We were warned!

A couple of weekends ago, our second blast of wintry weather was forecast. Here came the first of many snow flurries during the day.

The locals didn't think much to getting their feet wet, I watched as one of the local cats delicately picked its way across our driveway.

And this pigeon was forced to just sit it out.

Ah, but though from behind glass in the warm, it did look pretty.

 

It began to melt properly on day three, making it all look messy and tired again. Down the valley some sad looking large lumps of snow remained where children had built once proud looking snowmen.

All over town the early red rhododendrons dropped their petals. Now a couple of weeks on, they have all fully recovered and bushes are covered once more in blooms.

Snow Days

As we left for our Sunday brunch at the seaside it began to snow.

Angry looking storm clouds at sea, proved what the forecasters had predicted--there was a southerly storm brewing.

The white on the sand dunes is snow - proving snow to low levels was correct!

Deteriorating conditions on the way home.

And a poor view from the supermarket carpark, as we stocked up on frozen food - a good day to shop for frozen food no chance of it melting on the remaining way home.

Couldn't see across the valley as the snow and hail fell.

So we spent the afternoon indoors.

In front of the fire.

Day two dawned and all the snow had turned to ice - so we stayed home again. It's been sunny, but the white stuff is not melting very quickly. The steep icy hills make Dunedin particularly treacherous, the gritters grit but unlike the UK there's no salt in the grit so the roads remain icy.

The Struggle for Existence

There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly moustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents – punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and cases – for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West.

After the wedding the punch-bowls were arranged on the sideboard with the big bowl in the centre; the glasses were set up in the china-closet; the candlesticks were put at both were put at both ends of things – and then the struggle for existence began. The bonbon dish lost its little handle and became a pin-try upstairs; a promenading cat knocked the little bowl off the sideboard, and the hired girl chipped the middle-sized one with the sugar-dish; then the wine-glasses succumbed to leg-fractures, and even dinner-glasses disappeared one by one like the ten little niggers, the last one ending up, scarred and maimed, as a toothbrush holder among other shabby genteels on the bathroom shelf. But by the time all this had happened the cut-glass age was over, anyway.

Quotation: The Cut Glass Bowl by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Penguin 2011

The Blind Man

He went away upstairs. She saw him mount into the darkness, unseeing and unchanging. He did not know that the lamps on the upper corridor were unlighted.He went on into the darkness with unchanging step. She heard him in the bath-room.

Pervin moved about almost unconsciously in his familiar surroundings, dark though everything was. He seemed to know the presence of objects before he touched them. It was a pleasure to him to rock thus through a world of things, carried on the flood in a sort of blood-prescience. He did not think much or trouble much. So long as he kept this sheer immediacy of blood-contact with the substantial world he was happy, he wanted no intervention of visual consciousness.

In this state there was a certain rich positivity, bordering sometimes on rapture. Life seemed to move in him like a tide lapping, lapping, and advancing, enveloping all things darkly. It was a pleasure to stretch forth the hand and meet the unseen object, clasp it, and possess it in pure contact. He did not try to remember, to visualise. He did not want to. The new way of consciousness substituted itself in him.

Quotation: The Blind Man by D.H. Lawrence. Penguin, 2011.

Stress of a Hunger Migration

It would seem, indeed, that these large and agile creatures living in the sea, must, to a large extent, forever remain unknown to us, since under water they are too nimble for nets, and it is only by such rare unlooked-for accidents that specimens can be obtained. In the case of Haploteuthis ferox, for instance, we are still altogether ignorant of its habitat, as ignorant as we are of the breeding-ground of the herring or the sea-ways of the salmon. And zoologists are altogether at a loss to account for its sudden appearance on our coast. Possibly it was the stress of a hunger migration that drove it hither out of the deep. But it will be, perhaps, better to avoid necessarily inconclusive discussion and to proceed at once with our narrative.

Mr Fison, torn by curiosity, began picking his way across the wave-worn rocks, and, finding the wet seaweed that covered them thickly rendered them extremely slippery, he stopped, removed his shoes and socks, and coiled his trousers above his knees. His object was, of course, merely to avoid stumbling into the rocky pools about him, and perhaps he was rather glad, as all men are, of an excuse to resume, even for a moment, the sensations of his boyhood.

Quotation from: The Sea Raiders by H.G. Wells. Penguin 2010

Volcanic Moon

A normal moon-rise over part of the University campus, before the ash plume from the eruption of the Chilean volcano reached New Zealand.

This hand-held shot of the moon taken the following evening, at about the same time, shows a distinctly red moon. Seen through some trees and through layers of atmosphere filled with ash and volcanic dust, it appeared red.

As the moon rose higher in the sky it lost its red colour.

Gulls and Chips

One calm sunny day at the beach, the gulls bothered some people for food. They sniff out free grub easily, even if the grub is safe inside a car with the windows up. Visual cues are important too, as it seems like you only have to pretend to eat and the action of hand to mouth will be enough to elicit gull curiosity.

However, in they are not usually fooled for long, and in this case have decided to settle on the railings.

Or on the beach.

There again there's always one or two who get overexcited and won't settle down for love or money.