Monday, March 23: Cloudy with rain all the morning, becoming very much finer & warmer by the late afternoon

Tramping: Mt Maunganui, 6.3 km

Liz & Phil’s

The dogs (Airedale terriers) hadn’t woken me @ 5:00, but from about 7:45 onwards I was awake. Breakfast (and Liz insisted that there would have to be one, otherwise her business wouldn’t be a B&B) was cornflakes, coffee from a very expensive looking machine and at least tasted like something, toast, cantaloupe and some spreads which I didn’t have.

Perfect day for a technical day, and I started off by trying to synchronise the internal and external hard drives in terms of pictures. For D: to have the absolute essentials that would be the main folder with the processed images (all DNG & IMG – debarrelled and dechromaticised) and one subfolder with thumbnails. It has occurred to me during the day that PPP could work primarily with G: as the source and copy some files to the internal hard drive at the end of the day. If that were the case, then it would also be worth considering extending the postprocessing procedure beyond just ATM (advanced tone mapping).

Then a couple of images were processed for 50 best pix, and those were added to from the blog images. One further post blog was scheduled, leaving only two more to cover my bases until I recover on the other side.

Went down to the supermarket for some chicken herb loaf for lunch, which I had as sandwiches with tomato sauce here.

In the meantime Liz had been out and I had called a hostel in Whitianga (On the Beach) for two nights accommodation in a twin as single for $38, which seemed quite reasonable. They have kayaks, so guess what I’ll be doing tomorrow afternoon? Also checked on the kayak operator in Hahei (for a trip to Cathedral Cove), but he wasn’t giving away too much.

The weather improved dramatically as soon as I had started PPP on one of the sets that I wanted to get done, so I took off to Mt Maunganui to walk around it, and then on the way back to walk over the top. Not very strenuous but nice views and a couple of photos.

Came back through town to eat a small roast lamb meal at a Chinese-run place downtown for $13. Was sufficient, and will return to eating pizza and fried rice tomorrow.

Passed the plastic store on the final leg but it was already closed for the day. What I really need is a sealable salt shaker, a reasonable set of portable cutlery (teaspoon, spoon, fork and knife) and tiny containers for the filters. Let’s see how much Christmas there is left tomorrow.