Eye to Eye with The Yellow Eye

Adventuring has been a bit thin lately, probably because we are settling in here, and definitely because of winter. But I've been thinking lately, already in fond-memory mode, of an excursion Estin and I took within our first week of arrival last December. The Otago Peninsula is home to seals, albatross, and penguins. We set off on a bike ride out onto the peninsula toward Sandfly Bay, home of the hoiho (Maori; noisy shouter), the Yellow-Eyed Penguin. This is the rarest and most ancient of all penguins. It leaves it's young nesting amongst the tall grass while fishing during the day. Evenings, the adults return and that's a good time to see them emerge from the surf. To get there, Estin and I linked up his Trail-a-Bike to the mountain bike and tackled some serious hills. At the carpark, we dropped the bikes and walked 30 min down the trail and onto the dunes. Bunch of birds on the beach, seaweed, nice coastline, etc. The far side of the bach has a viewing hide from which one can observe the birds. We plop onto the sand for a rest and a snack before making the trek overto teh hide. A few minutes of basking later, Estin says "hey Pop there's penguins on the beach". "Naw, Estin, those are seagulls" (over-excitable child). "No really!" I take a closer look and sure enough, coupla hundreds away, amongst the gulls, there stand a pair of penguins. A delightful moment for a landlubber for whom pengiuns previously existed only in zoos and on TV. There we were, on a warm sunny day, watching penguins waddle up the beach (it should be 50 degrees below zero to see this shouldn't it?). But wait it gets better. We think, hey we'll just head down to that patch of tallgrass and watch them from about 50 yards away. So we hunker down out of view and scramble over to the dune with the grass (newbies don't know that the adults are making their way up into the nesting area to feed the chicks). We carefully and quietly poke our heads up, and damned if we don't come face to face with a penguin, about 5 feet away. S/He doesn't get frigthened, we stay still in awe, the animal is gorgeous. The hoiho and it's partner stop, dry their wings in the air a bit, and continue on their way. While I'm no expert, and am now aware that one should keep considerable distance to avoid disturbing feeding time for the chicks, these animals showed no sign of distress. They moved deliberately and when stopping to dry their wings, were majestic. They were surprisingly agile when climbing the dunes. I was transfixed, and I know the moment was special to Estin because he kept very quiet and still, which has not recurred in the eight months since this event. Because we now know that the hoiho is endangered and needs more space, coming eye to eye with the Yellow Eye is fixed into place as a memorable event that won't happen again.

photo: tourism New Zealand

Where'd the Cheerios go?

My name is Brian, and I have a problem. I feel I must come to grips with it, meet it straight on, wrestle it to the ground. After years of denial and thousands of dollars, things finally came to a head tonight when I went looking for the Cheerios. They weren't there! They had been moved, hidden away. Yes, Mary had to hide the cereal so I couldn't eat my way straight through the baby's stash.

I seem to have a problem. Cereal. Hot or cold, brown or white sugar, sliced banana or none, muesli or Fruit Loops, rice milk or cow's milk. It just has to be cereal. As kids, my brother and I would eat a huge bowl of cereal at breakfast. After school snack was one or two huge bowls, drowning in milk. Bedtime snack? Yep, again. Mom and Dad were able to buy food cheaply at the Army commissary, which was a fair drive, so we'd make a monthly pilgrimage. We eventually got a spare freezer to hold the 20-odd gallons of milk that were hauled home.

I had a fair bit of stomach pain until I was about 33 years old. Most often it was exercise-induced and running/sprinting was the trigger; cycling was okay. I finally quit the milk. As it turns out, humans domesticated cattle about 10,000 years ago, and in all of human history before then, nobody drank milk beyond their breast-feeding years and consequently only babies could digest lactose. 10,000 years later many of us adults still aren't too good at it. Finally I got onto rice milk, the great enabler: my stomach has been great, but the cereal is still there, haunting me. Pouring a bowl is just like taking candy from a baby.

Harry Potter and the Magical Blanket

Estin's reading has really taken off this year, thanks to quality schooling and his own enthusiasm. He's gone from barely reading to really reading: with H Potter, he is now following along and even reading some of the sentences to me. As reading together is the stand-by for Estin and I, so is the story he often gets from mum. Spiderman stories are always requested, and lately the number of rescues Spiderman will undertake is a negotiating point. Spiderman turns out to be rather ordinary off stage, being occasionally prone to bouts of laziness and over-indulgence in ice cream, but that's another story altogether.

For EJ and I, the last couple of years have meant a lot of Harry Potter. We get into other books now and then, but it comes back to HP every time. There are occasional weekend morning readings at home, or midday events in the tent. Our first two weeks in Dunedin, we would even head to the hot tub and have a soak with Harry P. Increasingly, we visit with Harry on the couch in front of the fire. But most of the reading gets done in Estin's bedroom. He uses the electric blanket to warm the bed and then flicks off the heater before climbing in. Me, I go right ahead and jump in too. There is almost no better feeling than my back hitting the toasty warm bed in a chilly room. That electric blanket is truly magical. And off we go with the book.