plucky tree
It's the plucky ones that will surprise you most
wannabe housewife, foodie, pacifist, amateur chef & tennis player, libertarian, food rights & backyard chicken supporter, consultant @ flipboard, angel investor
"Young Blood" by the Naked and Famous
2011 Single of the Year at the New Zealand Music Awards. Pretty addictive. I might listen to the radio if they played stuff like that.
if only plastic canoes were our biggest problem
If only our biggest problem here in the US were the government potentially wasting money on a plastic canoe.
Only $2 million? I guess it wasn’t a no-bid contract!
Instead, we have to wonder what country we’re going to bomb next.
return trip to new zealand
Eric and I made a second trip to New Zealand this year! Even though we got back in mid-October, I just now finished sorting through all the pictures and uploaded them to Flickr:
We hope to back again two years from now for another visit.
an eagle ate my baby
Good thing this hasn’t been widely reported in the local news here or parents would be keeping their kids out of any parks where large, soaring birds have been spotted:
500 Years Ago, A Giant Eagle In New Zealand Was Possibly Eating Children
Panic!
our rules for trips (new and improved!)
Before our recent trip to New Zealand, we created the following rules:
- No fast food
- No staying in hotels or motels
- Minimum overnight stay in one location of 3 days
- No pre-planning or scheduling unless absolutely necessary
- No more than 5 hours of travel between places we stay overnight
a kinder, gentler health care
The upside of catching a nasty flu bug on my last week in New Zealand was getting a genuine glimpse inside a health care system outside the USA for the first time. Without getting into the pros and cons of socialized medicine, the experience was profoundly more humane and comfortable than I’m used to:
random observations on new zealand
I visited New Zealand for the first time and spent 7 weeks there, mostly staying in people’s homes and cottages. Here are some random observations from my trip:
- Bathrooms are astonishingly clean and nice, even many of the outhouses in the national parks. There are also heaps of public bathrooms.
- On the South Island, you can drive for hours and sometimes not see another car.
- Kiwis are generally humble about their country, up-front about its shortcomings, and proud of its achievements, but at the same time they are not patriotic.
- When someone describes a place is “touristy”, that means there are great restaurants and they are open late.
