The Sewphist

Oooh, within cycling distance, where cycling distance makes the treat basically everything neutral.

Which New World? #ForResearch #ForFutureMorale

The fact that it’s shown on almost flat land. Where are the office buildings and hills that surround it? And is that… the Auckland Museum behind it?

I find our birds often appear in waves - so you might have fewer varieties around at any point in time, but there are still lots of them.

In our garden we get kererū, tūī, pīwakawaka, tauhou, ruru, riroriro, pīpīwharauroa, kārearea, and even the occasional miromiro, just not all at the same time.

How rude! I don't have FaceID turned on on mine, but in my photos it has set up three different "people" collections for me. For a while I thought it was just confused by the fact I went from long straight hair to no hair to various stages of wavy regrowth, but no, all three are a mix of the above.

Ā fluffy baby albatross practicing flapping its stubby little wings

The world is a big and scary place, but this fluffy baby albatross is practicing flapping its wings on a sunny Dunedin afternoon.

The toutouwai are very friendly too. They are often seen hanging around just at the side of paths, and just like the pīwakawaka they love it if you scruff up the ground and disturb some bugs for them.

Attention #MadProps fans, there’s a Zillow-gone-wild show on HGTV. Right at the moment they’re looking at a Pirates of the Caribbean house. It is… well, Wild!

Caramalised not-chicken in a cast iron pan.

Caramalised not-chicken sandwich made with home baked sourdough bread, mixed lettuce, cucumber, and tomato and red onion.

My baguette shaping was a little off today, but le repas est servi!

#kai

Dinner.

The cooked seitan had been unwrapped and now looks kind of like a hunk of roast meat. Using the baking paper inside the foil creates a skin.

The pile of shredded not-chicken, with a hunk that was cut off and reserved behind it.

So far so good. Not-chicken has steamed for two hours. I’ve cut off a chunk to slice into burger patties, and shredded the rest.

That’s how my parents used to do it. Hand-milled mince-grinder, bean-slicer, coffee-grinder and bread/meat-slicer.

There’s still a couple in Lower Hutt, and there’s one in Ngaio too.

Seitan dough prepared for wrapping. It is vaguely chicken-sized and shaped.

The dough has been wrapped in brown baking paper.

The dough has also been wrapped it aluminium foil.

The wrapped dough in the top of my large stainless steel steamer pot, seen through the glass lid.

Adventures in not-chicken are happening.

I’ve based it on Chickwheat shreds, but with real onion and garlic, so the dough is definitely softer this time, but also has been processed, twisted, plaited and knotted until very strong.

Let’s see what it looks like in 2 hours once it’s been steamed.

Yeah, that is one of the main ways I normally pick them up. Although on my phone, everything comes into one inbox, so I have to be more alert when I'm checking my email there.

That's the reason I knew it was phishing too. I've been meaning to cancel it, so I guess this is a reminder to do that.

Email from “Spotify Team” saying that they couldn’t process my payment.

Heads up that there’s Spotify Phishing going on. Got this email earlier today, but there are reasons why I know it is not genuine.

I baked bread but it was too late for lunch so now I have to leave it until dinner.

Contemplating an adventure in not-chicken… then making sandwiches inspired by New Caledonian Franco-Vietnamese chicken sandwiches.

Wouldn’t it be grand if having burnout once made you immune to having it again…

Yes, that’s a really good start. I leave mine charging in the living room overnight. I slipped up bringing my tablet into my room to do Wordle/Waffle etc as I wind down. Trying to make that an afternoon treat, and do paper Sudoku instead. Has to be the hard ones though, the easy ones are dopamine.

After 5 years of horrible sleep hygiene, I’ve managed to rearrange my life so that once I’m finally asleep, I can just stay asleep until I’ve had enough of it. It doesn’t work all the time, but it is making a lot of stuff a bit easier.

If you ever need a hardware store buddy, just let me know. Xx

The picture shows a needle made of bone, it resembles its modern descendants with an eye at one end and a tapered end.

Things used in everyday life are the real archaeological treasures!

This sewing needle was made from animal bone some 13,000 years ago.

Some designs simply don't need to be improved, because form and functions were perfectly matched from the start

Length: 5.6 cm

📷 Landesmuseum Württemberg 🏺

I just wish that there was more French content available for streaming here. Netflix is mostly English shows dubbed into French, the actual French context largely a very particular style of raucous comedy that quickly gets wearisome.

Just finished watching S2 of Patience, decided I’d like to try watching Astrid et Raphaëlle (which is what it is based on, and there are 6 seasons).

No one is streaming it in AoNZ. But it’s there on France.tv. Sign up for an account… of course all of their content is geo-locked. 😫

This all sounds less than optimal and I really hope your son is ok.

FYI my next homework is going to be learning about fungi so I can do mini talks on it while volunteering. I look forward to your contribution of favourite facts when I get to that!

A fairly common style used here is to give terms/words in both languages, separated with a pipe, for example korimako | bellbird, or tīeke | saddleback. That way people are exposed to the proper name, but in a way that helps them learn it by linking it to something more “familiar” sounding.

Korimako is their name in te reo Māori.

It always amuses me when I point birds out to visitors during one of my volunteering shifts and they ask me what the English name is because they don’t recognise the te reo Māori one. For a bird they have never seen before because they only live here… 🙃

Tīeke, if you want to use the local name.

Yeah, I figured that it was a month ago and went had several days worth of violent storms since then.