My poor car: it was huffing and puffing all the way back from Port Levy, the bay of basalt. You have to use volcanic rocks so they don't explode when you incinerate them.

It is hard to find old-fashioned hessian sacks these days, but the Interweb helped me out on that one and I imported them from the North Island.

I still need manuka logs, a tarpaulin, a sheet, and wire baskets.

The big drama of the day has been realising there's a permanent open fire ban in Christchurch. However "open fire" is defined specifically to exclude barbecues and traditional cooking fires, even though a hangi fire is effectiverly a bonfire with rocks on top. Anyway, thank goodness for cultural sensitivities.

So yesterday was a funny one. Probably my most stressful day at work this year. Didn't even have time to hide in the bathrooms.

But then I pulled over on the way home to lift a blue brick of feathers off the road, one giant red claw grasping at the air in the creepy way of the almost dead. But the pukeko wasn't almost dead. It had been knocked down and was just taking a moment to recompose itself, lying on its back in the middle of a busy road. I stopped the traffic — I love doing that. Just a scraped leg, a drop or two of ruby blood on jasper red skin. I looked it in the eye, and it looked me back. I put it down on the farmland over the fence and it bolted into long grass, vanishing happily.

After that, I had pizza with a couple of friends and the day looked brighter still.

Today I'm flying out. Running shoes, iPod, notebook, ticket. The airport is my second home.

Time for the bi-annual Daylight Savings clock survey.

• 1 wristwatch
• 1 oven
• 1 microwave oven
• 1 car
• 2 cameras
• 1 mobile phone (self-updating)
• 2 computers (self-updating)
• 1 alarm clock
• 1 video recorder
• 1 television
• 1 heater
• 1 electronic timer controlling living room lighting

Yes, I live in a house where the heater knows what time it is. I'm a big fan of automation. Most ridiculous embedded clock? The television. I didn't even bother to set that one. It should just ask the VCR. It is interesting that I have 14 different devices all keeping track of the time.

Partner already contains
its undoing: part.

A tiny cut
starts the paper ripping,
And I can no longer use
the word we in a sentence.

Thinking this, I break a glass
over the fruit bowl
and spend the evening
picking blue shards out of bananas.
This is how the energy dissipates.

I am just back from Wellington this past weekend. Wellington Airport has new carpet in a cheap imitation (mockery?) of riverstones. Hideous — almost like it was involved in a car crash and knocked 30 years into the future. However, the airport music store is really great. It looks deceptively prosaic from the outside, but then you look through the racks and see the Decemberists and Imogen Heap and Angus and Julia Stone and all those albums that are just a little hard collected in one place. I remarked on this to the shop assistant. "Surprising, isn't it?" he said with a smile.

So I was visiting my friend Thom. We ran, drank flamboyantly named yet ultimately disappointing cocktails, ate at the Chocolate Fish, explored bookshops, discussed the best way to implement tagging, and hung out on his balcony, watching the fast food signs brighten as night fell over the city. It was fascinating to watch the people returning home from work. Everybody walks, wildebeest migrations. I started imagining the roads as rivers with snapping crocodiles.

The weekend before, I was in Queenstown presenting to a florists' conference. I stayed in a cheap backpackers that seemed to be a fire trap, where the bathroom tap was running permanently due to lack of maintenance. The staff were friendly though. I walked up Ben Lomond and met a Swedish woman. A polite hello on the trail up and a quick "can you take my photo?" at the top soon led to a plan to climb the neighbouring summit too, and verbal floodgates opening. We talked all the way up and all the way down on favourite movies and books and cultural differences and politics and surnames and Kitchen Stories. And then we met up the next day and did it over again. There are interesting people lurking in the hills.

The weekend before that was Dunedin, catching up with Sophie. It seems a zillion years ago now, but it's just over two weeks. The hottest weather I remember down there. We went out one night to Arc to listen to Damo Suzuki, the Japanese singer from the famous 70s group Can. He was collaborating with local artists singing half hour or longer improvised songs comprising entirely made-up words. It was one of those experiences that wavers somewhere between mesmerising and boring.

My Swedish friend was right there in the small audience at the same time as me. I must have seen her, but we did not speak as we had not yet met. Fate had arranged for us to do that the following weekend on a mountain at the back of a completely different city.

This weekend I am staying still. I need to sort out the poor neglected house; Hastings next weekend.

There is a fantail in the garden; I hear it through the window.

I waited patiently.
I bought you gifts that would remind you of home.
I called your mother to let her know
you were OK.
I did not protest.
I followed you overseas.

But you left me
standing at Sydney airport
holding a cardboard coffee cup
feeling foolish
next to the giant
mosaic frog.

Standing on this mountain,
I become the summit.
Earth gains one point seven
something metres
of fleshy orogeny.

A demonstration with lightning can be arranged
if you have doubts.

Nevertheless, 
standing beside me here,
you are the peak
and I am just
another ragged outcrop.

Arthur's Pass, Westport, Dunedin, Queenstown, Wellington, Hastings, Hanmer Springs, Abel Tasman, Kaikoura . . . I'm exploring the country one weekend at a time. Last weekend was sunny Dunedin. This weekend is Queenstown, a florists' conference, a walk up Ben Lomond, and waking up at 5am later this morning to catch a plane. I wouldn't have to get up quite so early if I'd bothered to check where the conference is before leaving work. Some questions the Internet just can't (or won't) answer.

The weekend of 21 April — I'm doing nothing. Nothing!

Stewart and Colbert 08. Nice shirt.

Americans are weird. Flags on everything. I wonder if they have flag sandwiches....Oh no I can't believe what I'm seeing. I'm no expert, but isn't it a little unpatriotic to describe the 50 states as "a few small crumbs from the bread"?