I did quite well with my posting towards the end of last week. I felt really sick on Friday but still managed to have an excellent whinge about public transport in Auckland. I guess it just goes to show that it’s pretty damn easy to moan about public transport, at least it is for me. I won’t go on too much about transport in this post as it feels like there’s plenty of other stuff for me to write, but I was once again annoyed today by Auckland’s ineptitude. Not that there were any problems with the two buses I caught today, both arrived just when needed and got me just where I wanted to go, faster than I thought they would. Sounds unbelievable, but actually true this time around. No, my annoyance comes from an ongoing battle I’m having with ARTA over the timetable at the end of our street. Having a bus timetable at the end of your street (especially when you’re only two houses back from the end of the street) is very useful, as you can pop down to the bus stop to see when the next bus is – if it’s more than a few minutes away you can head back to the house for a drink before the 30 second walk down there again. But anyway, a few weeks ago the roadworks that were happening along our street eventually led to the pole upon which the timetable was attached to being replaced. Instead of cleverly restrapping the timetable to the new pole, the contractors just dumped it in the bus stop shelter to roll around. Inevitably someone thought it’d be a funny souvenir to have (though I must admit that I’d thought about how funny it would be to have our bus timetable sitting in the kitchen, but realised how annoying this would be for everyone else) and it disappeared.
No drama I figured. I’ll email ARTA so they replace it. So I email them – and don’t get a reply for a week. So I email them again, and – ah excellent – get a response. In fact, the response says it’ll be done in the next few days. Then today I get another email saying that the work is done, in fact it was installed late last week. Sweet. The problem is that when I got today to check, there’s no timetable in sight. I suppose there’s the possibility that they did install the new timetable late last week, and someone already decided to grab it, but I reckon that’s pretty unlikely.
My email back to ARTA was nicely to the point I think:
Hi ****, whoever says that the timetable has been replaced is lying. It is not there, I checked 10 minutes ago. Could you please make sure it ACTUALLY gets replaced. Thanks.
Anyway, minor issue really. It bugged me though. It is these little things that can make a big difference to the effectiveness of a transport system. I doubt NZTA would wait weeks before replacing a motorway sign, or that council just wouldn’t get around to fixing a traffic light. But I guess anything to do with public transport gets put at the bottom of the pile. Or it ‘supposedly’ gets fixed.
So, what of the weekend? Well first things first damn it felt like summer. This is kind of ironic as on Friday I’d been moaning (through my facebook status, a useful moan outlet) that it was damn freezing and where the heck was this summer meant to be? I think now that was probably just the last remnants of my fever showing through, as I would fluctuate from being crazily hot to crazily cold every few minutes. Saturday was a generally quiet day, as I was still trying to recover from late last week, when I hadn’t been well. I still managed a few things: took Amalia to swimming, hung out at my parents’ for a while, went to playground for a while with Amalia, had dinner with Leila at Mission Bay… before eventually crashing to sleep. I also managed to read a big chunk of “Paper Towns” by John Green, although I’ll get back to that more later.
Then yesterday Leila and I went for a rather long drive. The odd thing was that it was quite unplanned, as after breakfast at a very nice Grey Lynn cafe (Occam) we just started driving. About halfway down the Southern Motorway I decided to go check out Awhitu as I remember my parents saying it was a really nice spot. I didn’t quite realise how long it would take to get there, as driving to Drury along the motorway is actually only about a third of the story. After that it’s another 30 odd kilometers to Waiuku, and then at least that amount again on to Awhitu. But it was a nice spot, so Leila and I read for a few hours – enjoying the sunshine and how much it felt like summer. I do very much enjoy just heading to some random spot around Auckland that is nicely scenic, and then just reading for a few hours. It feels peaceful, and like that’s definitely the way a good book should be enjoyed. And I was reading a good book, but once again more on books later.
We returned to civilisation via the very tip (or at least as close as we could get to it) of the Manukau Heads. It was quite spectacular scenery, and I deeply regretted not having my camera with us. The road ran along a very high ridge for most of the last leg of this drive, and the drops off each side of it were a mixture of amazing and terrifying. Amazing when it was safe for me to have a look around at the huge drops off each side of the road, terrifying when I realised how close the road went to the edge of these precipices (why can’t precipice have a better plural?) Leila did a pretty stellar job as navigator, as we wound our way from the tip of the Manukau Heads back to Waiuku, via a very interesting peek at the ocean beach (Awhitu is on the harbour side of the peninsula). There were a pile of hoons doing doughnuts on the beach, which was more funny than annoying, but it was blowing a gale (I wonder if it ever doesn’t blow a gale around there) so we eventually drove home. Snow Patrol’s new album “A Hundred Million Suns” played on the car stereo for most of the day, and was a very very good soundtrack for the day. I wonder if, over time, I will continue to associate songs from that album with our trip to Awhitu – like other albums have sometimes ended up being associated with a particular time or place.
So yes, it was good to make the most of the nice weather. Somehow I just feel more ‘alive’ when the weather is good. Not just ‘OK’, but definitely sunny enough to not bother with much more than a T shirt, sunny enough that when you head back inside you can feel the sun’s warmth on you and in you still (although hopefully not because you’ve been sunburnt). The downside was last night, when it was so damn hot and sticky that I couldn’t get to sleep forever. Though I think I was just caught up in a struggle to distinguish the reality of me trying to get to sleep from the non-reality of the book that I was reading. But yes, more about books later. Soon. Humid, sticky nights are probably my biggest annoyance about summer, but clear sunny days definitely make up for the nights.
But anyway, the books, the reading. Interestingly enough, I’m not the kind of person who reads many fiction books. I usually have one or two books on the go at any time (at least), but they’re usually a mix of cricket, trains and urban planning. Particularly this year, thanks to the awesomeness that is amazon.com, my collection of urban planning books has grown like topsy, and until recently it had kept me going with some before-bed reading pretty much ever since Leila and I got back from Europe. However, as the New Zealand dollar has gone down significantly against the US dollar in the last few weeks, Amazon isn’t really worthwhile any more, at least not as worthwhile as it used to be. Including freight, a book I bought a few weeks ago for $US 12 ended up costing something in the region of $NZ 40. And that was a pretty cheap book.
Fortunately, to help me with my “what to read” predicament, thankfully I have a girlfriend with a extraordinarily large book collection and a growing understanding of what I like and don’t like. To be fair on her, I have a growing understanding of what I like and don’t like – I’m getting there with truly understanding it myself. Weirdly, although I very rarely find myself reading fiction (only usually after I’ve exhausted all other options) I have to admit that I actually really like it. I really get into books in a way that just can’t happen with a movie or whatever other source a story is coming at you from. I can totally understand why a good number of the people I know are total book freaks, even though 95% of the time I really am not. The strange thing is that I really enjoy getting into books, feeling like I’m somewhat living them, that the distinction between my life and the lives of the characters in the books I’m reading have blurred a bit. The surreality of it all seems really nice to me, as though even while it’s making things seemingly ‘less real’, that’s somehow making my life more distinctive and more interesting.
So yeah, I think from now on I will make much more of an effort to read more fiction. Not for anyone else’s sake but my own, because I really do know that I greatly enjoy it.
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