The building DOES shake...David blogging on Wednesday

I have up-loaded the wrong pctures--the first is an interesting house built around what look like two round chimneys, and the second shows a host of shivering schoolchildren jumping off a jetty into a bone-chilling sea. I wanted a couple of container ships (see post below)-but I now realize that I have not loaded those photos into the computer.

By the way--dear reader-if there is a reader--you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them, and then click on BACK to get back to the blog.

The wind is howling around the apartment building on Wednesday afternoon and the building is definitely shaking--a standard lamp in front of my desk is wobbling a little to and fro, and a tall house plant with a pot on the floor is also shaking. The sea below is a mass of whitecaps--more, I think, than we have seen since we arrived on Sunday afternoon. Well, the building has survived since 1966--though that could mean that it is getting to the end of its life and weary of the battering it must have received over the years.

Would we get a refund of rent if it collapsed?

I regret a little my post of newspaper headlines. Easy enough to make fun of newspaper headlines here--I am sure some Washington Post headlines would amuse a New Zealander--and I begin to see that the sub-editors here are looking for a laugh. Today the main headline is "Fur flies in SPCA row over pet palace."

Actually, I think the Dominion Post--which I pick up each morning at the supermarket while Joan does her jog--is a very good paper, especially in the World section, which has a number of the main international stories together with some quite long articles. And the business section today had a long and interesting article about the cycle manufacturer Giant--which is actually run by a Taiwanese woman. It also had an article (available on its web-site, incidentally--you can Google Dominion Post) on the plans to install underwater turbines that would be driven by the incoming and outgoing tides in a narrow channel and feed electricity into the grid.

Impressive from our eyrie up on high are the shipping movements--ferries going in and out to the South Island and big container ships moving in and out of the container wharves where giant cranes swing the containers out and on to the docks. A huge ship pulled in on Monday night and was gone by Tuesday morning. We can see two now across the harbour being unloaded.

Do any of you Brits remember when dockers' strikes would bring Britain to a standstill? No more, with the merchant ships being all container vessels.

Maybe I will try to bring up a couple of ship photos taken from the apartment.

As you will have seen-I failed because the photos were not loaded into the computer.

All from me today.

David