Sunday, March 31: Rain on and off during the day, drier towards evening
Jarrad’s
Breakfast had to be in two parts this morning because the bread I had left behind had indeed gone off in the meantime. It was sultana bran to begin with and an orange juice, then down to the shops for the bread, and back here for toast and coffee.
Spent the rest of the morning trying to get something in airbnb near Rayna’s place with a reasonable check-in and not too complicated rules (surely they must have an option to exclude single males from even seeing some places if they are non grata?!?) and eventually sent off a request that took a long time in being answered and was rejected in the end. Then the question of the cooker replacement at home had to be addressed, at least in its initial stage.
Jarrad was off on his way to work when I left in the rain to check out the supermarket once again for some lunch. He had given me an umbrella for the task, and I battled the wind and the rain all the way down to the bridge and along back the banks of the Waitangi, and past the motorcamp of yore, noting the lack of fried rice places along the way (not even the Chinese fish’n’chip shop had fried rice), and the Thai trailer which was open yesterday was closed again today.
Back here heated up the two pies I had bought from the supermarket for $1.5 each and had them with some of Jarrad’s tomato sauce. Irvine’s pies, singly, are the cheapest, but they all seem to have exactly one piece of gristle in them. In the meantime the paddling stuff was put into the washing machine for desalination and has been drying slowly ever since.
Slide Show
Click on the image to stop/start the animation
After lunch I started on a program section to amalgamate photos from two folders produced when two cameras are used separately on the same day (or it could also be used to “tidy up” a folder from which photos have been discarded). Anyhow that went pretty well and I noticed a tui feeding from a bird feeder on the deck, so the SX160 was set up with the motion detector to try to catch him. Set the initial threshold to 25 which may have been too high so reduced it to 12 and set a dead border of 1.
Started working on the panoramas for CC2 which meant aligning a number of brackets and correcting their chromatic aberration individually. Colors were much more subdued than in the camera display, even at 100% gtx. Will have to try some oversaturation methinks.
Wanted to see how at least one of the sunset time lapses worked so set up CC3 for that and while that was rendering went off for dinner. The only Chinese restaurant in town had fried rice for $25, which was deemed to be too expensive, but Green’s Indian Thai Cuisine, 78 Marsden Rd, had some for $17, with a few extra vegetables, and a bit greasy, but that will have to do (meat was pork). Paihia is not a place for regular dining out.
Airbnb continued to produce a mess. Two requests were rejected before one was accepted and that will barely go through. Will see about a plan tomorrow.
