to a newly completed shopping centre, not a mall, but more what is being called 'bulk retail'. Joan was curious to see this; we looked in a few places, but it was very hot and time was getting on. We dropped Priscilla back in the city so she could collect her car, and set off down the motorway to go back to Morrinsville. Unfortunately the motorway runs out after about 30 minutes driving, so it was back to traffic queues.

The Morrinsville camping ground was part of the Agricultural & Pastoral Association showgrounds. Like a rural American county fair, New Zealand towns all have an area set aside as a 'showground'. Once a year, the farmers bring in their prize cattle and sheep for judging, ladies bake for cake competitions, there are Irish and Scottish dancing competitions, wood-chopping competitions etc etc. And, there is always sideshow alley and merry-go-rounds. The rest of the time, the facilities are used as sportsgrounds -- and in Morrinsville there is a District Council-sponsored camping ground.

We pulled up on the wide grass sward: a facilities block, one lonely caravan (with truck 'for sale'), and several posts with power outlets. On enquiring of the caravan occupant, he directed us to the caretaker's cottage way on the other side of the grounds. I paid my money ($NZ14 = $US6 for the power site and received a key for the toilets and kitchen. These were basic concrete-block, but very clean -- we don't mind it a bit basic, but it's gotta be clean. <g> So up went the camper lid, fasten down the canvas sides, plug in the power cord, and we were in business. It's now 9 pm, the twilight is fading, and I'll try to get this posted to the server by my cellphone. Off to Wanganui tomorrow, about 5 - 6 hours drive from here.

Friday, January 5, 2001

The day dawned bright and sunny, the air crisp and the dew cold on the feet as one walked over to the toilets. We had the camper gear stowed and the lid down by 10 am, and away down the raod by 10.15 after we left the key at the cdaretaker's house. The sun started to shine hot and we threaded our way through sealed back roads towards Cambridge. Stopped there for a cup of coffee -- I should mention for my North American readers that NZ has adopted the Continental/Italian coffee habit enthusiastically. Here we found a small roadside cafe which turned out as good a cup of coffee as we had tasted anywhere -- I had a bowl latte and Joan had a long black espresso with cream. Try going into a similar place in Britain and asking for that, and they'll look at you blankly and tell you they can do some instant coffee.

We found the roads reasonably free of traffic, probably because it was by now the middle of the day. The weather remained good all the way down through the centre of the island, and we reached Wanganui about 4.30 pm. I shot some photos which I'll try and get posted tomorrow. The motor camp we stay in is one of the best in NZ for facilities.

We arranged to meet friends for a meal at a chartered club -- chartered means they can sell liquor to members, and most have a restaurant attached. We stopped on the side of the road on the way back to the motor camp, as the phone reception there is not sufficient to maintain a data link. More tomorrow.

Saturday, January 6, 2001

Arose leisurely -- as befits the holiday spirit -- and went into town about 10 am to visit my favourite mens' clothing shop. I've been dealing there for the last 20 years or so; I get good service there, but they do specialise in larger sizes. For most of the clothing stores, the world stops at XL size; if they do have anything bigger it's usually cheap and short-lived or extremely basic in cut and fit. Managed to find two pairs of jeans and a couple of shirts which are lightweight and hopefully will not require ironing. These are to take away overseas when we go to Greece and Crete in May - more of that as time unfolds.

We returned to the camp for lunch, then went to visit a couple of old friends and catch up with their doings. We then went on to a cousin of Joans; they chatted while I whipped photos out of the digital camera via a PCM card into the laptop. I massaged them down to web resolution and size, quickly formatted a couple of pages [there's an updated garden page] and set them up. Then uploaded them to the site by modem, much faster than my 9600 baud GSM phone.

Email from Barbara Thompson: Your camping trip sounds like fun and I am enjoying reading about it. I hope you will be posting some pictures of the areas you are traveling to and your camper. You'll find a separate camping page to satisfy curiosity. As you'll see, we don't stint the creature comforts; the beds are comfortable and there are all the necessities of living -- sometimes a bit basic, but still there. It's not for everyone; some of our friends must think us a little strange -- but it's great to be able to suddenly decide that the weather's settled, nothing urgent is pressing, so empty the house fridge into the camper one, grab some clothes and just go. The family can reach us in most places by mobile phone, and if I do happen to be out of range, every day or so I'll drive to where I can ring them and check in. But that's only necessary if we are in a really isolated place -- mostly we stay in towns and there is no problem with the phone coverage.

One of the joys of camping when you're getting older, is the 2 am stroll over to the toilet block, with a jacket to keep you warm and the grass making your feet wet with dew. We usually wake at the same time, and go together; often under a brilliant moon or bright starry night. We thankfully don't have any air pollution here to dull down the night sky, although street lights do drop contrast by reflecting off water vapour and dust in the air.

Sunday, January 7, 2001

After breakfast this morning, we headed up the road to a local winery, Holly Lodge. Joan had previously had some peach liqueur, purchased for an outlet in Taupo. We had a tasting session, and ended up with a bottle each of peach and strawberry liqueur. These are great for jazzing up a fruit dessert. The building itself is one of the local historic places, early timber construction, probably in the late 1800s.

In the winery.	Holly Lodge

The rest of the day we spent doing our visiting of friends and relations, and ended up with friends for the evening meal, very convivial and good conversation. Tomorrow we pack up the camper and head north past Mt Taranaki (Maori name, previously known as Mt Egmont) to a small town called Stratford. We'll do some more visiting on Tuesday before heading home.