opanuku

Meet Hunter!

After three days of first-stage labour for Saira, Hunter was born at our home in Opanuku Road, surrounded by native bush and birds.

Being able to have the birth at home was an amazing and moving experience that we're lucky to have shared. Thanks SO MUCH to our midwives Karen Bettley and Chris Hamilton. We're deeply grateful for their efforts and commitment in spending so much time to ensure our birth was a natural and beautiful one.

Thanks also to Helen (Grandma) Lal, who stayed with us and gave her love and support throughout the process. And to Henry and Leanne for the super-cool Uglydoll (in background of pic above), to Jacqui (Nana?) for the beautiful flowers, and to Interflora for their quick delivery and valiant attempts to climb our driveway in their van.

Hunter is a Libra, weighed 7lb (3.2kg) at birth, and was born at 9.24am on Saturday, 29 September, in the year of the Fire Boar 2007. He has super cool sideburns.

Love to yas all from Hunter, Chris and Saira!

i've been checking out google maps versus yahoo! maps, evaluating the best nz coverage

google gets cred for a hot flight sim built into google earth and for not lying to dutch tourists about opanuku road joining up with scenic drive. when dutch tourists are deceived, they end up breaking their rental cars on the bullbars of my clunkery old diesel, and that sux. -10000 points to some nz mapping providers for their mapping badness.

but today we're looking at yahoo!, who are predicting (note contrast between coastline in satellite pic and inlay) either severe global warming, or a catastrophic dambreak at the huia dam

what else have we learned from the mapping madness?

• yahoo has ok pics, but responds to requests for specific nz addresses with "do you mean waitakere, or waitakere?" then it sends you to waitakere township either way
• yahoo has lots of black areas across nz, and pretty much no street map ... maybe this whole yahoo!xtra thing will change that ... but would you trust xtra for directions to the corner store?
• any mapping provider gives better results than nz posts postcode finder, which still insists that piha doesn't exist, try paihia. i cannot find a single piha road that nz post know about. such a pity, given what a nice chap the postie is ...
• google maps are pretty damn good so far!

the girl at mitre 10 asked what the humane trap was. i said,

it's a rat trap.

she said,

ew, do you like rats?

the humane trap didn't work. rats are too smart for that shit.

tui is a very good dog, he likes to hunt rats. only bad ones though. (not lovely friendly rats like shiva.)

mummy rat is pissed off now. the nest is gone. the food is gone. the trap is still ignored (rats are really smart, i will grant them that. but they smell bad.)

we feel your pain, mummy rat. but we asked you to leave nicely, and you didn't, so we killed your family.

i updated our map of directions for getting here

thanks to clive for his input on the misleading hairpin

thanks to zoomin.co.nz for the map

opanuku road is very nice thankyou

zoomin.co.nz

maps.google.com

maps.live.com