Quit my job yesterday, after 23 years with the same firm. The company's changed over the last few years (since well before Covid - anyone else noticed that 2020-21 don't count when talking about "a few years ago"?) between the previous CEO losing his way and ultimately quitting, and a new guy coming on board and bringing his team with him. My role within it has also changed over that period, into one I'm not satisfied with. I could have fought to get back into a role I wanted, but ultimately I came to the conclusion that even if they gave me the perfect role, the company culture is now not one I want to be part of, and given the individuals involved, I can't see that changing. So I'm out.

I'm glad to have made the call, and hopefully it'll have me feeling better about life in general in a few months - I've been finding myself getting steadily more negative about all sorts of things of late. But meantime there's a grieving process to go through - this job's been part of me for almost half my life, and while I'm not sad to be going, I'm sad it's come to this.

No idea what happens next - I don't have a job to go to. I'm going to take a few months out to decompress, shitpost a bit more, and do some landscaping around the house: there's some big jobs required to finish off the massive project we took on with this property four years ago, and I've been deferring paying someone to deal with them because I had a feeling that at some point soon I may have more time than money. After that, maybe a similar tech management role with a different company, maybe get back on the tools, which TBH I enjoyed more than I ever have management; the only issue is money. Or maybe get back into the startup scene - I joined my soon-to-be-ex employer as employee #6, and the best days were the early days when we were making it up as we went along and everything seemed possible: I'd love to get that feeling again. I'm not overly worried about finding something when I decide to look - the job market seems to be booming even despite the looming recession, and worst case we can get by on my wife's salary with a few lifestyle compromises.

A reminder of more carefree days (or at least less thoughtful ones) for your time.

...because apparently some of us already have.

Armistice Day seems particularly relevant in a year when once again young men are dying in muddy fields in Europe.

<note: this has the potential to turn political but that's not the intent. I was just reminded today of a so-Kiwi quirk of NZ's Parliamentary system that y'all might find amusing>

The US has the Liberty Bell. The UK has the Crown Jewels. New Zealand has ..... The Biscuit Tin of Destiny.

In our system, along I expect with most parliamentary systems, not all law is created according to the government's agenda. Any Member of Parliament here is able to draft their own bill on any matter they feel strongly enough about to bother, and submit it to Parliament to be debated and then voted on like any other legislation. If it passes - which mostly it doesn't - it becomes law.

Aside from allowing random trivia or pet hobby horses to come to Parliament's attention, this is also commonly the way that legislation on "moral" topics like marriage, abortion, euthanasia or homosexual law reform comes about here. Political parties often won't want to put their name behind something too controversial, but there's usually an MP who feels strongly enough about it to submit the legislation privately - often with behind the scenes support from MPs on both sides to draft a compromise bill that has a chance of passing - and if it is drawn in the ballot, the government can declare it a "conscience vote" which means MPs are free to vote against party positions, insulating the government from criticism whatever the outcome.

Since there are generally many, many more of these "Private Member's Bills" in the queue than can get discussed in the one afternoon every two weeks which Parliament schedules for them, there needs to be a system for deciding which ones get debated. In New Zealand, the process is by lottery: tokens representing the bill are drawn at random by one of Parliament's officials whenever there's a vacant slot.

Because this is New Zealand and we don't go for no hi-falutin' ways, the tokens are repurposed Bingo counters, and the container from which they are drawn is a biscuit tin (cookie tin for the Americans). These were pressed into service because they happened to be lying around 30 years ago at the time the ballot system was put in place, and have remained in service ever since, as has the paper label taped onto the tin.

Due to this, the Private Members Bill system is informally known here as "Biscuit Tin Democracy" and the tin in question, whose official home is a bookshelf in a parliamentary back office, is variously called "The Biscuit Tin of Democracy" or "The Biscuit Tin of Destiny".

(

Summertime here, so prawns have been barbied and beers have been drunk for the lunchtime warmup session, and now the younger members of the family are off for a surf while the rest of us get in a bit of digestive stupor before the serious eating and drinking begins this evening.

Hope everyone has a good one.

It probably didn't make international news much, but Auckland NZ, which I live on the outskirts of, took an absolute pasting from a storm over the weekend. I posted on Friday afternoon about it being wet, but it got a lot wetter: we're up to 40% of Auckland's average annual rainfall already this year, and most of that happened in the last few days. The city's under a State of Emergency, around 600 houses have been declared unfit for habitation so far, around 10% of the city's still without power and 25% without water pressure, more than 2000 emergency services callouts on Friday night alone, large amounts of urban infrastructure foobar due to flooding or landslides (including 40% of the city's sewage pumping stations, so no ocean swimming for a while), schools closed and public events cancelled for the next week at least, and 4 dead. So nowhere near Katrina level ugly, but not pleasant.

Pics of the aftermath here and here if you're interested.

Being on a hillside, and not an erosion-prone one, the Distraxi household came through it not too badly. Minor roof leak which wet the carpet in one room. The driveway's been washed out somewhat - not massively, but the 86 with its low ground clearance is housebound till I get a chance to get the tractor out and grade it. The roadside culvert at the end of our drive blocked with debris, sending a few hundred yards worth of road runoff water into our upper paddock and piling debris against the fence between it and our forest block, though fortunately the fence held, so I don't need to hump fenceposts and a post hole borer down the gully and remake it. The fence on the downhill end of the forest block is probably toast, but that’s the neighbour’s problem as it’s his responsibility to keep his stock off my land, not mine to keep my trees off his . The road between us and town was flooded out for a half day or so but it's useable again now, though the farmland either side of it is still largely under water.

Plus Mrs Distraxi had a very miserable night attempting to attend the Elton John concert, which was cancelled waaay later than it should have been, leaving 40,000 people wading back to their cars.

However my sister currently has two sets of neighbours camping in her house because the valley they live in is blocked by landslides and both their houses were floated off their piles, and one of our friends has had water waist deep through their house, so it'll be a year or more till their life is back to normal again.

And now we're off to the races again. Another storm incoming tonight - expected to be almost as severe as the last one, but the ground's totally waterlogged already so the effects will be worse. Forecast says the worst of it should go north of our place (we're south of the city), but the forecast for Friday said it was going to be bad but not horrific, so who knows.

It's starting to rain and my phone just squawked a Civil Defence alert at me. Wish me luck and post Unimogs - the Surf Lifesaving guys need a break.

NZ has done well at containment, but we’re doing a lousy job at vaccination - only 15% of the eligible population have had even one shot. I guess there just hasn’t been the sense of urgency here, plus supply’s been a problem because we don’t have a lot of leverage with pharmaceutical companies and anyway the government’s only approved the Pfizer one.

Anyway, my number just came up, so I’m now sitting in the recovery area waiting to see if I keel over.

So far, at least, I’m feeling no urge to use Bing. So that’s good.

Here in New Zealand, we're still living in 2020: we're in a hard shelter-in-place lockdown at the moment due to Delta breaching the border quarantine. Seems to be working so far, but it's an open question how sustainable an elimination strategy is going to be vs Delta and whether we can hold it together till vaccination rates are high enough to open up. But that's another story and not the point of this tale.

Anyway, as a consequence, it's not currently possible to buy anything I can't get from the supermarket or pharmacy: hard lockdown in NZ means hard - everything's closed. Which is a PITA - it's amazing how many jobs I've started over the last couple of weeks that have stalled because nipping down to the hardware or auto parts store and grabbing a necessary widget isn't an option.

So of course this is the time that the shrub which had hooked itself around the antenna cable of our internet connection (we're on cellular broadband via a Yagi antenna bolted to the roof) managed to yank the cable out through the wall in a storm, breaking the connector on the inside end. Net result: no internet, which as I'm sure most of you remember from last year, is a major crisis when you're confined to quarters.

Fortunately, my box of "cables which I have no idea what the fuck they're for or where they came from and I really should get rid of" was able to ride in and save the day. I'm pretty sure I've never previously owned a device with an SMA format coax connector, but nonetheless I do have a short cable with an SMA plug. A bit of chocolate block splicing and an antenna cable rerouted through a window and connected directly to the router later, and Netflix is back online - yay! It's ugly, but it'll do till electronics stores are open again.

It's nice to occasionally get rewarded for never throwing crap out

Went out for dinner (Korean fusion. Bit of a gamble but paid off - best meal I’ve had in ages) and stayed the night in the same hotel we spent our wedding night in. It hasn’t aged too well (who has?), but it’s still got a pretty good view.

Unfortunately this year they’ve cancelled it, but normally this weekend is Pride Parade, which we hadn’t realised when we set the date (also didn’t think through the implications of it being the first weekend after Valentine’s Day - ever tried to buy roses just after Valentines?). On our wedding night we walked the half mile or so from the venue to here through a massive street party: Pride was a huge event in Auckland back then. Want to have a really fun time? Wander at midnight through a street full of drunk and happy drag queens while wearing a wedding dress and a morning suit. Biggest planning fail of the whole wedding was not taking a camera with us for the walk to the hotel .

In today’s edition of “Life With Mrs Distraxi’s Petting Zoo”, it always amuses me seeing the llamas coming up over the crest of the hill - Nessie would be proud.

We’re now entering the summer dry season here, and the fungal infection facial eczema is a risk: it’s a killer, and camelids are even more vulnerable to it than sheep. The solution is to dose them with zinc, which protects them from liver damage if they get infected. This means they get a daily helping of zinc-laced food pellets. Summer, with its need for daily feeds, is the only time llamas get high maintenance: the rest of the year they can be pretty much left to themselves if you feel like it.

Fortunately they love the pellets - you’ve only got to head out into the paddock and shake the bucket and long necks start to rise over the sea of grass in all directions and make a beeline for you. The trick then is to get one llama assigned per bowl before grumpiness ensues.

There’s inevitably a certain amount of grumpiness once the fastest eaters finish theirs though. Ears lowered right back against the neck as you can see in the photos below is llama for “get out of my face or things are gonna get ugly”.

In this particular instance, it was only going to end one way. Pico, the paler one on the right, is our alpha male: if he wanted the bowl, he was gonna get the bowl. The two young girls are just trying to figure out their place in the pecking order - just like with humans, kids can get away with anything: teenagers not so much.

Meantime, in the handling paddock, Colonel Mustard, a young recently gelded male who’s being kept isolated till he forgets what it was like to have balls, is getting bullied by Charlie the Canada goose (Mustard, by by the way, is pure white, despite all evidence to the contrary. He does love him a dust bath).

Despite the fact that Mustard’s full on ready to murder any male llama he can get to, Charlie scares the shit out of him - it’s taken him 15 minutes to work up the nerve to get close enough to eat from his bucket. Charlie knows it too, the little bastard: he’s only hanging around there because he knows Mustard doesn’t want him to. Charlie’s a piece of work. Although this is the new relaxed and chill Charlie - we got him a couple of girlfriends a month or two back. Before then he was waaaay angrier. He wasn’t sharing a paddock with Mustard back then, but I expect if he had been there’d have been bird on overgrown sheep violence rather than just some light intimidation: Charlie doesn’t really do backing down.

One of his girlfriends has decided she’s a duck, however. She always hangs with the duck flock rather than the other geese, and the ducks seem quite happy to accept her.

In closing, have a Guinea fowl who’s got trapped on the other side of the fence from its flock and is now in a major panic. Guinea fowl are dumber than toast - they’re hilarious. YOU CAN FLY, YOU IDIOT!

For the DT-ers: like people have been saying, it’s an off-topic blog . I’ve been known to post about cars, but I also do camelid content.

Mrs Distraxi has just had her first go at shearing a llama. Her hairdressing technique needs work…

Her dad, who was a sheep farmer after he retired from the airforce, would be laughing his ass off.

@Violet said in Car Design with Vi: Renault Twingo I:

@WBizarre That is an excellent point. The Twingo even inherited the R5's smooth two-tiered look granted by its integrated plastic/fibreglass bumpers.

That’s another aspect of the design genius. Even though it didn’t share a design language with other Renaults of the period, it was still very identifiable as a Renault (even when it first came out, not just with hindsight), because of the design cues carried over from the 5.

It’s interesting to contrast the Twingo with how Giugiaro had attacked the same design problem - creating a unique/desirable econobox - a decade earlier with the Gen1 Panda. The Panda took current Fiat design language of the period (Ritmo, Uno) and simplified/brutalised it, leading to a car that was cute in the way a bulldog puppy is cute, whereas the Twingo started with Renault legacy design language and went off into its own unique space, creating a car that’s cute in the way a stuffed toy is cute.

@atfsgeoff I used to do it a lot back when backpackers hitching was more of a thing. I hitched a lot myself back in the 80s when I was in college and during my gap year in Europe, so I felt obliged to pay it forward. Haven’t picked one up in maybe 6 or 8 years, but that’s got as much to do with opportunity as anything - you very rarely see backpackers hitching nowadays, I don’t drive longhaul all that often of late, and when I do it’s usually with a car full of junk so no space.

I’m reasonably selective about who I pick up though - obvious tourists, students, or people with car trouble only: no random weirdos with no baggage. And only in places that are consistent with “I’m going from obvious destination X to obvious destination Y and I’ve been dropped off by someone turning off to destination Z”.

Never had any bad experiences apart from the occasional sketchy driver when I was the hitchhiker, and met some interesting folks.

@Just-Jeepin Fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

@john-norris The outside I could live with, but man that’s a lotta red in the cockpit.

@Poor_sh Strictly speaking, that one’s actually neither, it’s a lantaka.

@liam This snuck into my ear when Terry Hall passed away in December, and I haven’t been able to evict it for more than a few days at a time since.

This town, is coming like a ghost town…

@Krusty-Walnut It’s brilliant. So’s A Desolation Called Peace.

@pip-bip because apparently 0-60 is too ambitious.

@SilentbutnotreallyDeadly said in OPPO goes down and an hour later I wake up pantsless in the garage:

@tophercrowder
I'm shirtless in the garage as I type this...

Hatless, too, apparently. Standards have really fallen in the farthest-flung reaches of the colonies.

@Poor_sh How about a swivel gun?