A misty Auckland dawn this morning. #silentsunday

Today's zen activity: making boxes for boardgame pieces.

@spudooli you guys still doing Fieldays? If so, good luck to you all!

Last weekend we kayaked from St Helliers to Motuihe and camped there the night at the DOC campsite. It's only a two-hour paddle and nice and quiet at this time of year. Beautiful day but chilly at night in the tent.

Today's baking is a focaccia and 4 x small baguettes. Cost around $3.00 in ingredients plus an hour of oven electricity. The house smells amazing!

RE: https://mastodon.social/@damianpeterson/115903475754579738 So, three months and 639 games later I've moved up to 1275 on my chess journey to 1500 Glicko-2 rapid. At this rate (if progress is linear, which it's NOT) I'll need another 5 months and 1027 games to get there. This morning I […]

oh no. There's a Muzza's pies in Birkenhead. I'm duty-bound to try each flavour. My first pie was steak, jalapeno and cheese and was spot on.

Home-grown black turtle beans taste awesome! There's a noticeable difference in the rich flavour compared to the originals I bought from Binn Inn.

It's that time of year again!

Got back from a long holiday to find my harvest.of black turtle beans nice and dry ready for disenbeaning. I'll post the number for our ROI once they're all shelled.

How about let's just ban wet wipes altogether in NZ. Including at the border.

I've just realised "Somebody that I used to know" is the tune of "Baa baa black sheep" and now I can't enjoy it anymore.

My goal this year is to become a better chess player. I'm currently rated at 1135 Glicko-2 on Lichess for rapid and would like to be 1500 by the end of the year. There are a LOT of better chess players than me!

Managed to score a lifetime gym membership for only $27

We had a beautiful kōtare visit our fence this morning. I grabbed some worms from the worm farm and left them on the deck for it. Hopefully he/she becomes a regular visitor.

The baguettes using Minchins flour (2 x white, 2 x high extraction) look pretty good but they feel pretty stodgy unfortunately. May need to increase hydration and/or blend with my pizza flour.

Ahhhhhhh

My Minchins flour has arrived in time for Christmas. Looking forward to experimenting with the different grades. (thanks @stephen for the heads-up)

I'm on 52frames, a weekly photo challenge thing. This week's challenge was "nature" which suits me down to the ground. I've been taking a lot of photos of harakeke and bees lately and spent an hour in Tuff Crater Reserve yesterday. Pleased with how this one came out.

Spotted in a Swedish museum. I like their frankness.

Turns out it's really easy to get rid of water trapped in a temperature gauge: just bung it in the oven for half an hour.

The clouds over Auckland yesterday evening were otherworldly.

Something is happening at The Warehouse HQ in Northcote. Police cars and lots of security people. Looks like in anticipation of something rather than in response.

Not a single wasp caught in my trap for yellow-legged hornets. Lots of ants and the occasional small cockroach. I'm using a simple sugar water mixture with a dot of vinegar to deter bees.

I was looking at campsites up north and came across this photo from 2020. I love it in so many ways. Some daft kid bowling an awesome cricket delivery to nobody, seagull photobombing, covid lurking in the wings about three months away, tents and beach.

This baby praying mantis is helping keep the other bugs off my garden

I managed to capture the nanosecond between a pīwakawaka's change of footing on a fence. These guys move frustratingly fast. Three photos stitched together. Note that the bird's right foot doesn't actually change position on the wire; I had to space the three apart so they didn't blur together.

The last peregrine falcon has fledged! 14:22 on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNKk0ivuWe4 Go well you fantastic pigeon fucking machines. I'll miss you. Hope to see at least one of you again on the same ledge with your chicks in the years to come.

Number 2 peregrine falcon has fledged! At 09:09 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNKk0ivuWe4 One left

One of the falcons as flown! Go back to 09:27 on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNKk0ivuWe4 to see it happen

The Melbourne peregrine falcons are teenagers now and they're feisty. Check out the bloodbath when mum brings home pigeon pie for the kids. (content warning: contains ex-pigeon) https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxuDWlbiNxYWQ_-tLpI1JeF7JmcGgmQAqA?si=mONzWgrFtq8somrH

What's worse? Pirate a TV show, watch it on your computer and deprive the makers of revenue. Or watch it on TVNZ with an adblocker costing them CPU cycles and depriving them of revenue.

I know, I know; this is NOT a safe replacement for a fuse. It's temporary...

I'm out doing the lawn this morning and realised today's the day that all the neighbourhood kids will be out with their cute plastic lawnmowers asking for lollies.

I'm fundraising to set up a delicatessen beside this called Sound Jam.

This morning I checked on my seedlings and was surprised at how much they'd grown overnight. So I set up my camera on a tripod and took a photo every minute for an hour. There's an incredible amount of stuff happening! I'm setting up more experiments to see […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Yesterday I played a game of golf. It's only 1.5km to my local and so I walked there with my bag on my back. It felt so weird walking through suburbia like this but it shouldn't! I mean I'm going to walk another 10km or so once I get there but everyone takes their car. Anyway. I sucked but it […]

@theadmin Is https://pixelfed.nz/ in your control? If so, I'm getting a CloudFlare Invalid SSL Cert warning when loading the page.

I'm enjoying having this livesteam on in the background. It's a pair of Melbourne peregrine falcons tending three chicks brining the occasional dead pigeon for din-dins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oibsohQ14cY

Happy Diwali!

hmmm, I'm not seeing posts from mastodon.nz on my mastodon.social feed.

The local supermarket has avocados for 65c each at the moment so I've made icecream with them (plus sugar, coconut milk and cream). Came out pretty well. At ~$14 for 2L not much cheaper than a good-quality brand though.

They had a Paint and Pint thing at our local Beer Spot tonight. It was a lot of fun!

I'm sure this display unit for Good Massage chairs seemed like a good idea at the time. But it's really just a greenhouse for growing kikuyu and looks like a scene from Fallout now.

Dramatic sunrise over Auckland this morning.

I've managed to skip a Monday. Left Houston late on Sunday and will land in Auckland at 5am on Tuesday. One way to shoot, ooo oo oo, the whole day down.