“Slow down you bastards”

Tom’s been walk­ing again. Fol­low his latest tramp­ing adven­ture from tra­vers­ing the Hutt Val­ley to Kāpiti via the Akatar­awa Road here.

Where the Wild Wind Blows

We’re expect­ing some severe winds overnight and in the morn­ing, and sens­ible people are bat­ten­ing down their meta­phor­ic­al (and occa­sion­ally lit­er­al) hatches. I saw a com­ment on a friend’s Face­book page from someone over­seas say­ing “but surely Wel­ling­ton houses are built for the wind?”, and the answer is yes, but gusts of 160km/h are extreme enough […]

What Summer?

You’ve heard the com­plaints. You may even have uttered them your­self. “What happened to sum­mer?” “Call this a sum­mer!?” “Bloody Wel­ling­ton sum­mer.” And the half of offi­cial sum­mer that Wel­ling­ton’s had so far is def­in­itely sig­ni­fic­antly less warm than usu­al. But is it really that unusu­al, and are we per­haps expect­ing too much from a Wel­ling­ton […]

A room with a (typically Wellington) view.

A night at the Bolton Hotel

Back in August, our edit­or Jo atten­ded the Bolton Hotel’s Wel­ling­ton on a Plate event and enjoyed it migh­tily. In the ensu­ing inter­play on Twit­ter, the Hotel invited one of us to stay the night so that we could exper­i­ence their hos­pit­al­ity more fully. I quickly took up the offer on the behalf of the […]

It never rains…

…but it pours, espe­cially in Pori­rua today, caus­ing sud­den flood­ing and ser­i­ous dis­rup­tion. I down­loaded the hourly rain­fall data from Great­er Wel­ling­ton’s site (a rather pain­ful manu­al pro­cess, but a big improve­ment from not long ago, when you could only get the charts as stat­ic images) and put togeth­er a quick graph. Here are cumu­lat­ive […]

Voting Weather

There are signs that this elec­tion could have a good turnout. Advance vot­ing is about twice what it was at the same stage in the last two elec­tions, and there have been over 35,000 new enrol­ments since I pos­ted about poor enrol­ment fig­ures: nearly 1500 in Wel­ling­ton Cent­ral alone! How­ever, one thing that can still put […]