New Zealand, day 2

We got up just before our alarm at 07:30. I had a very poor sleep, as I often do on the first night of a trip, but my wife slept soundly all night. We wandered down the street to the centre of Paihia to find a cafe for breakfast. We grabbed an outside table at Letz Cafe, which had muesli bowls and also smoothie bowls, which was essentially a muesli bowl with the yoghurt replaced with one of their range of smoothies. I chose that and got a smoothie with blueberry and some other fruits in it as my choice, while my wife had the plain muesli. As we were finishing off, my wife’s mother and sister walked past and we said the food was good, so they joined us and ordered some breakfast too.

After eating we returned to our room to prepare for the day out. Our first meeting point was at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, a historical site just a couple of kilometres north up the coastal road. This is where the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of New Zealand’s history as a modern country, was signed between the native Maori people and the colonial British. We wanted to walk there, but some others took one of the hire cars and we planned to meet there for our guided tour which was booked at 10:00.

On the walk I got a little distracted by spotting several interesting birds, including variable oystercatchers which I tried to get some photos of. We also might have underestimated the walking time, so we ended up arriving with only a couple of minutes to spare. My wife’s eldest nephew checked us in and we joined a large tour group of about fifty or sixty people. The staff gave us earpieces to listen to the tour guide’s commentary, which was good because we ended up a long way from the guide at many points on the tour.

It began with a walk through the gift shop, which I thought was very strange. Then we proceeded outside and down the hill to two large wooden canoes, built in the style of the old Maori canoes, out of kauri wood, and sheltered under a long wooden roof. These canoes seat upwards of a hundred people, and are floated and used for celebrations annually on Waitangi Day, 6 February, the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty. The guide explained these are not original historical canoes; because the wood eventually rots they build new ones every few decades.

Waitangi Treaty Grounds

From here we walked uphill to a grassy area with an expansive view of the Bay of Islands. Here was the Treaty House, the original house occupied by the British Resident minister, James Busby, from 1834. In this in 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi was drafted and translated into Maori, before it was signed in a nearby tent on 6 February. I went inside the house to see some of the rooms, including the one in which the Treaty was drafted. The house had magnificent gardens with many flowers in bloom.

Treaty House, Waitangi Treaty Grounds

Nearby is the Te Whara Runanga, a traditional Maori meeting house, built in 1940 facing the Treaty House to symbolise the Maori side of the Treaty. Here the tour group assembled for a Maori cultural display. We removed our shoes before entering the meeting house. Seated inside we were treated to various traditional songs, dances, chants, and weapon displays by a group of five Maori in traditional costume. The performances were really good, and sprinkled with lively and humorous commentary, really making everyone feel welcome. Following this performance we were left to explore the Treaty Grounds at our leisure.

Maori cultural display

We parted from the rest of the family, and my wife and I took a walk through a densely grown valley, where there were the two oldest camellia trees in New Zealand, planted in 1833. This led us back to the museum, where we browsed briefly to review the history of Waitangi and see various artefacts, Maori and British, and replicas of several of the original copies of the Treaty itself. (The originals are now kept in the National Library of New Zealand, in Wellington.)

After this we walked back into Paihia to get some lunch. After stopping briefly at our motel room, we found the Cafe 10, where my wife chose a vegetable frittata and I had the pumpkin salad.

After eating, we went to the wharf to get tickets on the ferry to Russell, a village on a long peninsula across the Bay of Islands. We had twenty minutes until the ferry left, and my wife spotted a small arts and crafts market across the street so we went there for a very quick look before retiring to the wharf to catch our ferry. The boat was a lot smaller than I expected, with bench seating for about 50 passengers. On the way across the bay we spotted an Australasian gannet flying alongside us about 50 metres up for a few seconds before turning to plummet straight down into the water, presumably to catch a fish. It surfaced and skimmed along just above the waves for a few seconds before veering off. Unfortunately I didn’t have my long lens on my camera and there wasn’t enough time to switch it to capture this bird.

Crossing the Bay of Islands

We arrived in Russell after about 20 minutes crossing the Bay. There were several restaurants and bars along the waterfront and a parallel street with a few shops to explore. After looking around we headed on a walk up Flagstaff Hill to the lookout point and historic flagstaff there. This flagstaff has a long and complex history beginning with the Treaty of Waitangi, and was symbolic of subsequent friction between the British and Maori people. Besides the history of the site, the view from here on the hill was magnificent, with 360° views around the Bay and the surrounding lands.

Russell, Bay of Islands

While I was taking this in and changing camera lenses, my wife spotted a large bird walking up the path and yelled out to me to come look. But but the time I had my camera safely reassembled and dashed over, the bird had vanished into the brush down the hillside. She described it and I figured out it was a weka. I was extremely disappointed not to have seen it myself!

We walked back down the hill via the road rather than the foot track we’d walked up on. There was no footpath between the road and the steep hillside so we had to walk on the road and avoid cars coming up the hill towards us. Once back in Russell we walked along the shore back to the centre of the village. We passed my wife’s older nephew and partner who were sitting at the Duke of Marlborough Hotel having a drink on the beautiful verandah. We waved hi and continued on to look at the last few shops that we hadn’t seen. Then we decided to backtrack to the Duke of Marlborough to get a drink ourselves. The others had gone to walk up Flagstaff Hill. I had a local Kororareka Cream ale, while my wife had a glass of local Pinot gris. Later in the evening, the nephew told us that the Duke of Marlborough was the oldest hotel in New Zealand (established in 1827).

Duke of Marlborough Hotel verandah

It was good to rest our feet after so much walking around. I spotted a tiny black and white bird flitting in a tree nearby and identified it as a tomtit, but it was too hard to get a photo of. After our drinks, we went to a small ice cream shop where I had scoops of hokey pokey; and fig & manuka honey ice cream. Here we met my wife’s mother and sister, who had also just bought cups of ice cream. We ate them as we walked back to catch the next ferry back to Paihia together. The ice cream was really good. On the trip back I had my long lens ready in case I spotted any more gannets, and I did, although they were much further away. I did manage to get a couple of shots at extreme range but the birds were pretty small in the photos.

Back in Paihia, we went back to the motel. I changed and went for a swim in the pool while my wife did some sketching in her sketchbook of scenes from today. After the swim I had a shower and changed for dinner. Tonight was the special birthday dinner for the eldest nephew and his partner (their birthdays are just 10 days apart).

We met up just before 18:30 and walked the short distance to Terra Restaurant. We had a reserve table on the balcony, looking out over the Bay. The setting was lovely, and the food was really excellent. I had a starter of squid and chorizo with chilli caramel and lemon mayonnaise, followed by a main course of pork kassler with harissa fried cauliflower and white bean puree. And for dessert a Black Forest combination of a chocolate marquise with cherries and cherry sorbet. Everything was delicious.

After this magnificent dinner we walked back to our motel room for the night.

New Zealand, day 1

We had an alarm set of 03:45 this morning to make sure we got up in time to have a bite to eat and then head to the airport for our flight to Auckland at 07:05. I had a bit of muesli and was ready to go. We walked over to the station and waited for the very first train of the day, due at 04:28. It arrived and took us to Central where we changed for the airport train.

At the airport there was almost nobody around. There were no queues at all to get through security and passport control, so these took only a couple of minutes. Inside the terminal, many of the shops and food places weren’t even open yet, but we found one where my wife got a coffee. While she drank it, I noticed a large group of people clustered around a departure gate near us. Looking up to the indicator board I noticed the flight from that gate, to Denpasar in Bali, was shown as cancelled. There was an announcement over the PA system that all passengers for the flight should assemble at the gate for news regarding their flight, which had been cancelled to to “an ongoing incident in Bali”. When the passengers began to disperse a few minutes later we heard them saying that it was due to a volcanic eruption.

Fortunately this didn’t affect us. We boarded our plane in the last group since we were right near the front. Oddly, the row we were in had no window on our side for some reason, although there was a window on the opposite side. But once the plane had loaded we were happily surprised that nobody had been assigned the “window” seat next to us, so we had three seats for the two of us.

The flight was very short, at just under three hours in the air, plus taxiing time at each end. They served a full breakfast however, and I had a potato frittata with beef sausages. The flight was barely long enough to watch a movie, so I instead chose to start watching episodes of House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel series. I just managed to fit two episodes in and I thought they were fairly good.

We landed in Auckland at 12:05 local time. The airport was not busy at all, and again we had no queues for either passport control or customs, and were out into the arrivals lounge in just a few minutes. However while traversing the terminal we kept hearing a warning over the PA system that we might be instructed to evacuate the area. When we reached the public area, we noticed large groups of people clustered around the escalators up to departures, and staff holding them back. There was an announcement about people not being allowed into the departures area.

My wife got another coffee from a cafe in the terminal and then we walked over to the shuttle bus area to get a lift to our car ire place. Soon a van arrived and the cheerful driver took us out to the car pickup spot. We checked in there and collected our car. The woman saw our Australian driver’s licences and was pretty casual and friendly with us about the whole thing. At the same time another woman at the next counter was serving an American couple and explaining very carefully a lot of things about driving in New Zealand.

We loaded our bags into the car and drove off, heading into central Auckland to pick up my wife’s mother and sister (our recent travelling companions in Japan!) from their hotel, where they’d been staying for a couple of days already. We had some trouble picking them up, because the street their hotel was on was full of parked cars. I tried doing a U-turn to grab a spot on the other side, but as I was in the middle of turning another car on the there side grabbed the spot! So we had continue straight and circle around the block, which took a long time because of some very slow traffic lights. By the time we’d done that there was a spot free where I pulled over so we could load their bags into the car and all climb in.

From there we headed out of Auckland, heading north on highway 1, over the Auckland Harbour Bridge. We proceeded until we’d left the outskirts of Auckland, and then exited the highway at the first town past the toll road section, a small place named Warkworth. It was after 14:00 and my wife and I needed some lunch, since this corresponded to midday in Sydney. We parked near some shops and walked across a small bridge to a larger shopping area. I found a bakery that sold “award winning” pies, so I got a chicken, spinach, and feta pie and also tried one of the delicious looking walnut tarts (which was indeed delicious). My wife didn’t fancy anything they had, so went for a walk to a supermarket she’d spotted to buy something. But she got lost coming out the other side and couldn’t find her way back to the rest of us for several minutes!

We continued north along the highway until we reached Whangerai, the largest place we’d been through since leaving Auckland. Our GPS navigation in the car told me to go a long way around it, but I thought we could just continue on, so I stopped at a tourist information centre to check Google Maps, and also to stretch my legs after well over an hour of driving. The map said we could indeed continue straight through the city, so we did that.

Whangerai tourist information centre

From there it was another hour to Paihia, the small town on the shore of the Bay of Islands where we are staying for the next two nights. We checked into the motel and then went to find my wife’s two nephews (her sister’s sons) and their partners, who had arrived shortly before us, having departed Auckland on the same drive a bit earlier than we did. The reason we’re all over here is to celebrate the 30th birthday of the older nephew, who currently lives in Auckland. They were having a drink at Zane Grey’s Restaurant and Bar, not far from our motel. In fact, everything in this tiny town is not far from our motel!

Bay of Islands

We’d arrived at 18:30, and the others were about ready for dinner, but my wife and I were still a bit full from our late lunch, so we said we’d walk around a bit and maybe do our own thing for dinner later, while they sat in at Zane Grey’s. So we went for a bit of a walk along the waterfront. We decided we could use a drink after the long drive, before thinking about eating, and that we may as well go back and sit with the family and have a drink while they ate. So we did that. Towards the end of them eating dinner, we decided we were ready for something light, and my wife suggested we split a vegetarian option version of the fish and chips that most of them were having – which was a beer-battered banana blossom with chips. She was intrigued by this and wanted to try it. It was pretty good, I thought.

We broke up after dinner, with the younger four heading to a bar for more drinks, while my in-laws headed back to the motel. My wife and and I went for a stroll through the shops and restaurants and I grabbed a couple of scoops of ice cream from Movenpick. I wanted a New Zealand ice cream, but this was the only ice cream place open.

Then we walked back to the motel for the night. On the way we crossed over the street to the waterside to stare at the stars for a few minutes, which were spectacular, since this area has very little human habitation and light pollution.

Last preps for NZ

Today I took care of final preparations for my trip to New Zealand tomorrow. Our flight leaves at 07:00 am, so we need to get up at 04:00, throw on clothes, and dash out the door to get to the airport! So we need to completely packed tonight.

I filled out my New Zealand Traveller Declaration form. It asked if I’d been to any other countries in the past 30 days, and for the first time in my life filling out one of these forms I had to say yes, since we only got back from Japan less than 3 weeks ago.

Because this trip is only three days long, I’m taking a lot less luggage than usual. As I was thinking where to put the toiletries, I had the sudden thought that I’d need to make sure I could access them easily on the plane. Because—and this is an automatic thought for an Australian traveller—of course I’d want to brush my teeth during the flight. Only after thinking this did I remember the flight is barely three hours long, and no, I don’t actually have to brush my teeth during it. When flying from Australia to almost anywhere else in the world, you definitely do need to brush your teeth, because you’re in transit for 12-24 hours or more.

In fact, we’re picking up a car at Auckland Airport and driving up to the Bay of Islands in the afternoon. The drive is going to be longer than the flight!

For lunch today I drove with Scully up to Allambie to get pies from the pie shop there. We haven’t been there for a while, and Scully likes to run around on the soccer field next to where I sit on a bench to eat. And this afternoon we met my wife right after work to drive over to a friends’ place to drop Scully off for dogsitting. We wanted to do this early to get home and have dinner and then get to bed early before our pre-dawn start tomorrow.

Next blog entry will be from New Zealand!

Reporting on Japan, preparing for New Zealand

This morning I worked on my report for Standards Australia on the recent ISO Photography Standards meeting I attended in Japan. I have to summarise all of the relevant technical and administrative discussions and resolutions of the meeting, which means going through my own notes, the official minutes, and about 50 separate reports on all of the work that was done at the meeting and since the last meeting (in Sydney back in October last year). It takes a good three hours or so to work through all of that and complete the document, and then submit it to SA.

I’d thought about taking a long drive with Scully for lunch, to get out of the house a bit since I don’t have any ethics classes today. But I still had some rye sourdough loaf at home and decided to use that up for my lunch instead.

I took Scully for a walk instead, around the harbour shore and past Bay Brew where I tried another of their sweet treats, this time a coconut rough slice. It was okay, but not as good as the caramel slice I had last week.

After we got home I worked on a new Darths & Droids comic, and then started preparing for our trip to New Zealand on Friday. I checked out the NZ Traveller Declaration site online, which is a form we need to fill out prior to arrival. But it says you are only allowed to start filling it out within 24 hours of your departure, so we couldn’t do it today and will have to do it tomorrow. We need the address of our accommodation in NZ, but I don’t know where we’re staying. My wife’s sister booked accommodation for the whole family, so I actually have no idea where it is. But my wife got the info so we can fill in the form tomorrow.

I also prepared my bird-watching apps, Merlin ID and eBird, by downloading and installing bird data packs for New Zealand. I neglected to do this before leaving for Japan, which meant they defaulted to generic common birds, making some IDs difficult when we were over there.

Lastly, I formatted my Japan travel diary into web pages on my site. These are essentially the same text as the daily posts I posted here while in Japan, but I’ve added a lot of extra photos for the first two days so far, and will add more as I get through processing them. Id hoped to have this completed by the time we leave for NZ, but I’ve run out of time!

A Roman Holiday in a pastry

Today I had my last two ethics classes before taking a week off from them because of this weekend’s upcoming trip to New Zealand. After those, at midday and 1pm, I took Scully for a walk to the patisserie Moon Phase to celebrate.

The last few times I’ve been there I’ve seen a new special pastry called a “Roman Holiday”, which I really wanted to try, but those times I was after a small sweet treat, not a large savoury. But today they had it again, and I decided I had to try it.

Roman Holiday

It’s a base of flaky pastry topped with a ring of sliced cherry tomatoes around the edge and a mini burrata cheese plonked in the middle, decorated with basil leaves. The pastry is also filled with some tomato and pesto and I think there was some other ingredient in there but I didn’t identify it. Anyway, it was really really good, as have been most of the pastries I’ve had from this place.

Tonight I’m planning to relax and then get an early night, since I don’t have any online classes as I usually do. The goal is to get used to getting up an hour or two earlier by Friday when we fly out to New Zealand. Since the time zone there is two hours east of us, so we’ll have to be getting up earlier there.

Cooler after hot weekend

Not much to talk about today. Thankfully that cool change came through after midnight and dropped the temperature a lot. Today was much more pleasant and comfortable.

I did some ethics classes online in the morning, then headed into the university for today’s Data Engineering lecture. Today’s topic was about data presentation, including tables and graphs.

While there I saw posters up on noticeboards about an anti-Donald-Trump protest rally to be held at the university on Thursday. I don’t know how many people in the USA are aware of this, but people in other countries are organising anti-Trump protests – that’s how awful him and his actions as US President are. And I’ve got to say, a lot of us are wondering where are the protests in the USA? Why aren’t there millions of people cramming the streets? Why haven’t New York and Washington and Los Angeles ground to a halt? Because from here it looks like Americans are okay with the destruction of democracy and society there.

I know a lot of Americans aren’t okay with it. In fact probably all of you who might be reading this. But, like, why isn’t anything happening about it? We’re over here in Australia boycotting US goods and organising protests, and the USA is just radio silence.

The clutching tendrils of summer

We should be getting cooler weather with autumn progressing here, but today was one of the last gasps of summer. Overnight we had the highest March minimum ever recorded in Sydney, 25.9°C. We slept with the air conditioning on all night, which is a rare thing. I don’t imagine we’d have got much sleep without it.

By the time I had my 5k run this morning it was almost 28°C, making it another slow and exhausting one. And by mid afternoon we approached 37°C. There’s supposed to be a cold front change coming through after midnight, but until then it’s supposed to still be almost 30°C at midnight. Thankfully tomorrow is supposed to be much cooler. But the Bureau of Meteorology says this isn’t the end of summery conditions, and we’re going to have more hot spells throughout autumn.

In the middle of the heat I went to the lighting showroom to pick up our new light fixtures, which we’d ordered last weekend. I got a message yesterday that they were in from the warehouse, so I drove down to get them.

Some of the new light fittings say that they are DIY installation, not requiring an electrician. I checked and they involved simply unscrewing the existing light battens, fitting the lightshade over it, and screwing the thing back in. No need to touch anything electrical at all. However when I tried to do this, the shade didn’t fit over the existing batten base. So I think new smaller battens need to be installed, which is indeed a job for an electrician. I’ll call one tomorrow to make an appointment for them to come around and install all the lights.

DIY electrical work is simply not an option in Australia. I know that in some countries you can do your own electrical wiring work if it’s not too complicated, and honestly I feel confident that I could most probably do this job of changing the light fixtures. But here it’s illegal to do so. Anything that touches electrical wiring must be done by a licensed electrician. Otherwise you’ll void your home insurance and be liable for fines up to $40,000. So absolutely not something I want to mess with.

Three more ethics classes this evening, and some Indian curry vegetables with rice for dinner.

And some more Japan photos! Takeshita Street in Harajuku:

Harajuku street scene

Okonomiyaki, before self-cooking:

Sakura-Tei Okonomiyaki

And after:

Sakura-Tei Okonomiyaki

In the restaurant Sakura-Tei:

Sakura-Tei Okonomiyaki

Followed by dessert from a crepe place on the street:

Marion Crepes

More photos from Tokyo: Shibuya

Friday night was online games night, so I didn’t write up a blog entry. I picked up the grocery shopping in the morning. I order non-perishable stuff online for pick-up since it’s quicker, but I select fruit and vegetables by hand when I’m doing the pickup after some bad experiences with the produce that the supermarket picked for me the first few times.

Anyway, I normally buy an orange every week to go into a fruit salad that I use to top my breakfast muesli. But oranges are seasonal and when they’re not in season here in the southern hemisphere, like now, Australia imports oranges from the USA. But with all of the recent stupid/evil things that the Trump administration is doing over there, I decided it would be a good idea not to buy anything from the USA where I can avoid it. I’ve been keeping up with the news especially about Canada, how Trump threatened to annex Canada, and the resulting widespread disaffection with the US and boycotting of US goods by Canadians.

Trump hasn’t threatened Australia as directly, but he did in the past week initiate high tariffs on Australian imports. Which in economic terms makes no sense whatsoever, since Australia has a fairly large trade deficit with the USA, so any reduction in trade is only going to hurt the USA more than it hurts us. Probably exacerbated by the fact that politically savvy Australians like me will boycott American products, and because of the imbalance in trade even a small percentage reduction in Australian imports will have a much larger relative effect on the US than the relatively small amount of exports we make to the US. Most of our exports are to Asia, so Trump’s tariffs aren’t even really going to hurt us very much. It’s just crazy that he’s bullying a much smaller economy in a way that actually hurts the US more than us.

But hey, the more countries that stand up to this monster, hopefully the faster we’ll get to whatever action it will be that eventually stops this freight train to madness and starts returning the USA to a normal country.

At lunch on Friday I took Scully for a walk and got some fish & chips. It was a warm day, but thankfully my favourite lunch spot overlooking the harbour now has new tree growth near the seating to provide some shade.

After some ethics classes I had dinner with my wife up at the local Greek restaurant. It was a sultry evening, and dining al fresco is kind of nice, though honestly it would have been nice if it was a little cooler. We’re having a mini-heatwave covering Friday and the weekend. Overnight minimum temperatures are around 24°C, with high humidity around 90%. Today we had 32°C maximum, and tomorrow is forecast to be 37°C.

This meant my 5k run this morning was pretty awful. It was 25°C and 82% humidity at 9am, and my running was really sluggish. I recorded the slowest time I’ve run since 2021! I fear tomorrow morning will be even worse.

Today I stayed inside as much as possible, working on Darths & Droids, and some more photos from my trip to Japan. For dinner I made fusilli alla norma, with roasted eggplant cubes and a tomato sauce.

Today I processed photos from Shibuya on Tokyo. The famous Shibuya scramble corssing:

Shibuya Scramble crossing

Shibuya Scramble Square, the building on the top of which is the Shibuya Sky observation platform:

Shibuya Scramble Square

A view of Tokyo from the top:

Shibuya Sky view of Tokyo

Looking north to the centre of Tokyo with the sun going down:

Shibuya Sky view of Tokyo

Starting on post-ISO meeting work

Today I did some comics stuff for Darths & Droids, and I also started work on follow-up things for the ISO Photography Standards meeting I attended in Tokyo. I had to download and look through a huge bunch of documents – all of the presentations that were made during the meetings in Tokyo, summary files, and so on. It’s something like about 50 PDF files. The next task is summarising them all for my report to Standards Australia, which I’ll try to get done in the next few days.

Speaking of Tokyo, here are some more photos from my trip, which I processed and uploaded yesterday. These are all from the first two days.

Flying out of Sydney. It’s a pretty good view of the city from the take-off flight path. This is an edited version of the photo I posted while I was over there in Tokyo (straightening the horizon and improving the colour and contrast).

Departing Sydney (edited version)

View from my hotel room in Shinagawa, Tokyo.

Shinagawa Prince Hotel view

Sake barrels sent to the Meiji Jingu shrine from manufacturers all over Japan.

Sake barrels, Meiji Jingu

Torii gate at Meiji Jingu.

Second torii at Meiji Jingu

A procession of monks for the Emperor’s Birthday.

Monk procession

Inside the Meiji Jingu shrine.

Meiji Jingu courtyard

Saga of a door

Our new front door was supposed to be painted today. The workman arrived in the morning, but then vanished for a few hours. When he returned he said that he’d been driving around to different hardware stores looking for the specific moulding style and size that is on all of the other apartment front doors, so that he could install matching moulding on ours before painting. But he’d been unable to find it anywhere.

So he asked if I’d be around next week and said he’d go further afield and try to find the matching moulding, and then come back to affix and paint next week. So we have another week with an unpainted wooden door.

After lunch I took Scully for a long walk, around the harbour shore. I stopped at the Grumpy Baker in an attempt to get a snack, but after waiting a few minutes with nobody serving me (I was the only one waiting to be served), I gave up and left. This bakery used to be really good, but their service has always been slow, and I’ve soured on them a bit recently. Instead I went to the nearby cafe which opened recently and decided to see what they had. There were a few muffins and small cakes, and they had a caramel slice that looked good, so I got one of those. It turned out to be delicious, with chewy caramel, which is not usual in a caramel slice. Really good. So I’m glad I went there!

Down by the water we met a woman with a small caramel-coloured dog, and as she approached she picked up her dog and carried her past. I said hello and she explained her dog was very shy. I said Scully was a bit too, and she stopped and carefully put her dog down. It was named Indy. The two dogs both approached one another very carefully and slowly, and eventually had a close sniff and hello. Scully is very gentle with other dogs and the woman was happy that Indy seemed to be friendly with her. She said it would be good for Indy to have positive experiences with other dogs. So I stayed there for several minutes as the two of them got used to each other and relaxed. It did seem that Indy was more shy than Scully. The woman seemed very happy with this, so that was good.

This evening I made a new experimental pasta sauce, using half a left over sweet potato from last night’s couscous dish. I boiled it up and then pureed it with semi-dried tomatoes and paprika to make a pasta sauce, served over fusilli, with chopped almonds for some crunch. It was pretty good.