Splashing dashing restless sea

I enjoyed my trip to Kawau so much last week that I thought there was no better way to finish the long weekend than with a return visit with Georgia and my grandsons Mack & Murphy.  So, grabbing our togs, water bottles and towels, we all leapt into Georgia's vehicle for the road trip to Sandspit.

We arrived in good time and I indulged in the sadistic pleasure of watching a group of people about my age fighting with their cellphones to retrieve their reservations.  They were still at it as the boat left but, as they were on board, the ferry company had obviously taken pity.  (I will confess to having had a dry run retrieving our reservations from Dropbox on my phone yesterday evening so I could look like I knew what I was doing.)  The sun was shining brightly and we were all glad to be wearing hats and lashings of sunscreen.  It also wasn't as windy as the weather forecast had predicted, with the tail end of a cyclone coming in from the northeast.

I'd gone for the upmarket cruise with barbecued salmon for Georgia and me and hotdogs & salad for the kids, served as we bobbed gently in a sheltered bay.  Once that was done we headed for Mansion House for an hour's stopover (and ice cream) which featured feeding the peacocks - probably more accurately described as letting the peacocks steal our food (Indian bhuja mix that I had bought in Waihi a couple of weeks ago).  Please excuse my crappy photo of the Mansion House - it doesn't really sit on a load of wooden piles.  The commentary on the boat was very good, describing the various incarnations of a number of buildings we passed, none of which I can recall

now.

Having fed our faces, as I mentioned earlier we bought ice cream at the café and set out to feed the peacocks.  It's generally frowned upon to feed the native birds but peacocks aren't native so we figured we'd get away with it.  They most certainly weren't shy, going so far as to shove their heads in the plastic bag we had the bhuja in: good for them I had bought the mild rather than hot version.  I then found a weka who was more ready to be photographed than the one I had done battle with on my previous visit.

The wind was getting up by the time we got back to Sandspit and I have just had to come indoors to finish this post back at Red Beach as the wind was threatening to take the screen of my laptop.  Tonight promises a real lunarfest with a blue moon, a super moon and a lunar eclipse taking place between 8:30 pm and 5 am.  By the look of the cloud cover at the moment, I'm going to have to take the Met Service's word for it.

I think I may be suffering from "little old lady disease" or simply a touch of the Jonahs as I am finding things falling apart around me.  This laptop and my hands have a wild feud going on.  It appears there is some keyboard shortcut that says "Go back a random number of lines and start typing there" and another(other than Ctrl-A) that says "Select everything and delete it".  Not to mention the one that turns on text centering.

Besides that, my beloved Lumix camera has started playing up, refusing to upload pictures to my PC and not auto-focusing (but only on what I consider to be the vital shots of the day).  Rain got into the bathroom floor earlier this week (I think I've found where and will shove some goop in and renail a flashing tomorrow) and turned the end of the bathroom vanity to wet cardboard (bloody MDF - should be banned in bathrooms.  On second thoughts, just banned).  And the DVD player is on the fritz.  I think that's about all.

So you're going to have to wait for my pics of the storm for some other time.  Maybe I'll buy a card reader tomorrow or, more probably, I won't because Windows 10 doesn't like them.

Oh, in case you were wondering, Splashing dashing etc, is the first line of a song we used to sing at junior school.  So many songs we sang there were hymns and I've always assumed it was, too but now I come to google it (a) there's no obvious religious references in it and (b) I never knew it had a second verse.  But now the CD has finished and I am determined to play my way through the entire collection before I leave - not doing particularly well as there are half a dozen I keep coming back to.