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Devastating Samoa Tsunami Kills 110

The realities of the vulnerability of the region that we live in has just struck quite close to home when a massive undersea earthquake triggered a tsunami that has devastated Samoa and Tonga and taken may lives with it.

At the time of writing this article, some 110 people have died and many more injured. Watching the footage on the news tonight has really struck me with how close to home this all is, in more ways than one. The remnants of the Tsunami tidal wave did hit NZ without any damage, but there’s many Samoan and Tongan families who live here in NZ and lost loved ones.

The pictures of the once beautiful Island are devastating. Whole villages wiped out. Peoples homes and possessions taken a lifetime to build, all gone. When you look the photo below, it’s quite clear that this wasn’t that far from home.

For the first time that I can recall in the 10 years that I’ve lived in here, the magnitude 8.0 quake resulted in a ‘National Warning Tsunami Threat to NZ’. A bit scary.

My heart goes out to all those in the region who have lost loved ones and are now picking up the pieces and trying to rebuild their lives.

Here I was, like, going out for some lunch, like, and was, like, walking behind these twenty somethings, like, and, like, couldn’t help getting kinda irritated, like, at the banter going to-and-fro between them, like. Almost every bloody other word, like, was ‘like’.

It’s almost *like* the younger generation are completely incapable of, like, ………..pauses. I think most of the Gen Y’s do it, but for some it’s like a fricken habit on steroids.

If I ever start, like, doing this can someone please hit me around the face with a large fish – PLEASE!

Have I become I wine heathen?

Here I am, taken my time to choose a bottle of wine to go with my regular Friday night pizza, finally settling on a bottle of Pinot that looks half decent for my budget. I then find myself putting the bottle back because it (wait for it) has a cork!

At the time I thought nothing of it, but now it’s had time to simmer, I now wonder what the heck has happened to me. I’m a man of simple tastes and I relish the ‘experience’ of things. For example a short black is far more satisfying when you’ve ground the beans, filled the portafilter and seen it through to the final brew.

I used to have a similar experience with pulling a cork, and even enjoyed using the more complex method of using a proper Pulltaps corkscrew that posh waiters use. For me it was all part of the experience.

So have I become a wine heathen? Well, after a bit of Googling, the story that I’m gonna stick to from here on is that screw caps have a near zero chance of the wine being corked and are more environmentally pc. I’m sure that’s what I was thinking at the time

Kia ora

Welcome to my new blog and my first blog post.

So here’s the low down on what you can expect. From time to time I feel the need write about something. It may be something I feel passionate about, it may be something I found interesting and think others may too.

Right now, Spring has just arrived so now seemed a good time to start. So here I go.

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