Still chill

Snow continues to fall; snow on snow.

The practical upshot of this is that the first fall of snow settles and packs down, like the flour in the bottom of the sack, under its own weight or trodden down by small boys/Christmas revellers/car scrapers. It melts very slightly in the degree or so of warmth afforded by the midday sun and at night this millimetre of water freezes to a near frictionless surface of ice.

New snow overlays this miracle of physics with an impossibly beautiful covering of crisp yet powdery sugar frosting like a white sahara. "Treacherous" doesn't come near to describing this combination of awesome beauty and lethal potential. Broken bones and smashed cars abound, as do snowmen.

Simon and I spent the afternoon building ours and he's proof that those hours of reading Calvin and Hobbes were not wasted. He is a jolly, seasonal but strangely disturbing presence in the garden with his mushroom dark glasses and sharp sticks hair. A triumph.

Thongor and the Boulders of Doom

Last weekend we drove north from Dunedin, stopping at a fine secondhand shop called The Oddity where I picked up all but two of the Thongor series of chronicles - you know the ones - for a few dollars. The titles tell all:
The Wizard of Lemuria (Thongor the Barbarian faces the vengeance of the Dragon Kings)
Thongor In The City Of Magicians
Thongor At The End Of Time (joyfully, not the last of the series !)
and Thongor Fights The Pirates of Tarakus
Several coffees and junk shops later we meandered through Oamaru.

Somewhere up that coast we stopped to view the Moeraki Boulders, an extraordinary collection of spherical rocks each about the height of a man and lying in the surf on a narrow sandy beach. Other tourists wandered, as we did, in a bemused way along the tight strip as waves broke over these dinosaur egg alien pod gallstones, as if luggage had been washed up from an unseen tragedy. I took photos, sat on one and wondered, as I often do, how to respond to them. Thongor would have known what to do.

In Oamaru two motels diverged on a wide street and we took the one less travelled by. It was, you may say, satisfactory.

Thereafter we headed upstream along the Waitaki river, stopping at Peebles.

That's right. Peebles.

Coraline

Took Simon and a friend to see Coraline 3D on Saturday; a great adaptation of a gothic book by Neil Gaiman. 3D technology is used intelligently to bring stop-motion style animation to life and sensibly avoiding cheap frights. The story unfolds slowly, building the expectation and shifting into Hitchcock-like suggestions that all is not as it seems.

Was it worth the hour and a half drive into Edinburgh with 35 minute traffic jam at Leith on a nearly empty tank ? Hmm.

air traffic over 24 hours

Just because I can

Now you can see how many people have visited my blog (about 6) and where they are (can you guess ?). And you can see where most of the photos were taken, on a handy map. Just click on the photos to go to the online album.

Then again, why would you ?

Weird People sit at the back

The subway, and New York generally, seems to be a good place to spot weird people. Training the kids not to stare at them is harder. Unfortunately they don't just sit at the back of the bus like they do everywhere else.