June 4, 2020
Day 75
Went into town this morning to get supplies to fix a problem with the power to a section of the kitchen. A huge old tree on the turn by the estate picnic area had fallen, its splintered trunk, broken a metre above the ground, revealed rot through and through. We were lucky that it fell downhill and away from the road or we would have been blocked and I would most likely have been part of a working bee to remove it. This would have been possible because we are, as a community, gradually realising that only one person has Covid-19 in New Zealand and the likelihood of catching it is pretty small. It was raining off and on all the way to town. New slips along the road are showing up as the land reaches saturation. The weight of water pulls great swathes of clay and forest floor, trees and all, down sodden slopes to new resting places. They usually aren’t as bad as the one below that happened yesterday in Norway, but you never know.
The whole of New Zealand, indeed, the entire world, is headed toward sea level and the universe toward its eventual heat death. I probably won’t be around for it.
We arrived in Whitianga in the middle of a sudden downpour and I stopped at a hardware store that had a three-foot wide river running in through the main entrance and down the centre aisle for fifty feet. It turned to the right and disappeared from view under the tool section and I knew it would find its way out the back door the same way it had come in the front. The staff were taking pictures and putting up cones everywhere as I paid for my gear and left. It was still coming down cats and dogs on the way home and we could see where the Whangamaroro River had flooded a few days earlier. The highway runs down the centre of an alluvial flood plain next to the estuary that opens up into Mercury Bay and whenever it rains hard for any length of time the road is overtopped by the river. There is a crossroad at this point that leads up into the foothills of the eastern Coromandel Range. I don’t know how the road got its name, but I think I do and I smile every time I see the sign post for Wade Road.
I spent the afternoon replacing wiring and outlets and putting things back together again and testing to see whether it all worked. Once again I finished as the light was fading outside. My repairs of the roof on the previous day were half successful, which means I still have a leak from the roof into the house. Half is better than none, but we’re still seeing water coming in through the wall. The thing to do is bite the bullet and replace the temporary roof with a permanent one, but summer is gone and the rains are here (and inside) so I’m caught on the horns of a dilemma.
Checked the numbers and found we are still in stasis…
No change. Good news.
Elsewhere in the world some interesting things are happening. Sweden has said that given a chance they would have altered their policy of staying open for business during the first wave of Covid-19. The very fact that there is a free and open discussion about the issue and that a member of their government has admitted that they could have done things better stands in stark contrast to China, where no such admissions will ever be made while the CCP is in control.
Today in China it is Internet Maintenance Day.
It is also known as A Day to Remember, but not if you are being recorded…
Can you imagine what it must be like to live in a country where one-thousand-four-hundred-million people are afraid to say anything on camera?
History is being erased day by day in the…
Don’t forget.
ironwoodwind 