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]