It's been an interesting month or so here at Te Whare Mayfurr.

First off, I completed another solar revolution earlier this month, and am most definitely in the "over half century" club. To make things even better, I'd received some reward vouchers as a management award from work, so we celebrated my birthday by going up to Palmerston North for the day on a shopping spree. Very nice!

Sadly, we had to say goodbye to our 13 year old Birman cat Niccolo this month. Over the last month or so he'd been losing control over his bowel movements and was starting to stumble when walking, and when we took him to the vet he was diagnosed with a incurable "pinched nerve" in his hind-quarters that was steadily affecting his movements. We put him on medication to manage his condition, but he there was no improvement and we started noticing the same kind of head shaking that Khandi (our late Sheltie girl) started showing before she died, so we decided that we didn't want Niccolo to suffer the sort of pain that Khandi went through and took him to the vet for the last time. Te Whare Mayfurr is now a feline-less household for the first time in 14 years, and is now likely to remain so.

Tram driver training is going really well. Having obtained a mastery of the notch power controller, magnetic braking and lapping airbrakes in hill stops and restarts, I've graduated to manual handbraking practice, "desperation" emergency braking procedures, starting up a tram from "cold" (powered down) as well as putting the tram back in the barn at the end of day. At the current rate, it feels like it won't be long before I'll be doing my assessment for my "ticket", which will be great!

Some good news is that New Zealand is currently out of lockdowns and social gathering restrictions again, having been at "Level 1" nationally for well over a month and managing to have a general election in the process. Of course, we still have our border restrictions and mandatory "managed isolation quarantine" in place for arrivals, and so far (touch wood) the odd community case we're had from the likes of port workers has been stomped on through contact tracing and testing. But I haven't been required to wear a mask on public transport for quite a while, and can go out and do stuff more or less normally - I just need to keep using the government COVID Tracer app to "scan in" when going to shops, trains, buses and stuff, which is no big deal. But the whole air of relative normality here makes watching the increasing outbreaks in Europe and the US quite surreal, almost like being in a lifeboat standing well off from a burning ship. Earlier this year when NZ had knocked back COVID-19 for the first time, I was feeling somewhat guilty for describing the normal things I was able to do with people who were either heavily restricted or were in lockdown, and now I'm feeling more of the same. I keep imagining things like -

"What did you do in the weekend, Mayfurr?"
"Took the train into town and went out for dinner with a bunch of friends."
" <mutter mutter grumble bloody Kiwis>"

Still, it could be worse. I could be living in a #NZHellHole... oh wait, I am! If living like this is, as some idiot gimboids have claimed, being held in an "open-air jail", I'm demanding a life sentence with no parole :-)

He aha te mea nui o te ao?
What is the most important thing in the world?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
It is the people, it is the people, it is the people.
- Maori proverb