This is half-pie.

Last week – well, the last two rather intense days of last week – were all about Webstock, which I may or may not get around to writing up.

Immediately after the drinks on Friday night Rebecca and the girls picked me up and whisked me away for fish and chips on the Petone foreshore followed by a drive out to the Catchpool Valley for some camping with Ralph and Kathleen and their kids.

OK, so I have to admit I wasn’t entirely keen. It was a bit of a wrenching mode switch from webstocking to camping. In the dark, I was momentarily excited when I was able to name the bright stars using the Sky Voyager app on my iPhone. And luckily for me Rebecca and the others were being tolerant of my need to hold on to my techno-comforter.

The next morning was lovely. However our sleep was not: between the pack of munters over the way who didn’t stop yahooing until 2:30am (and at one point we heard them discussing loudly their plan to take one of the kids’ bikes for a ride, but lesser yahoos prevailed) and the pigs, moreporks and other odd screechy things wandering about, and the hard hard ground I didn’t get much rest.

Can you tell? Yes, it’s been almost 20 years since the last time I went camping. And I’m a whiner.

In the late morning we hung out down at the creek. By this time I was dehydrated, caffeine deprived, and overtired. I needed occupational therapy, and then I remembered what my father used to do for us on the banks of the Pomahaka River in those hot summers of the 1970s. So I got out my pocket knife and cut a flax stalk, and I made a boat.

One waka was not enough, though this one was the most elaborate. Eventually all the kids had their own, and they floated them with intent smiles lit by the water’s reflections from the pools and rivulets they carved in the gravelly sandbars.

Meanwhile I was looking for spiders and other interesting invertebrate excitement; and the others joined in too. There was lots to be seen…

Beautiful pebble-speckled wolf spiders running fast across the stones, shying away from the water:

Smooth and sleek giant-jawed tetragnathid spiders surrounded by the translucent shells of their prey:

(and later, parked on their line and waiting for dinner to arrive, their undersides an unlikely stripe of yellow)

And crayfish:

This latter caused a LOT of excitement amongst the kids, some of whom had never seen one before (though our girls have encountered them up at Khandallah Park). I picked it up behind the eyes so they could have a close look; and they took turns holding on to it gently. It was much prettier than the muddy green brown ones we used to catch in the ponds and creeks around the farm. I have to admit… it actually looked edible. If it were a little larger.

There was lots more: dragonflies; little invertebrates scudding about in pools; lovely grey water-skating nurseryweb spiders. Shade growing across the water bringing relief from the sun. The kids starting catching things and showing them to me. It all was great fun.

But then it was getting on into the late afternoon, and we had to go home.

It was a pretty good way to start the weekend, all things considered. Curry at Petone’s Curry Heaven on the way home, and a whole Sunday to recuperate.

Though maybe next time we’ll bring a thermarests for sleeping on, and a billy to boil for coffee…

We just got back from the public tasting event at Pinot Noir 2010. This is a triennial trade conference for NZ Pinot Noir growers, winemakers, and various industry types. I’m none of these. But lucky for us, I won tickets to the public event for Rebecca and me on Twitter.

There were 107 stands. Two hours was therefore not enough. Hell, two DAYS would not have been enough. Hats off to the professionals who have the stamina and the talent to get around everything with their palate and liver intact, and still deliver relatively meaningful and consistent judgements. (We hope.)

As for me, I’m not likely to deliver any meaningful or even useful judgements. I didn’t even get time to send any reviews to Corkscore! But we had lots of fun getting around the tiny few we managed to visit. In general the standard was pretty amazing, so any negative comments I may make should be viewed in that light. (We’ve found by experience that even a Pinot that seems average in a lineup is often pretty bloody good when you have it by itself with food of an evening.)

• At Johner, we met the avuncular Karl Johner. I follow Patrick Johner on Twitter, and we all had a little bit of a laugh trying a barrel-drawn sample of the upcoming 2009, something Patrick (who is in Germany on the family’s vineyard over there at the moment) hasn’t tried yet. It was very good, too. At the very end we returned to try some of his Noble Pinot Noir, a beautiful and unusual dessert wine that we’ll have to get some more of.
• at Pisa Range, we met the Hawkers. We’d enjoyed their Black Poplar Pinot when we were down south on holiday, and it was good to calibrate our expectations of the wines on something we’d had before and really enjoyed. It’s fair to say that not many wines exceeded the Pisa Range for us. Their 2005, which they dug out of their wine library specially for this tasting, was unbelievably intense and unlike any others I had (in a good way).
• at Pyramid Valley we tried their Calvert Block Pinot. There’s three wineries that have made wine from the same block in the same year, and we were going to try and get around all three of them (Felton Road and Craggy Range are the other two) but we ran out of time.
• at Brown Family Vineyards / Cape Campbell we met Alana, the winemaker (at the recommendation of Lucy who runs the Cape Campbell twitter account). I really wanted to like their Pinots but we found them a little too acidic compared to others we’d tried; though the Lobster Reef ’09 (if I remember correctly) wasn’t too bad.
• at Pegasus Bay I had high expectations but again I was a little disappointed with the acidic mouth. The Prima Donna reserve was beautiful up front and more balanced in the mouth compared to their standard range—but then that’s to be expected.
• while we waited to edge into Felton Road I tried a couple of the Foxes Island wines. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t understand enough about the regional differences between Marlborough and my usual favoured Martinborough and Central Otago so I’ll need to leave it to others to explain it. For me, and this was true of many of the Marlborough Pinots, they just seemed flatter and less interesting (though I hate saying this, as the passion, effort, and love that’s gone into all these wines on show is plainly evident).
• At Felton Road we tried one of their range, but sadly not the Calvert Block to extend our trio tasting. Felton Road was another one of those wines we wanted to love, being a big name Central Otago winery (and always closed when we wanted to visit it, the tease). But it didn’t grab us, and the crowd was closing in, so we moved on to the next stand on our list. So. Many. Wines. So. Little. Time.
• At Valli Wines we tried all three of their rather amazing wines: the Gibbston, the Bannockburn, and the Waitaki. All three were great in their own right: but by this time, having neglected to spit out much of the wine and missed out on filling up on the delicious finger food, I was struggling to express exactly what the differences between the three were. Rebecca and I both agreed that the Valli Gibbston Pinot Noir was one of the best we’d tasted all evening, if not the best—rounded and full. The Valli Waitaki, grown in limestone, really did taste minerally, something Rebecca didn’t like so much, having had enough of hard water in her youth.
• At Martinborough I’d heard (again via Twitter, this time through their winemaker Paul whom we met on their stand—I love how Twitter & wine just go together) that they’d had one of their ’06 Marie Zelie Reserve opened. It was a clear step up from their two other Pinots, so much so that I’m unlikely ever to afford any. One to watch out for.
• Finally, we saw that Larry McKenna of Escarpment was almost free, so while we waited to thank him for the tickets I won (for it was he who had organised the comp) we tasted his Escarpment, Kupe, and Kiwa Pinots. Of the three, we liked the Kupe best, though by this time neither of us could explain why. It was great to finally meet Larry too, and it’s clear we need to spend more time “researching” Martinborough wines.

So yes, two hours was not enough—we had a list of other wineries we didn’t get time to check out; and yet, it was probably enough on this amateur’s empty stomach. Rebecca and I had a power of fun meeting the winemakers; hearing their stories; and trying their wines. It was a fantastic event.

The standout wines for us were, in no particular order, the Valli Gibbston; the Escarpment Kupe; the Pisa Range; and the Johner dessert Pinot.

Now: when’s the Riesling conference?

The older we get, the more predictable we men become. Thus it was that in my quest (once more) for the “something small” spousal Christmas present I turned, just as I did before, to the Wargames shop down in the BNZ Centre.

This time, I came away with a fabulous little two person game called Fjords.

In this game you use place little hexagonal cards turn-by-turn to “explore” an area of fjords. At appropriate spots you place a farmhouse—and which spots are the “appropriate” ones is where the tactical interest comes in.

After all the tiles that can be placed are placed (there are some rules on placement which mean you might not use all of them) the next phase of the game starts. Here, you place your “fields” (some little wooden disks) turn-by-turn on tiles contiguous to your farm houses and your other fields. You have to go around mountains (the dark areas on the tiles) and water; so as you can imagine there is a tactical element here which extents back to the exploration phase earlier.

This makes for a pleasing mix of tactics and map-making bundled into a relatively quick and simple game, and we’ve enjoyed playing this against each other. The girls play this quite well too. Recommended as a quick, fun, relatively cheap and compact game that will travel easily¹.

The other weekend was Anniversary Weekend (i.e., there’s a Monday off to “celebrate” the founding of Wellington province, a political division that ceased to exist over 133 years ago) and, as has been typical with this summer, it was wet and cold. I convinced Rebecca that buying a new game was more cost-effective than lunch out and going to the pictures as a family (almost true!) and so, back to the Wargames shop we went, this time coming out with Ticket to Ride Europe.

This game is altogether longer and more complicated—but possibly more satisfying. We have a map of Europe with various coloured routes in it; each player needs to “claim” these routes as they can by collecting cards of the same colour and placing their little plastic trains as appropriate. There are many modifications to this basic play, such as “destination tickets“that specify certain cities that the player must make connected routes between; “tunnels” and “ferries” that require extra completion steps; and bonuses such as one for the longest continuous route.

Rebecca and I have enjoyed this game quite a lot—but as it involves quite a bit more long range thinking than some of the other games we have it’s looking like the girls are getting a bit tired of it. We’re having to experiment with various handicaps to even it up a little so that they have a chance of winning.

It’s also fairly long (the fastest game we had with the kids was 1½ hours) for small people of wandering attention… though possibly they’re just a little tired. Maybe it’s a game that is probably true to the 8+ label on the box.

We’ll have to try playing it some more two-player and see how we go with that.

¹ Update: If there’s one flaw with the gameplay in Fjords, it’s that too much seems to hang on which player gets to go first in the second phase of play. There are a set of rules around this that try to mitigate this effect, but once the players become more familiar with this game this effect is likely to become an issue. Perhaps using another tileset, but the same number of houses, as a commenter on Board Game Geek suggests, may help. (This is apparently the Mega-Fjords variant.)

We once had a lake view, looking to the north. But that was thirty-five years ago, when the street was just two ruts between the matagouri; briar rose; and tussock, and there were no houses or trees other than what we’d planted. That was when the arrival ritual was to sit on my father’s knee and steer the Valiant down the “street”.

What we still have, and should always have, is a lovely view to the south.

On the southern edge of the once and future terminal moraine of the Hāwea glacier my father bought a section and built a modest crib, nearly forty years ago. That’s where we are now.

Looking out: on the left there’s the Clutha valley, and in the distance the Dunstan mountains and Bendigo’s clutch of vineyards. On the right, the Cardrona valley and the straight, hill route to Queenstown over the Crown range. In the middle, the Pisa range.

Behind me: the little house, full of holiday memories and another holiday still in progress.

On the way down here the other day we stopped to do the very short Blue Pools walk. There are many short bush walks off State Highway Six, and we thought the girls might enjoy the sight of the trout in the Makarora River.

However the water was (as advertised) the milky blue of glacial runoff, and we didn’t see a thing in there (though the water was very pretty). But I had gotten completely diverted by another sight: something I don’t think I have ever seen before: lots and lots of Riflemen.

(In fact, up until that point I don’t think I’d ever seen a Rifleman at all. They are New Zealand’s smallest bird; the adults are a lovely bright green and are presumably named after the famous British greenjacket rifle regiments of the Peninsular War.)

Usually this particular area is short of birdlife apart from the introduced blackbirds and the occasional tomtit (has DoC been poisoning the rats and possums? I hope so). But as we were walking down to the river I kept hearing little whistling calls, lots of them.

When I stopped and let the girls go on ahead, I could see what was causing the calls: little swarms of tiny grey birds skittering up the trunks of mossy trees, then from woodfall to woodfall, then across the leaf litter. They’d cross each other and turn and bicker, then split and hop: always active and fast.

They appeared to be shepherded by green birds about the same size, and it was at this point I realised that what I was probably seeing was families of riflemen, with their mother or father.

We passed at least three groups of birds on the short walk; each of at least four to seven in number. And on the way back, Rebecca and I managed to get Bella to slow down and see what was in front of her (both girls had been a bit put out by the lack of excitement in our little enforced sidetrip, and sadly Rosa was not at all receptive to sights of seemingly drab little birds) and we were well rewarded with a couple of the chicks working their way closer and closer to us across the leaflitter until they were within about 2 meters of our feet.

Just at that moment though there was a flash of green and a flurry of wings and whistle between us and the chicks; and they fluttered quickly back to a safer distance. One of their parents had spotted them getting too close to us, and had chased them away, telling their incautious children off in no uncertain terms.

It was a beautiful moment.

Which is not quite right, because we are Finally Here, and not really On The Road anymore.

More pictures as and when I find either the patience or a better internet connection, but here’s a panorama of Lake Hawea centred on Corner Peak (which some of you may know from the Craig Potton calendar photo).

We came from the north, down through the Haast Pass and along the northern part of Lake Wanaka; over The Neck to be presented with an utterly flat Lake Hawea.

It’s not often that the lake is dead calm this late in the afternoon; but so it was today, and the southerly passing through yesterday appeared to have cleared the air of both dust and cloud.

A few more days like this, please.

Doubleclink.com is a new wine diary website from well known New Zealand winery Kim Crawford. You can record what wines you had, and where; and there is a bit of a social networking aspect to it as well. (I’d be more definite about what the site does, but read on and you’ll find out why the site is still a mystery to me.)

And… the first 3000 people to register get sent a free bottle of Kim Crawford wine! So naturally, I had to register.

The first little barrier was an age-verification step before I could even get into Doubleclink: something I’ve not had to do at any other similar website (and I’ve signed up for a lot in the last six months). Not too hard though, and soon I was past the homepage and on to the registration page.

I filled out the registration form, using my main email address (email address #1) wishing the fields could be a little larger, and clicked submit.

And here’s where it started going all wrong. Instead of getting a friendly “You are now registered” message, I got a “Page not found message”. Oh, I thought; don’t know what went wrong there – but I’ll enter my details again in case that works. So I entered my registration details again; and this time when submitting the form got a new error message telling me that I couldn’t use the same email address twice to register. Cool, I thought; my registration must have gone through anyway – I should be able to log in now!

So then I tried logging in. It didn’t work – I got yet another error message telling me to wait for a confirmation message to arrive in my inbox. So I flicked over to my inbox. No email. And no email message five minutes later, none half an hour later; nor an hour later either (and nothing in the spam folder either). I thought this was pretty odd – most websites requiring an email confirmation on signup send you the email immediately. There was a contact email address at the bottom of the homepage – so I sent Doubleclink an email asking them to resend the confirmation email. And in the meantime I tried using the password reset function to see if there was some email problem preventing messages from getting to me. It turned out that I could successfully receive a password reset, but I still couldn’t log into the website.

Well, I got no reply to my email to Doubleclink after a couple days, which I thought was pretty poor form. But I decided to persist and tried registering again using all the same details but using email address #2. Maybe they’d fixed the website and there’s be no “Page Not Found” error.

I was disappointed. I got the same errors all over again.

At this point I was starting to get a bit annoyed. This stuff shouldn’t be hard! So I posted a screenshot of the Page Not Found page to Flickr and sent an message to the @kimcrawfordwine account on Twitter alerting them to the problems I was having.

Again, there was no reply; but over on the Flickr page there were a couple of responses – one from another Twitter user (and long time Flickr member) saying she’d had no problems, and another message from a brand new Flickr member I didn’t know basically telling me the problem was my own fault. The language of the comment read like it was from the website developers, but of course I have no proof of this. I hope it wasn’t!

So then today I had another go at registering, using email address #3, and all the same name and address details as before. But as I was filling in the mobile phone number I had a sudden thought: could my putting the phone number in the very commonly used international format (e.g., +6421000000) be causing the problem? Often, badly written web apps choke on non-ascii characters – and while there are sometimes good security reasons for stopping users from entering these, the web app must always be ready for them to be entered – and have a graceful way of then dealing with it.

So I omitted the + in the mobile number, and sure enough, I got to a very nice “Success” screen (I have since confirmed, by attempting to register yet again, this time with email address #4, that this is in fact the case: adding the + to your mobile number will screw up your registration catastrophically). Not long after, I received a activation email, and within a couple minutes I was into the website and having a quick look around.

Of course, my successful registration was using an email address that I don’t use very often, so the next thing I did was change my email address #3 back to my main email address #1. Unfortunately, this was a very bad move because now Doubleclink is terminally confused. I can’t login using either email address #3 + registered password #3 from my sole successful registration, nor using email address #1 with registered password #3, as one would expect if the email address change had worked correctly.

So now I’m back to square one. Although I have been busy spending quite a bit of time debugging their web app I am still no closer to being able to report back on whether Doubleclink is actually any good at being a wine diary and social network. And at this rate, I never will. Let’s hope Kim Crawford’s very fancy second social networking play, The Artist’s Lounge, works better.

All this was tedious and dry work, and I have worked up a powerful thirst. But not for Kim Crawford wine.

It has been a long time, too long. That’s what happens when you have new obsessions (like the ukelele, though more on that another day), and other more regular stuff to do (like reading, sleeping).

In fact, I think I need to do some reading and sleeping shortly. But first, I need to tune my ukulele and have a bit of a burst.

So, look back past this recent wintry weather, and remember what early spring was like:

Feels so long ago now, doesn’t it.

Usually on a day like today we’d I’d just sloth around. It’s Sunday, after all, and by the time I’d have removed the piles of cat crap from the lawn it would be too dark to mow it anyway.

Not today though. Today was all action. The kids were up early as one of Bella’s friends was staying overnight. After Bella’s friend went home, we headed into town for brunch with the Wellingtonista. It was a little bit unusual in that this time partners and kids were invited as well; however, kids being catching, they were placed safely down the far end where they couldn’t disturb people too much. James‘ Milo brought along Blokus along, which we had not played before, and he beat us comfortably while we waited for lunch.

Later on, we headed down to the stadium for the football.

We’d been prepared for cold, like good parents, but the direct sun beating in on us was extremely warm and bright. This is normally a good thing, but not (bad, bad parents!) if you are without hats and sunscreen and sunglasses.

I was still feeling a slightly boozy halo of wellbeing from lunch, and I think this, coupled with an over-stimulated sense of the occasion, made me go and buy hats for the whole family (I think this is the same impulse that makes you buy an expensive t-shirt at a gig – I am all-too susceptible there as well).

Super styley, eh?

Well, I can’t say that I like my new hat that much (and Rebecca doesn’t seem a huge fan of hers either), but at least I have something to wear to the next game. (There were less obvious styles that in my haste I overlooked in favour of an expression of tribalism.) The girls love theirs, so that’s something.

The game itself: well, it was as good as the last one we went to, except for the ending, in which the opposition team, notable only for a very famous ex-Liverpool player being the captain, scored an equaliser in the last minute of extra time. I’m not really what you’d called an informed watcher of sport, though I enjoy watching it live in life (over live on TV).

I also discovered that the one drawback of daytime football matches is that small kids don’t just fall asleep when they’re bored: they have to be kept entertained with food and drink. That is what parents are for.

Anyway, after all that we went to a drama production that one of Bella’s friends was in, which was charming, clever, and also concise; this last virtue being most welcome given the day’s various excitements.

And so the weekend was satisfactorily completed.