The Deepest Station

Hello everyone. We're standing at the foot of the longest escalator in New Zealand.  From the time you step on it, in the picture just above, to the time you step off takes one minute and 22 seconds. Then of course, you still have to take the other escalator, shown above this picture, to bring you to the surface.  

We are on the Pitt Street side of the Karanga-a-Hape train station and we're ten stories down.  This is the deepest point of the newly opened portion of the train system in Auckland.  

I'm delighted with the change.  Let me give you one reason. 

Martha's Backyard is the American products store in Panmure, which is on the East side of Auckland, and is a place we to love to shop at every now and then. (They have Crisco)  Before the train upgrade, to get to Martha's, I'd have to take our local Western train to Britomart, wait about 15 minutes for the connection, and then ride an Eastern Line Train to Panmure.  Total time involved was about an hour, 40 minutes.  

Or, I could take our Western Line train to Grafton, get off, wait for bus 70 to come along, and ride it to Panmure.  Total time was also about an hour 40.  

Since the new line opened up, I get on our new East-West Line train and ride directly to Panmure.  Elapsed time is about 55 minutes.  

If I want to, I can jump off at the K' Road station (Karanga-a-Hape) in either direction and ride the escalators.  The trains come along about every 12 minutes so doing such a side-trip wouldn't slow me down much at all.  

And believe it or not, for folks over 65, all the train, bus and ferry rides here in Auckland are free. (You do need to apply for a Gold Card, which is easy, and you have to log on and off each conveyance with your ATHOP card. And, some businesses give a Gold Card holder five to ten percent off on purchases.)

Let me also show you a couple of other shots down here.  I'm taking the green E-W Line toward Swanson, (My stop, Henderson, is two stops before Swanson) so I don't have long to wait.  If I were going to Martha's, I'd take the E-W line toward Manukau.   

This is one of the cross-tunnels.  

It's hard to get a sense of distance in a tunnel like this, but this is about two blocks long. I'll show you the two stations up on the surface next.  They're two blocks apart.  

This is the station I usually come up to.  It's on Pitt Street.

  

This is the other one, on Mercury Lane. 

We're back on Pitt Street and outside a favorite of mine.  This is where Jeanne and I come to buy various crispy flat breads and where we found Quark, the soft cheese. We've found that we like the cheese even better when Jeanne adds chopped chives and a little garlic salt to it. 

So now you're somewhat more familiar with our new City Rail Link. (I should probably also show you what's deep below Auckland's Sky Tower.)  

Check back soon.   -djf

 

It Has Been a While

Yes, it has been a while. I haven't published a post for quite some time now. Could it be that I'm getting old? My 75th lap around the calendar is coming up soon, so that sounds like a plausible excuse to me. Not that I really need one.  

I'd point out to anyone who says that they think I ought to keep cranking posts out at the same rate as during my peak production of one every five or six days, that there are 688 other posts just sitting there, waiting for someone to read them.  You don't really need a new post very badly. Go back and start at the beginning and work your way through.  

They're over on the right side of the home screen. Just scroll down and you'll find them.  Click, and away you'll go.  

I have no clue about how many words I've actually written over the course of my blogging.  Some might say that much of my writing has been nothing more than adding captions to the pictures I've shown.  That's true of course, but I'd argue that the rest of my content has been of some interest, if only to me.  If I assume a modest 500 words per post, then I've written a total of 344,000 words since 2014.  That impresses the heck out of me. 

Of course, I'm easy to impress.   

Enough of this. I said something quite similar to this on another post not too long ago and should move on. Today, I'm going to show you a few pictures I took while traveling into Auckland, and across the harbor to Devonport.  

There's my bus, number 14, due at 9:09. Notice that the trees in the distance have lost that springtime look.  

Many of  you already know that the yellow arrow shows our balcony.  

I'm in Auckland. Springtime means the cruise ships have started arriving.  

I'm waiting in line to board the ferry. It's an eleven minute ride across the harbor. 

I've arrived in Devonport and am looking back at the ferry as it loads for the return trip.

No trip to Devonport would be complete without a quick look at the 'big fig.'  It passed 100 years old a long time ago, and notice that what appear to be smaller trees toward the sides, are actually air roots that now support the enormous branches.  I like to imagine what a forest of such trees would look like after several hundred years.  

This quirky cafe is in The Arcade, which is just off the main street of Devonport.  

I'm sitting next to the bike racks on my way back to Auckland, on a much larger ferry.  The crowds have about tripled it seems, since I began my adventure this morning,  and I'm glad to be on my way home.  

One more thing though. My breakfast cornflakes are a distant memory.  I need some sustenance to see me through the return train and bus rides.  

A pretzel with cheese will do nicely. I bought it from a stall at the Saturday market behind Britomart.  

There, I finished post number 689.  

You know, when you've written that many posts over the years, you can't help but receive a lot of views.  I checked my statistics before I started writing this one and saw that 559,799 people around the world have happened across one of my posts since 2014. I never imagined it would get this big when I started it.  What fun.

So, see you next time.  Yes, I do want to continue. I'd like to hit 700 posts at least and then, who knows?   -djf

Parrots and Palms and Psalms

I read that Karl Pilkington once said, "Parrots have gone a bit quiet since pirates have gone."  

Whether the lack of pirates in Henderson is the reason that I've never heard any of the parrots that have cruised past my place utter a single word, of if there's some other cause keeping these birds silent, but the bottom line is they all seem to me to be a bit standoffish. 

We've seen several pairs of them winging past our balcony over the years, and the occasional couple has even stopped off to inspect a few of our nicer palm trees,  Being of a neighborly sort, I tried to take a few pictures of them while they browsed through the foliage, but as soon as I stepped through the balcony's slider, they decamped.   

I think that the two I photographed today must have had their guard down, because I was able to get some pretty good shots.  

Here they are. First the trees, so you'll understand the setting, then we'll zoom in.  

The look on the face of the parrot in the picture just above is definitely of a friendly sort.  I think it took the attention I gave them with the camera in the right way. It's staying partially camouflaged, but looks as though, given a little more courage, it might inquire if there be any pirates about?      -djf

Oh, and I'm sorry about the psalms thing in the title. There aren't any. What with alliteration and rhyming, I got carried away.  

Update:

There has been some speculation about whether I caught a bird or a helicopter in my header photo. Here is a zoomed-in look. I vote for bird.   -djf 

 

It's All in the Details

This picture was taken on July 5, 2026, at about 7:40 a.m. from our balcony in Henderson, New Zealand.

Jeanne and were having our coffee on this mid-winter morning and looking at our world through light condensation on our sliding door. A heavy, early fog had made that world smaller to such a degree that I hadn't given much thought to snapping pictures.  

But that sun suddenly looked rather special to me. I snatched up my camera, popped barefoot out onto the balcony, and collected this moment in time. 

As I sat at my computer shortly thereafter, the urge to zoom into the sun hit me, and I'm very glad that I did. While this wide-angle shot has a lot going for it, I was thrilled with the discoveries I soon made.  Let me show them to you. 

My post will be a relatively short one today, but it will demonstrate the importance of looking closer. As my brother-in-law, Fred, likes to say, "Who knew?"

We go now, to the closeup in which I noticed something.  Look at the upper left hand side, at about 10 and 11 o'clock. I see little spots there.  

When I first saw them, I wiped at my monitor screen, thinking that I had smudges. When that failed to remove them, I looked at my Nikon's lens, thinking that I'd find the offending dot of dirt there.  But, nothing.  

I then zoomed into the three other pictures I had taken in rapid succession and discovered that, although the sun was in a slightly different position on each of them, the spots were in the same location on the sun. This was no smudge or dot of dirt. This was the real Mccoy.

 Archimedes apparently once shouted, "Eureka."  I uttered no similar interjection, but instead announced to Jeanne, "I've got sun spots.  

"Some spots, she asked?  Where are they?  Do they itch?"  

I repeated my statement more clearly and she was soon looking over my shoulder at my screen, not my skin.  

This next picture, is the same as the one above, but zoomed in a bit more and with a black/white filter that brings out the spots a little better.  

This picture is even more of the same. Extreme zoomies, but look at not only the spots, but the edge of the sun.  Jeanne thought that I might be getting some Earthly atmospheric distortion, but I think I am also seeing some detail of the surface of the Sun.  

Utterly astounding in my opinion, that I can step out my back door, snap off a quick photo of the morning sun, and with a little computer work, be privy to some of the secrets of the universe. And I'm not quite done.  

Let's go back and look at the Sun photo I showed you earlier. Notice that the Sun appears to be elongated from side to side. It looks wider than it is tall.  

I looked up the stats on the Sun and discovered that it is classed as an oblate spheroid.  In other words, not a perfect sphere. But, in fact, it is only 12 kilometers wider than it is tall, which is nothing considering that it is 1.392 million kilometers in diameter.   

 The sun in this picture measures 135 mm wide by 123 mm high.  A huge difference and one that is explained by the fact that this sun was photographed only about 10 degrees above the horizon of the Earth.  The distortion in its shape that we see now will disappear as the Sun climbs higher and it'll  be its usual oblate spheroid self when it's higher overhead.  

I have thoroughly enjoyed sharing these wonders with you today. I hope that you've found it intriguing as well.  Keep watching. I'm going to dig up some old pictures of a similar nature and re-acquaint you with more jaw-droppers. (My jaw drops anyway, but then again, I'm pretty old. Maybe it's my default setting.)    -djf

More Fun with Magnets

Once again you find me playing with magnets.  Today, I added a heavy "rattlesnake egg" to the stack of magnets that I used in a post just a few weeks ago. Just scroll down to see the original post.  

You may notice in the picture below, that the overhead magnet looks slightly different than the last time I took such a picture. When this heavy arrangement of magnets jumps up to the overhead, it hits with such force that I was afraid it might chip the overhead magnet. I therefore taped a plastic washer to it's south pole with a little masking tape. That will have no effect on its field strength. 

As I did last time, I weighed the stack (chain) on my kitchen scale.  

I must give you a little background before we go further. I experimented a little with the rattlesnake egg addition before putting it on the scale tonight.  Last night, I set up the chain of magnets before I went to bed.  I did not have them on the scale.  Sometime later, from bed, I heard the chain of them contact the over head magnet.  They had jumped up.  

What that told me was that the chain of magnets was very slowly but surely being drawn up into the field of the overhead magnet. The buckyball chain was slightly curved when I positioned the chain and it grew slightly taller as the field above it straightened it. Apparently, it straightened enough that the rattlesnake egg was pulled far enough into the overhead magnets field that it lifted it. Therefore, the weight I would have recorded, had they been on the scale, should have been diminishing and gone to zero.

Tonight therefore, I took a number of photos, after I set the magnet chain in place on the scale, spaced a couple of minutes apart, and did in fact find that the scale showed a steadily falling weight. Check it out.    

  

I'm sorry this one is hard to read. It was taken immediately after setting the chain on the scale.  It reads 4.532 grams.  

This one, taken a couple of minutes later, is 4.332

This one reads 4.227

This last one is 4.178.  Unfortunately, shortly after this reading, my scale shut down.  I think it has about a 10 minute auto shut off feature.  

I immediately got out the user's manual, and hoped to find a way to adjust this feature, but it is apparently set, and that's that.  

I would have liked to continue to watch the change in the weight and even seen it go to zero, as the chain of magnets jumped up into contact with the overhead magnet.  

Ideally, I would have one video camera focused on the scale, with a clock visible next to it, and another focused on the chain of magnets from the front.  I'd run both until the chain was pulled up. I think it would be interesting to see how the weight change varied with time.  

But, all that is way more than I want to put into this project.  I guess I'll just call it a day.  An interesting, instructive day.  I hope you enjoyed it too.    -djf 

 

The New Place

It's too bad when nice places fold up.  People get used to how a place is.  How it feels to go there. Those nice places have a way of growing inside the folks who frequent them, and when they disappear, the people feel the loss.  

The Hard to Find Bookshop on St. Benedict's Street was one of those nice places. It was fine in every way a used book store ought to be.  

Sadly, the church that owned the building it was in decided to sell it. Used books don't generate the kind of cash that would have been needed to buy it, so it folded.  

And was reborn. 

This is my starting point on K' Road in Auckland. This is the Rainbow Bridge. From here it's about a 20 minute walk to the old or a 25 minute walk to the new location.  

I climbed to the old place in the morning sun. At the top of the hill I climbed again from the street to the front door. In stronger sun.  

 

The new place hasn't as much sun. I only climb a little early on from the Rainbow Bridge and from Symonds Street near the store, I turn, then turn again, descending, to reach it.  In the morning when I go, the last two blocks are shaded.  

Let me show you around inside the new place. It's on a basement level. I step down from the street to enter and then take several more steps down to the main floor.  

Rather than the multitude of small rooms the old place had, this is mostly one large room. It feels good though. The books are, of course, what makes the place, and this feels right. There are many reminders from the old place.  

The quirky chest of drawers seems to say, 'Yeah, remember me? This is it. You've found us again.  It's all still here and something's got your name on it."  

Do you see the yellow chair on the left?  I've gone through a stack of Wodehouse books there, decided which ones I'd take, and recently sat there and decided on Flannery O'Connor and Hemingway books of short stories.   

The pulpit from the old Chapel.  

I read that there are 150,000 books here.  The atmosphere is charged with the aroma of years.  

Recent purchases. 

Old friends leave and new friends arrive.  In this case, much of the old is alive and well in the new.  I'll always miss the old location, but I'm already very fond of this one.  

I wish you could all get to know this place. Its chairs have been molded by thousands no doubt to provide maximum comfort when taking a break from browsing.

You can do one thing though, to simulate a visit to the Hard to Find Bookshop. You can find your oldest book, sit in your most comfortable chair or sofa, close your eyes, hold the book beneath your nose, and sniff. Hopefully, if your book is properly aged, you'll smell the exact same smell that permeates my bookstore.  

And if you don't have any books of sufficient history, by all means go out and find the oldest book you can find and buy it. You want something at least 50 years old. Go to it.     -djf