My 400th post

I took a long time to decide what I would do for my 400th post. I felt it ought to be somethings out of the ordinary, but I couldn't think what that something might be. Nothing particularly exciting is going on right now, unless you count being housebound by the threat of the COVID-19 virus as being exciting. I don't.  

Earlier this week, because I've read through all the books I took out of the library before Covid shut us down, I started reading over some of my old essays.  I found that I rather liked what I had written.  Of course, I'm biased. I probably should have taken more than one writing class while at NMU, my stuff today might be a little better than it is now. And I waited a very long time before trying to write anything. I only began writing my essays during the summer of 2010, after the company I worked for went out of business. That was the start of my retirement. I discovered then that writing, even at my level of ability, can be very satisfying. It was especially so in that first, almost magical summer of my freedom.  

I had a very hard time letting anyone read my stuff at first. I was afraid of looking the fool I suppose. I've come to terms with that now and I decided that I would use this, the very first thing I wrote while in New Zealand, as the first part of this post. 

I'll include a few other things as well on this post.

A Long, Long Way from Home.

by D. Foster, May 2012

I understood beyond any doubt how far I was from Michigan when I noticed that the sun was moving backwards.  I mean that I could see, as I sat and basked beneath it, that it was slowly moving from my right to my left.  For my first 60 years on planet earth, when I faced toward the arch of the sun, in the south, the sun rose on my left and set on my right.  It never occurred to me that I would see it do otherwise. 

When I realized that the sun was not acting ‘properly,’ I sat up a bit straighter in my lawn chair and considered this phenomenon.  To be honest, I was not currently firing on all eight cylinders.  I had just flown from Green Bay to Minneapolis, to Los Angeles, to Sydney, Australia, and finally to Auckland, New Zealand, and boy, were my arms tired.  But seriously folks, I had a bad case of 44 hours of continuous travel across 19 time zones and the international date line, and was relying on the sun, as I alternately dozed and sipped a drink in our backyard on Applebox Lane, to help re-set my internal clock.  After trusting it with such an important task, I was annoyed that the sun couldn’t be trusted to at least move in the right direction.  

The restorative gin and tonics my wife had pressed on me earlier had given me a longed for feeling of well-being, but they didn't seem to assist in focusing my mental powers toward solving the mystery before (and above) me.  The best I could do was to turn to Jeanne, who sat beside me with her own drink in hand, and say, “Hey Hon, the sun is going backwards.”  She, who was apparently no sharper mentally than I was just then, considered it briefly and simply replied, “Gee, I hadn't noticed.” 

Such was the level of conversation that occurred as we two new arrivals to the land of the Kiwi gradually came to the realization that we were now viewing the universe from earth's southern hemisphere, where the sun's daily arc now crossed our northern sky, where the south now brought cold winds, and where even the night sky, dominated by the famous Southern Cross, reminded us that we “weren't in Kansas anymore”. 

We are two retired transplants, both recently ejected from the work-a-day world, and have come to begin a new chapter in our lives by joining our daughter and grandsons in the great adventure of living “down under down under.” 

During the first months of our marriage several decades ago, Jeanne and I had grandiose dreams of emigrating to Australia.  Here, two generations later, we have finally realized a version of that dream by coming to live on an island which is even more remote than Austrailia.  We are 1500 miles farther south and east across the Tasman Sea.  Check it out on a map.  If Australia is 'down under' to the rest of the world, then New Zealand is truly 'down under' to Australia. 

In Michigan, Jeanne and I lived our entire married lives in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula.  We reveled, for the most part, in the fact that we were out of the mainstream.  In imagining our lives in New Zealand then, especially considering the extreme remoteness of the country, one might suppose that we are once again living in the 'bush'.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  We are now firmly and comfortably ensconced in Henderson, a suburb of the largest city in New Zealand, Auckland.  We have 1.4 million neighbors.  There are eight homes around us in our subdivision that would easily fit within the three acres that made up the yard of our home in Wilson. 

And yet, despite the uniqueness of our situation, we find ourselves relishing the differences that we see every day in our lives.

At one time in America, the extended family was the norm.  Three, or even four generations lived together, and either farmed or ran another sort of family business, but raising the children was the real business of all the adults, regardless of the generation.  My own childhood was made immeasurably richer because my grandfather lived with us for a few months each year over a period of several years. 

And now, after previously supposing that the old days were gone, and that Jeanne and I would have to be content with seeing our daughter and grandsons only rarely, we instead have the opportunity to become a real family again and delight in the joys of helping to raise two intelligent, talented and feisty boys. 

And we get to do it in a land whose sun moves in the 'wrong' direction, and where the people drive on the 'wrong' side of the road, in cars whose steering wheels are reversed, and who speak with every imaginable accent.  They eat weird and wonderful foods, go barefoot whenever they want, and have the most unbelievable beaches on earth.  They smile at newcomers, say “Good on you,” and rank very high in the world in educating their children.  I think I'm going to like it here. 

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Well, I hope you might have thought, "Gee, that was pretty good," as you finished reading it, but even if your opinion ran more along the lines of, "At least it was short," I'm glad that I used it. I remember that day so well. I think it is suitable to mark the occasion of 400 posts. 

We love New Zealand after having lived here for over eight years now and I sometimes think back to those confused days after we first arrived. We sure have come a long way since then, and in so many ways.  

I thought that I'd also like to share some of the statistics about my blog and its posts.

• Each time someone brings up any page of any of my posts, a 'pageview' is generated. To date, I have had 38,282 pageviews. 
• The post with the most pageviews of all was Wahaha Kvass, followed by A Couple of Recipes, I like them both, and Fruit Hunters. 
• One of my favorites was my 200th post about walking to Auckland. Another was Bounty-full Aotearoa. 

I want to thank those of you who have followed my blog all this time and have contributed to my pageviews. (and comments)  The majority of the views come from America and New Zealand of course, but  a surprising number have come from Russia. Maybe that is the reason the Kvass post did so well.  

It's been fun. I'm very glad that I have this outlet. Although most of what I write simply serves to explain the pictures I include, the little bit of creative writing I do on some posts satisfies my need to produce something, with at least a bit of literary value.   

Keep watching. I'll keep taking pictures.  

And before I leave today, I'll show you just a few I took just recently. Here is an interesting shot I took of my Yooperlite and a couple of pieces of kauri gum under the blacklight.  

On the left is gum with a piece of kauri wood embedded in it. On the right, the darkest area is a shell that attached to the gum while it was submerged in a large bay just south of Auckland. 



The weta Arram spotted on our front door, housed for the moment in a jam jar. 

It was later set free in the backyard.

A shot from out backyard of the supermoon that happened not long ago. The colors in the clouds are natural. The only editing I did in this picture was to sharpen it up a bit.

This is the same picture with the Zeke filter turned on. It's the same filter I used on the header photo.    

-djf