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Monday, February 5, 2001

I worked upstairs in the office for the morning: a little bit of DTP to keep the newsletter moving forward, check the email and daynoters, file paper. After lunch: into town for me to go to the optometrist and Joan for her appointment with the Ear, Nose & Throat specialist. Joan came out with an appointment to have a scan done of her sinuses on Friday.

I told the optometrist of the problems I have had with the transition point of my glasses from distance to nearer being too high, so that I have to drop my head forward a little when driving. When he looked at the glasses he saw what I meant straight away, and promptly arranged for a new pair of lenses to be made. I am going to have another pair of lenses made for the old frames, which will be distance only -- these I will use for walking (because the main ones blur the ground just in front of you, and I trip on things) and also for watching TV. I tend to slump down in my lounger and consequently peer through the lower part of the lens which is for reading.

I spent the large part of the evening working on an update and reprint of a trophy record I have maintained for my old camera club in Wanganui. It originally came about because, like most clubs, the annual cups and trophies came back each year and were presented to the winners, only to vanish from sight for another twelve months. I proposed that the club have this trophy book to record the names engraved on each cup, and left out during club meetings, so new members could at least appreciate the prowess of the older members -- some of the trophies go back to 1954. It has been most successful, and I update it with the latest names at the start of each year.

My comments on restaurant service in NZ brought an email from Sue.

Tuesday, February 6, 2001

Today is Waitangi Day, a New Zealand-wide holiday; being the commemoration of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. This was the act of union between Maori and European, in which the Maori agreed to give up sovereignty of the country in exchange for the protection of the British Crown. Things went rather well, until the number of European immigrants passed the number of Maori; things have been going downhill every since. There were — in common with every other world colonial community — a number of atrocities perpetrated on both sides; but it was the land grab which has produced Maori feelings of injustice and enmity to this day. I won't go into details, but hope to post on my Life in NZ page from time to time, any cullings from the press on the subject.

Anyway, a cloudy start to the day. Joan disappeared off with Joanna to help choose a cupboard/benchtop for her soon-to-be-refurbished kitchen. I cleared email, then returned to the newsletter I have been working on. Scanned a couple of prints of the staff to put on the back page, placed them into position and wrote the result out to a Zip disk for Don to do the final tweaking.

In the afternoon, I dug out a box of slides dating back to 1994 and scanned them. I have noticed that my gallery pages attract a small but steady trickle of viewers -- and remembered that page 4 was still blank :-( These slides won a club trophy for me in 1994, and are a series of six shots of English letter-posting boxes). So, zip over here and tell me what you think. I have also posted a bio/family page in response to requests, and will try and get a pic of us all to post on it as well.

Wednesday, February 7, 2001

Don came in today with a whole raft of stuff for me to photograph. This is for the clients who grow macadamia nuts; we have done some labels for them, and are to do a web site. I have a carton full of various bags of nuts in all stages from pieces of branch, down to little bags of salted nuts. The light was bad this afternoon, so deferred photography until tomorrow morning. I use natural light for this sort of job, as we have a glass conservatory roof off our dining area.

I attended the first Camera Club meeting of the year; it was the AGM to start with, then we had a visit from one of the local police photographers. He talked about his job and training and then showed us a batch of slides -- carefully selected to minimise the gore. They certainly have a dreadful job to do; he said that he had now photographed 67 bodies in his 22 years in the police -- I don't think that included road accidents, either. He and his partner have to cover a big territory, from south of Lake Taupo to north of Rotorua -- probably over a 170 km stretch of country. NZers willl know the Desert Road -- he is called there often to cover road crashes, and it is invariably raining with low cloud and high winds (of course, that's when the accidents happen). He gets back home hours later, wet to the skin and all the gear soaked as well -- he's got very good at drying out cameras and trying to get them functioning properly. Not a glamour job at all.

I had word tonight that an associate of my late brother who had been in their accountancy practice in Wanganui, had passed away; I had been expecting this as he had been operated on for cancer last August. We will go down to Wanganui (a four-hour drive) on Friday, overnight, then come back on Saturday, as we will be returning the following weekend for a family get-together. That means a big work-day tomorrow.

Thursday, February 8, 2001

We cleared the decks (dining table) in the morning and set about photographing the Macadamia nuts. I had samples of everything from clusters straight off the tree; husked nuts in bags; plain roasted, salted, and honey-cured in bags; two sorts of chocolate-covered; and a couple of bags of Irish Creme macadamia nut fudge. I used a big sheet of blue-grey photo background for some shots, and various arrangements on different tablecloths. Don gave me a list of suggested shots before I started, and he will select the ones he wants to use from the 70 or so that I took. Plus some print scans that he had taken when he visited the orchard.

We usually don't use product shots as they appear; they're likely to be cut from the background in Photoshop before cropping to the required size and web-optimised. They were all reasonably hi-res: 1600 x 1200 pixels actually, and they end up as approx 0.9 MB each. A few of these shoots and you eat up chunks of hard drive; eventually I write the folders out to a CD-ROM and scrub them off the drive.

Into town in the afternoon to drop the Zip disk with the images off to Don, then round to the library to pick up a couple of audio book tapes to play on the car stereo when we go down to Wanganui tomorrow. I rang to book a motel, only to find that the whole town is booked solid with competitors in the NZ Masters Games (the ones for oldies who have kept fit!), so we decided to drive straight back after the funeral. This will mean eight hours of driving for me -- but I will have a long break between the two halves. My sister-in-law Priscilla is flying down to Wanganui in the morning; we will bring her back here to overnight before returning to Auckland on Saturday morning.

I'm off downstairs to get out clothes for the morrow, and crash for (hopefully) a good night's sleep.

Friday, February 9, 2001

10.45 pm: Just back from a long day away. We were a little delayed leaving, as Joan her her hospital appointment at 8.45 am. This took a full half-hour, and then we had to take the x-ray plates to the specialist's rooms. So it was 9.30 am when we left, and 2 pm when we pulled into Wanganui -- we had stopped for a bite at Turangi on the way.

The funeral was held at the Collegiate School chapel -- one of the top three secondary boarding schools in the country. Richard Gilberd had been closely identified with the school since his education there; he had been on the Trust Board for years and Chairman for three. So the school gave him a royal send-off with the full choir, and senior pupils acting as ushers. There was every senior accountant in the city there; Priscilla and I were of course representing my late brother, with whom Richard had been in partnership for some years. After the cup of tea, sandwich and savourys, we made our exit and went back to pick up Joan from her cousin's place.

We left there at 5.15 pm and went up to the Aramoho cemetery for Priscilla and I to visit our respective former spouses in the rose garden; then back on our way at 5.45 pm. We tried to get a meal at Raetihi, about an hour on the road -- but the few eating places were shut. So we pressed on to National Park, about half an hour away, and had a meal in a small place there. We arrived back home, rather weary -- that's about 8 hours driving for me today -- and I'm off to bed.

Saturday, February 10, 2001

A small correction: I had it wrong -- Priscilla is staying until tomorrow morning. We breakfasted, and went off in the car; firstly to watch Eli playing his first game of Kiwi cricket. This is a scaled-down version of the game to suit kids 8 - 11; the rules are modified so that everyone gets a turn to bat and bowl. We then went to deliver a parcel to Joan's cousin, then into town to show Priscilla the site of the mud eruption in Kuirau Park. We returned in time for lunch, then Priscilla and I tidied up some business. The time just flitted away; then at 6 pm we all met at a local restaurant for an evening meal. They do a huge smorgasbord spread and cater for children, so it's a real family eating spot.

Then back home to set up a projector to view some of my 45-year old home movies -- mostly of my family, first wedding etc. I switched on the movie projector to test it, and there was a loud noise -- a drive belt deteriorated beyond repair. I managed to scavenge a rubber belt from my miniature lathe; a bit loose but it served the purpose. We had a couple of hours of old history, including my 21st birthday party. It's amazing how well the old Kodachrome has kept its colour. Looking at the film, I wonder how it would go in my 35mm scanner; I must try a piece. The old 8mm frame is so small, but there may be enough of it to make some small prints of family members long passed on.

Sunday, February 11, 2001

We took Priscilla over to the plane at 9 am to return to Auckland; we did enjoy her short visit. The weather packed up into drizzle, then into rain later in the day — we are getting moist tropical air coming down to us, and it's rather humid. I wasted a lot of time this morning looking up the pricing of various ISPs to see what sort of deals are going for DSL. I'm hosed off with the satellite reception packing up every time there's rain. I need an ISP offering DSL connection who has a free 10 MB web site, and most of them are rather coy about what is included with their monthly payment. The biggest ISP in NZ doesn't have a word about web hosting, other than to display a page promoting their business shopping cart deals; in fact, most of the ISP pages start talking business sites and really don't mention a private one. OK, I can email the most likely — but I shouldn't have to.

I spent the afternoon sorting a carton of old family photos. We are going to a get-together of my late wife Leola's extended family in Wanganui next weekend, and I selected a bunch of the most interesting photos to scan. I've started a page in Ventura of super A3 size, and I'm dropping the photo files onto it ready for printing on the Epson 1520. I've also got to do a big A3+ print of their family tree that I have in Family Tree Maker. Fortunately, Leola went through the carton before she passed on, and annotated the back of most of them with names and places. Later, I'll probably sort them up and distribute to the person in each family group who looks after family history — there's always one of them! There is widespread interest these days in family history [in spite of RBT's derisory comments].