Welling­ton’s Tranz Metro trains have late­ly been known for cer­tain car­riages with bro­ken heat­ing. It’s hor­ri­ble enough being (rel­a­tive­ly) young and only faced with a 30-minute chilly com­mute. I would­n’t want to be a Para­param gran mak­ing the hour-long trip to Welling­ton in an unheat­ed car­riage.

But it seems that while the car­riages are slow­ly being fixed, Trans Metro are also pay­ing atten­tion to, you know, being nice to cus­tomers. This morn­ing when I was wait­ing for my usu­al train, a fel­low came up to me rep­re­sent­ing Tranz Metro and asked me a few sur­vey ques­tions about the cold car­riages.

One ques­tion was the toss-up between remov­ing car­riages with bro­ken heaters from ser­vice and there­fore hav­ing more crowd­ing in the usu­al train serv­cies.

But most inter­est­ing­ly, it seems that Tranz Metro will be offer­ing pas­sen­gers a 5% dis­count on month­ly train tick­ets for July, or else a cou­ple of free Fri­days in July if you use a dai­ly tick­et.

The sur­vey asked if this was ade­quate com­po. Well, for me it might be, but prob­a­bly not for an arthrit­ic senior.

Let’s hope that Tranz Metro gets their heat­ing prob­lems sort­ed out before the end of win­ter.

This Fri­day June 5 is World Envi­ron­ment Day, and in our fairy cap­i­tal city, and in oth­er spots around the coutry hun­dreds of peo­ple will “freeze” togeth­er to show unit­ed action for cli­mate change.

The Freeze is set to kick off at 1pm for just five min­utes.

Right now the loca­tion is all secret squir­rel, but stay tuned

Nick Pot­ter, Per­son­al Assis­tant to Mr Freeze and lead co-ordi­na­tor of a team of vol­un­teers, says

“If there was ever a time for you to get involved — it’s now. 2009 is a cru­cial year of action and in Decem­ber, a new glob­al cli­mate treaty will be nego­ti­at­ed in Copen­hagen. We need to come togeth­er and send the mes­sage that glob­al agree­ment is essen­tial and that bold and urgent action is need­ed.”

And look you can even check out last year’s freeze, on the you tube.

I’m think­ing stand­ing in the mid­dle of the road is not the most ide­al place to freeze, so as the girl guides used to say, be pre­pared.

Peo­ple can join the Freeze and find out more at www.freezenz.wordpress.com

What are you doing on Sat­ur­day? How about you go on a trea­sure hunt to find me* your­self a dia­mond ring? iChild on twit­ter explains it:

So, what’s this all about then?? Sto­ry goes, guy bought ring for girl, girl did­n’t want ring. Guy could­n’t give it to anoth­er, and does­n’t want to sell it. Guy also hap­pens to be the guy behind Donoogle.com …Guy decides that rather than just hav­ing this ring sit­ting around, he would cre­ate a trea­sure hunt around Welling­ton to give away said ring and use it at the same time to pro­mote this choice web­site which every­one should use!

So if you want to par­tic­i­pate, you should start fol­low­ing donoogle_com. It does seem a lit­tle bit astro­turfy to my eyes, but hey, trea­sure hunts are always fun. Espe­cial­ly if you do it dressed up as a pirate. Or a pan­da.

*(Although I must state for the record that I would rather have a sin­gle dia­mond on my ring, and I’d like it to be aprox­i­mate­ly the size of my fist, thanks.) 

This morn­ing-ish, I was jug­gling head­phones, iPod, scarf, hat, satchel and extra bag on the bus, as well as try­ing to text, and unbe­knownst to me, I man­aged to drop my phone on the bus.

When I got into work, I had a mes­sage on my answer­phone from my mum, say­ing that she’d got a call from some­one who had my cell­phone, and that I should call my num­ber to arrange a pick-up. Right now I’d like to take a moment to say that every­one real­ly should have an ICE (in case of emer­gency) num­ber saved into their phone, it real­ly makes every­thing much more awe­some.

So I called my phone, and a love­ly girl answered, and after a brief freak­out (“You’ve got my phone and you’re in Tarana­ki???? Ooooooh, Tarana­ki STREET!”) I arranged to grab it off her at the rail­way sta­tion this after­noon. I bought some choco­late, and met her, she gave me my phone, I gave her the choco­late, and she told me that this morn­ing get­ting off the train she’d dropped her phone, and some­one had called out to her about it. Yay hap­py kar­ma!

Any­way, my point is, this sto­ry is full of hap­py good­ness. I mean, you can only imag­ine how many top secret Welling­ton­ista secrets and dirty pho­tos that my phone con­tains. I’m so glad I got it back so eas­i­ly, and I hope that you will all con­sid­er doing a good deed tomor­row as well. Wahoo.

Now, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed or not, but the weath­er late­ly has been some­what less than pleas­ant. Unless you hap­pen to be a wave­watch­er or rather crazy surfer, that is, in which case there have been some rather spec­tac­u­lar things to see. If you’re the kind who’d rather stay inside nice and warm, here’s a fan­tas­tic video that Dave Framp­ton has made to show you what you’re miss­ing

Storm in slow motion from David Framp­ton on Vimeo.

X Way Vision is a video of live per­for­mances by artists from the Dunedin-based Xpress­way record label. Per­form­ing artists include The Dead C, Alas­tair Gal­braith, Pla­gal Grind, Chris Hea­zle­wood & Greg Cairns, Shayne Carter, and Chug.

Screen­ing at the Film Archive, Wednes­day 27 May at 7pm. Tick­ets $8/6 con­ces­sion.

[Read more after the jump]