The stuff of life

I did remember to post up those pics. I just forgot to mention it on the blog :) As there are (I'm told) some issues with finding the link among those relatively new to following blogs (Hi Dad!) you need to click here to see the gallery or click here to go stright to the slideshow.

I don't know about you, but the Picasa server seems to be getting slower and slower, making the images change before they've properly loaded. I'm moving the show to something more slick, I think, it would be a sham eto make them smaller files just to suit Mr Google. These days, I have to admit, things like that just have to be Flash-based, such that the whole show loads up before you view it, and your viewer isn't left wondering whether the strange and tediously developing image is supposed to be part of the presentation. Bro' Mark has finally launched himself webward with a fun showcase of his lovely work, nice and clean, simple and Flash. His other page is my favourite, so it's going on the favourite links sidebar :)

Scorching hot again here today, mercifully only 91% humidity so it was only really bad when you went out into the sun. The atmosphere's ultra-clear so you get full-on UV rays, not filtered the way they are back in Spain, and I swear you can actually feel it penetrating right though your hat. In other news, we finally got the growth charts up again and while Elly has achieved a very respectable three centimeters since September, Oscar has managed almost six. Saved us a fortune in summer clothes, as his previously long pants are now cool-looking three-quarter cutoffs.

Niki's term started off really hard, having lost her bessie mate teacher to the posh school Elly goes to, losing our kids after such lovely long holidays and gaining only another classful of incredibly rude and insubordinate ones. It's a real uphill struggle but she seems to be making headway against all the odds and is even starting to push through some changes to the hapless school regime. They don't deserve her, basically, and I've no doubt they'll miss her when we bog off and find somewhere that does. Doing really well on the bike though, being one of those nutters you see out on training rides before it gets light most mornings a week. We'll have her doing that Taupo Ironman yet :))

Me, I'm another uphill struggle. Motivation isn't a problem but direction definitely is. I feel I could do just about anything here at least as well as the best of them, but there's precious little calling or obvious demand for any of it. I see "gaps" everwhere, from reportage wedding photography to wacky patio installations, and whereas the Kiwis seem (on the face of it) to be progessive, up-for-anything types, they're colllectively very conservative, happy with the way they do things and not really up for anything new. Maybe it's just Auckland, in fact we're both convinced it is just Auckland. Our next trip south will be with bags full of very loaded questions and unreasonably high expectations.

I drove out to North Shore tonight to pick up some speakers I won on TradeMe (eBay here is a joke, try it!) They're great, apart from the huge big dent I put in one of them when I dropped it on it's way into the house :-/ It was one of those journeys that typifies living here in a very literal sense: I stopped off for some speaker cable at Dick Smiths (a kind of NZ version of Tandy) over in Sylvia Park, which for me is the worst kind of shopping mall. Not your big out of town mall – nothing in Auckland is out of town – just an ugly, sprawling, concrete carbuncle flanked by motorway flyovers. If it didn't sound like a cross between open greenbelt and a Swedish porn star I'd probably be more forgiving. The traffic was shocking into the city and I crawled along under leaden skies in the sticky heat for what seemed like hours.

Then suddenly I was cruising over the harbour bridge, five lanes of open sea views, volcanic islands to the right, rolling hills to the left. The sun comes out. My seller is a typical Kiwi; affable, honest, vague, a bit odd... but all is in order, the drive back is smooth and clear, and I inevitably think, "why isn't it like this all the time?"

That's just it though, you can't ever pin it down. It changes like the weather and leaves you none the wiser. One thing's for sure: tomorrow, it'll be exactly the same.

Something new under the sun

Looks like folks back in the northern hemisphere are having a hellish winter at the moment and I guess we really shouldn't complain about the NZ summer, especially considering what's going on across the ditch (as they say here) with high summer and countless bushfires pushing temperatures up into the forties. Victoria is a real horror story right now, enough to make you want to spend the rest of your life on a freezing Hebridean island: nearly 200 dead and loads more injured, upwards of a thousand homes destroyed, half a million hectares reduced to fields of charcoal. We could have boiled our heads and still have been relatively well-off. At times though, boiled – or maybe steamed – is pretty much how your head feels in Auckland... I thought I'd lived in some hot places but this week's been an eye-opener.

When I checked the forecast last weekend it looked good – maximum 25 degrees, light nor'westerlies, dropping to 20 overnight... nice eh? Er, No. Not nice at all, in fact bloody awful, with humidity turning out to be more than "a bit on the high side" and actually reaching 100%. If you've never experienced 100% humidity, imagine going out on a hot summer's day wearing a black polythene bin liner, with just your head poking out the top (this is one of those drawstring bags, right, with the white cords tied in a nice bow at the neck, like you might be going somewhere posh for dinner. Only not, cos you'd wear, like, a nice dress or whatever, but you get the idea) then, just as it's getting good and sweaty in there, you take a deep breath through the tiny holes thoughtfully punched out of the bottom of the carrier bag you have over your head. You can breathe, but it's as if you've swapped your lungs for gills. Terminal humidity feels a bit like that, but without the public ridicule and sudden weight loss.

Tuesday was just insufferably hot, even though it was only 28º... I had to find out why. I was sweating so much I thought I would short out the keyboard, but I eventually Googled something called a heat index, which is (appropriately enough) sort of the opposite of your English wind chill factor; a way of expressing how hot it feels at a given level of humidity. It's really interesting, but if thermodynamics isn't your cuppa, you could skip this bit:

The higher the water content of the air (ie relative humidity), the hotter it seems to be to us humanoids, because we rely on the air to carry away our perspiration and thereby cool us down. Max out the relative humidity and no more water can enter the air, sweat will not be carried off, flapping your arms up and down like a pantomime seagull has no effect whatsoever, and it feels oppressively hot even when it isn't.

Geddit? No? Ok, look under the kitchen sink, you'll find some black bin liners... or, using a handy online heat index calculator, dial in 100% humidity and discover that 28ºC translates into a "feels like" temperature of 37ºC and when "normal" temperatures get up to 30º (as they surely will) our solidarity with the Aussies' 40+ will have been achieved, or at least it'll feel like it has...

I kind of remember some occasional very humid days in Spain but I'm sure it was never this oppressive. Apparently the Middle East is the worst, getting up to heat-stroke-inducing HIs of 55 and beyond. A few years back the Canadians, inventors of the wind chill factor, set up heat index thing called the humidex to give their citizens a meaningful forecast of the day's "feels like" temperatures. They also worked out that a humidex factor of 40 is enough to cause "great discomfort". I tell you what, they're not wrong either. Wednesday was almost unbearable. Going outside for some air was exactly like walking into a small bathroom after someone's had a really hot shower. No wind, no air, just a strength-sapping outdoor sauna. Eventually, as night drew in and the air cooled a little it started to, well, not rain as such, more break out into a wispy, directionless vapour, drifting about rather than falling, as if the air itself had broken into a sweat.

Niki spent the whole week trying to get cold, which will sound as bizarre to her friends up north as I'm sure it will to herself, come July. I know I keep harping on about it and I'm sure It'll all seem quite normal after a couple of years here, but it is a very odd thing to be feeling in February. Even Elly remembers seeing out our last winter in wind-battered Chester-le-Street, with the cold howling up the high street and straight through several layers of clothing. Tomorrow it'll be one year exactly since we moved there from Spain, steeled against it all, full of hope that we'd end up somewhere warmer before the year was out. Put like that, we really can't complain at all.

I just realised I've been moaning on about the weather so much I forgot to upload those pics. I'll get it done this weekend, somewhere between the beach and the barbie, I guess :)