“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 […]