This picture is about 15 miles, or 25km across diagonally.
Hamilton is in the top left corner, and the Waikato River is the
main waterway you can see winding its way from top-left to bottom-right
of the picture.
The University of Waikato is marked with an orange icon, and is on
the Eastern edge of town. If you look diagonally across the image
from the University towards the South-East corner,
you should be able to see a smaller yellow icon.
Just below that icon is where we live, 16km (10 miles) by road from the Uni.
You can see Mystery Creek running past us; it is the waterway that runs
through our property, just South of the house.
The Waikato river runs about 300m (350yds) North from us, across Mystery
Creek Road. You can just make out the line of Mystery Creek Road,
between Mystery Creek and the Waikato River.
Life for us is now taking on a pleasant pattern.
Edwin, for one, likes to stay up late.
One day last week (October 2006) he stayed up later than his Mum
and Dad, well after midnight.
New Scientist tells us that teenagers have odd inabilities to
sleep, Edwin is just practicing.
I went electrofishing in the university's lakes with a colleague
in the biology department. We have been totally unable to get
environmentally-friendly fish for our stream. Public servants
in various ecological facilities have been apologising profusely
for the utter inability to get fish that one would want to release.
Anyway, we caught a bunch of "bullies", molly-like native fish
about 40mm long. Here you see me putting some into a stock tank
as a reservoir, while another bucket of them went into the stream
along with a small eel we got at the same time.
This picture was taken by Kay was we returned home one afternoon.
Pigs fly, as Merinda found out shortly after this picture was
taken when her Hoggy Beanie Baby was sucked into the windstream
over Willy. We stopped and went back and rescued him.
She is more circumspect now.
(Willy, my car, is named after Professor Messerschmitt, designer of the ME262,
prince of turbojets.)
We went to the Hamilton Model Train Exhibition. Even Kay and Merinda
were interested...
..although this is a better representation of Merinda's-Eye view of such things.
This horse is about 12mm high.
This is a picture in Hamilton Gardens, looking across the lake from
the pavillion. One of those photos you take with the self timer...
...or the camera set to take a few frames.
Yes, the
mania service is running OK.