Scavenging again

For photos that is. Most of them are from the archives, some are new. We haven't been out and about much in the last few weeks what with my GKB being a bit under the weather and then the snow followed by floods. I hope you enjoy them anyway even if you have seen some of them before. 

1:  Crane

We had been to Nunobiki Herb Garden at the top of the Ropeway (cable car, gondola) overlooking the beautiful city of Kobe in Japan. Travelling back down and naturally taking photos of the view we spotted this building being constructed. The crane was in the centre of the building on a gantry and as the building pushed skyward the crane was also heading skyward. Three photos I'm afraid.

2:  Ring

A cinnamon roll (ring?) I had for lunch one day whilst out with my GKB. Technically not a ring but with a smidgen of imagination it could be - it's circular, sort of :)

3:  Set

My DIL was baking and when I went out to the kitchen this is what I saw. I have never seen a cake cooling like this before but apparently it stops the weight of the cake from flattening itself. Who would have thought? Not me. Anyway I thought this cake was well enough 'set' to put in this post. I hope you all agree :)

4:  Light

Light reflecting off the top of the display case containing antique pocket watches. We took this photo in the jewellers/watchmakers shop in Shantytown earlier in the year.

5:  Bow

The bow used to be the pointy bit of the boat and landlubbers like myself could tell one end from the other. But looking at these two ships I'm not sure which end is the bow and which is the stern but I believe the ship on the left is bow toward us. If not we can see both ends of the ship on the right so one end must be the bow. Mission accomplished! Phew.

6:  Spring

Out visiting the local vet one 'spring' day and this was 

what I saw over the fence. 'Spring' lambs and one

 of them is 'springing'. 

7:  Open

Only 'twasn't. In fact it had been shut for a couple of weeks and was due to reopen the following day. We took this while strolling around one of the city suburbs one lunchtime and thought number  one son and DIL might be interested in visiting Kamome for a meal sometime. 

8:  Grand

We certainly felt grand sitting in these throne like chairs when out for dinner one evening with friends while on holiday. If we had realised how grand the setting was going to be we might have taken some grander (cringe) gear to wear. Still everyone enjoyed the dinner and the company and that's what it was really all about.

9:  Park

A sign pointing to a car park in a national park. Jacksons is a small place in Arthur's Pass National Park in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. If you blink  passing through you could well miss it, literally. There's a pub and not much more. That is the car park on the left, the sign on the right and it is surrounded by beautiful national park. 

10:  My own choice

A Thrush singing his lungs out one grey day.

 Just enjoying being alive

Joining Hawthorn and friends over at 

  I live, I love, I craft, I am me  

Weather watch

 I wondered what I was going to share this week as it has been a quiet time around here. But the last  24 hours gave me something, be it ever so little. A few of you might have seen the odd post where I've shown our benign Silverstream. Well it's benign in the summer but today that has changed.

summer on the floodbank

We had some of this weather below today which rapidly changed

 to extremely strong winds and very heavy rain.

autumn on the floodbank

Resulting in a not so benign Silverstream.

today

A lot of sandbagging was happening in the Silverstream area during the day.  This is at the bottom of our street but our house is built quite high off the ground, luckily. The rain is still coming down, it hasn't let up since it began this morning.

So now we wait to see whether it breaches the floodbank.

Well that's snow and rain out of the way, I wonder what's next?

Diana

Oh dear, there's just been a snowy forecast for tomorrow :)

Randomosity

I'm feeling a bit tired this week so I have just picked 

some random photos to post and will share them with 

Five on Friday and Friday Foto Friends.

My GKB playing at Shantytown on the West Coast. 

I will one day do a post on Shantytown as  promised

 but just now my head is not in the right space.

Some cute coffee mugs I was given during the past year that have been sitting in their gift wrapping. I finally decided they could go on a shelf in the kitchen along with one or two others I have.

New Zealand won the America'sCup yacht race this year and yesterday there was a parade in the city to show it off to the proud locals. It has been paraded through several of the bigger cities during the past week and ours was the final one. DIL was  in town and took this picture, the young captain is just obscured by the trophy. Unfortunately my GKB has been a bit under the weather so we didn't venture in this time.

Talking about the weather, we have just had an arctic blast travel the length of the country and  so we had a bit of a snowfall. Not much here but it has been heavy throughout the rest of the country and because most of our city is built on hills it was covered. Once again we haven't been out taking photos, decided it was best to stay home and keep warm. My GKB just took this nonsense one of our picnic table in the yard.

Because it has been so cold I have been doing jigsaws, a good winter pursuit. I just finished this one and today put it away and started on another one. When I finished I had two pieces left over, it wasn't until after I took this photo that  saw the hole in the middle. 

I fixed that but still had another piece left over from a totally different puzzle. Weird.

My GKB seems to be besotted with starlings, he finds the markings on them quite fascinating. This one was spotted (in more ways than one) on a neighbour's chimney pot, feathers ruffled to ward off the cold. Isn't he a beauty?

And seeing as starlings are critters I think I would also like to join Eileen for Saturday's Critters.

Feeling blessed

The phone rang about mid morning. I had won a hamper at the local pharmacy in a raffle for the Cancer Society. I'd totally forgotten I'd bought a ticket so it was a lovely surprise. I really was only thinking of it as a donation. I will have to share it, there is so much there but I'm sure between all the girls in the family we will soon sort it out :)

Later in the day my daughter called in. She had been given sausages, cream cheese, fresh milk and a tray of  quail eggs - all off a farm. There's too much here for me Mum, do you want some?  So of course I said yes. Later my son arrived home and he had been given samples of honey and barbecue sauce to bring home. Yum :)

We had the sausages for tea and DIL has been making cheese cake to beat the band. It is all so delicious.

To finish the day off there was a beautiful double rainbow 

over the town. I'm afraid I didn't get a very good picture 

of it as it was a very cold day and starting to rain again.

It's hard to see the second bow but I promise if you look hard enough you will see it.

*******************

A little bit of an update on what is happening with my wee Mum.

She is still awaiting surgery but her local referring surgeon is so disgusted with the treatment she has had (or lack of it) up 'til now  that he has referred her to another hospital which has also started doing the procedure she needs. We have already heard from them and are now awaiting a date once more but it should come in the next few weeks. Mum has been getting so frustrated at times with not knowing what is going on but now is feeling a lot more positive and her general health seems to be better. Thank you to all who have prayed for her and asked about her. We appreciate you all :)

Diana

A photo scavenger hunt

I am joining in a photo scavenger hunt this week with Hawthorn and friends over at I live, I love, I craft, I am me. Some of the photo's are from the archives, some I have used recently and some of you will have seen them before but I hope you still enjoy them.

1:  The setting sun

We had been up the coast to visit the blowholes and the pancake rocks. At the end of the day we headed back to daughters holiday accommodation for a pizza tea. This is the view we had of the sunset over the Tasman Sea from the upstairs sitting room :)

2:  My local wild place

This is a garden in the town where my GKB grew up, so although it is local it is not local local. It is on a hill on the other side of the city. It was established by the artist Ralph Hotere and overlooks the Otago Harbour. All of the plantings are native trees and bushes and those legs you see belong to a sculpture by Shona Rapira Davies titled They do cut down the poles that hold up the sky. A lovely peaceful place to sit and relax and enjoy the native bush without leaving the city.

3:  Mug of favourite drink in the garden

Christmas Day 2016. The family had gathered at youngest daughter's home to celebrate. Dinner was over, the dishes were all cleaned up and put away and it was time to take a cup, or glass, of our favourite drink and relax somewhere and chat. The photo below is me, my daughter and grandaughter sharing a quiet moment together in the backyard. The other two possibly had a glass of wine but my drink of choice was instant coffee, made the way I like it :) Goodness knows where everyone else was, there were at least 20 of us there for the day.

4:  My kind of beautiful

Isn't she beautiful? Well I'm guessing this is a she, cos she looks pregnant to me. Anyway I love these big draught horses and you don't see them around much these days. Don't ask me the breed, I couldn't tell you, I took the photo from the car while we were doing some sightseeing last time we were up Middlemarch way .

5:  Look to the skies

On the same trip up to Middlemarch this was early evening sky at the camping ground we stayed at. My GKB took this photo and some people have said the cloud formation looks like a giant hand in the sky. Anyway I think it is quite dramatic.

6:  Mini beasts

Well you can't see the mini beasts as they are inside the nest. 

This is the nursery web of a nursery web spider and the babies stay inside for couple of weeks. I guess if you don't mind spiders you won't think of them as beasts but if you see them magnified they are very definitely little monsters.

7:  Rain

One evening late last winter we had a shower of rain. Or maybe it was early in spring as I see new buds on these branches. Overnight we had a good old frost. In the morning my GKB took a sequence of photos. The raindrops had frozen on the bare branches of this bush and it looked rather pretty with the early morning sun shining on them. A little like the spindly little bush had been draped with a string of diamonds :)

8:  Something summery

Flowers always say summer but this is 
a photo I love, taken one hot day last summer.

Wouldn't you have thought it would be easier to just get under the table instead of clambering up on top of it to find the little bit of shade afforded by the sun umbrella? This puppy is a real character :)

9:  Urban wilderness

What can I say? An urban area in the wilderness. 

Queenstown, New Zealand.

10: My own choice

Parked up for the winter, caravans on a
 bleak winter's evening in Central Otago.

I hope I haven't been too wordy

See you next week.

Diana

A different catch.

The fish weren't biting so my GKB took photo's instead.

Here's a sample.

Did you spot the fishing rod?

joining friday foto friends

Pike River Mine

Several of you asked about the relevance of the manikins at the entrance to the Pike River Mine in my last post. Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia explaining about the explosions that occurred at the mine in Nov. 2010. I've written a bit of an update further down.

The Pike River Mine disaster was a coal mining accident that began on 19 November 2010 in the Pike River Mine, 46 kilometres (29 mi) northeast of Greymouth, in the West Coast region of New Zealand's South Island. A methane explosion occurred in the mine at approximately 3:44 pm (NZDT, UTC+13). At the time of the explosion 31 miners and contractors were present in the mine. Two miners managed to walk from the mine; they were treated for moderate injuries and released from Greymouth Hospital the next day. The remaining 16 miners and 13 contractors,^[2] often referred to as the twenty-nine,^[3] were believed to be at least 1,500 metres (4,900 ft) from the mine's entrance.^[4]
Following a second explosion on 24 November at 2:37 pm, the 29 remaining men were believed by police to be dead.^[5] Police Superintendent Gary Knowles, officer in command of the rescue operation (Operation Pike) said he believed that "based on that explosion, no one survived."^[6] A third explosion occurred at 3:39 pm on 26 November 2010,^[7] and a fourth explosion occurred just before 2 pm on 28 November 2010.^[8] According to the new mine owner, Solid Energy, the bodies of the 29 miners who died there may never be recovered.

It was a very tragic time for the people of the coast which is a relatively small community with most people probably knowing someone concerned in the disaster. The families of the miners have been campaigning ever since to have the remains of their men brought out so they could be given decent burials but the government hasn't allowed that to happen. They said the mine had to be sealed up without anyone being able to go in to see if it was even possible to do. The families put up the 29 manikins to remind the drivers of vehicles, private and commercial but especially those employed to do the sealing, that there are still the remains of 29 men waiting be brought out. Although I haven't seen them myself I believe it is quite an eerie sight (my brother's words, his photo) and quite an emotional place to be.

Just after we had been there at Easter there was a stay put on the sealing which gave the families time to breathe and regroup so

 to speak. Tonight on the news we learnt that new footage

 from inside the mine has been released and it looks like the

 area where the men were thought to have been may not have

 been affected by fire as was first thought. So now we wait and

 see what happens. Personally I think they should go in and have

 a look and maybe bring about some sort of closure for everyone, not only the families but everyone around the country. 

According to a recent poll 39% of the people agree with me.