A scouting trip for fishing season

Fishing season opened today and Dave spent the morning fishing at a lagoon on the outskirts of town. He caught two fish and came home happy and cold. On Saturday he went to check out this lagoon that he had heard of. So here are some photos from his Saturday outing. As he drove through town, he noticed that the sun was right to take pictures of the buildings on the main shopping street, George Street. We had been wanting to get photos of these buildings because we think their varied architectural styles are charming.

The lagoon he had heard about turned out to be two separate lagoons, at one time connected by a stream, so both of them are called Tomahawk Lagoon. They are right beside Tomahawk Beach, the most easterly beach of a short string of beaches along the southern edge of Dunedin. The photo below shows the first Tomahawk Lagoon.

This black swan is swimming in the second Tomahawk Lagoon.

The photo below shows red-billed seagulls by the second Tomahawk Lagoon. Today Dave fished at the other end of this lagoon, by the reedy area in the distance. Today he saw two black swans with cygnets, a New Zealand shoveler (which is a duck with a bill like a spoon), and a pukeko (a native New Zealand bird that is blue and green with a red spot on its head). He took his binoculars with him while he fished, so he can multitask out there in nature -- catch fish and bird watch in the same expedition! It's nice to know women aren't the only ones who can multitask.

The first Tomahawk Lagoon has an outlet to the ocean at Tomahawk Beach. The photo below shows some spring wildflowers, and both of the beach photos show Lawyer's Head in the background. I wonder where the name came from.

Right above Lawyer's Head is a cemetery and golf course, with Dunedin in the background.

One more painting by Dave

Here's one more painting that Dave created recently. I screwed something up when I uploaded it to the blog the other day with the other paintings, so I had to delete it from that post. This painting is based on a photo he took before we left the U.S. In March or April we spent a couple days in Port Townsend, and on the way home we drove on back roads and found this bay with still water and great reflections. Dave is submitting this painting and two of the others to a show in the Otago Art Society art gallery, which is located in the train station that you have seen in several photos.

The University of Otago

The clocktower building at the University of Otago is the iconic building of the university. You may be observing a pattern in the photos on this blog, that in the late 1800s and early 1900s a number of buildings were built around Dunedin that used both light and dark stone. Near the clocktower building on campus there are several other buildings in a similar style, and the second photo shows one of the nearby buildings.

The dental school at the university was founded exactly 100 years ago in the building below. Dave figures the large windows provided light for the dental students to see their patients. The old dental school is now the staff club. I eat lunch here the two days a week that I work on campus. They have a wonderful salad bar for US$3.50.

The building below is the university library, which is terrific (in my opinion) both inside and outside. That same stone that makes a vertical design on the exterior is used inside as well on a dramatic wall that is two stories tall in a sort of atrium. There's one other very contemporary building on campus that also uses lots of glass.

Unfortunately about two thirds of the buildings on campus look more like the building below, which is where my office is. I'm on the second floor from the top, and my window is the third from the right.

The next photo is one of my favorite sights at the university. Sometimes I still can't believe that I have "Dr." in front of my name or that I have a place that honors my qualifications and wants me to teach.

Despite how horrible my building looks from the outside, I quite enjoy my office. You can sort of see my view of the roof of the library and a hillside of houses in the distance.

A group of women writers at the university asked me to join them. They call their group "Women Writing Theology." The two women on the right are graduate students in my department, one trying to develop a theology of contemporary worship and one studying role hierarchy in I Corinthians 11, both topics that are very interesting to me. The two women on the left are adjunct faculty members in my department, beyond retirement age but both still teaching and writing for academic publications, still learning and growing. I feel very grateful to have them as models as I age.

Spring in Dunedin

Daffodils and flowering cherry trees in September -- hard to adjust to. We've had beautiful weather this past week, very clear with highs in the high fifties and low sixties. So we tried to get some good photos of evidences of spring around town.

Below is the busy roundabout near our house. On Thursday, we drove by it early in the day but couldn't stop to take photos. When we returned about 4 p.m., the sun wasn't in a great spot for taking photos, but I got out of the car to see if I could capture some of the flowers in the sunlight. Someone else had the same idea.

This building pictured below houses the Presbyterian seminary, although they don't use the word seminary here, so perhaps I should say the place where people train to become Presbyterian ministers. I'll be teaching there as an adjunct faculty member in 2008, and I'm really pleased to have that opportunity.

When we first arrived, we were so amazed by the building pictured below, which is visible from many places in the town because it's set on the side of the hill behind the downtown area. It is the Otago Boys High School. Seems llike they should have filmed Harry Potter here. No signs of spring in this photo, but I wanted to post it because it's such an amazing building. A note about the word "Otago." It's the name of the province Dunedin is in, the name of the University where I teach, the name of the Harbor, the name of the Peninsula, etc. It is an anglicized version of the name of a Maori village on the Otago Peninsula, Otakou, which was a whaling outpost for the early European settlers in the 1840s. That raises another issue to comment on. Because of spending alot of my childhood in Europe, I am used to thinking of the United States as a young country. New Zealand is much younger, with Maori arriving in N.Z. from Polynesia in several waves between 800 and 1300, and settlements by Europeans beginning mostly in the early 19th century. Europeans settled in Dunedin in 1848, simliar to Seattle's date of 1851, but Seattle is a young city in the U.S., while Dunedin is an old city in N.Z.

Dave's Paintings from July and August

Dave has been painting up a storm. His goal is to do one painting a week, and he has almost succeeded. Recently he scanned some of his new paintings and then framed them to submit to an art show that is coming up and to submit to the Otago Arts Society to become an artist member. (In the U.S. he cut all his own mats but bought frames. Here frames are expensive enough that he has learned to make his own frames as well as cutting the mats, and the five paintings below look terrific in the frames he made.) He painted the first painting off a photo he took his second day here at Aramoana Beach at the end of the Harbor.The next two paintings are scenes from around Dunedin that will be familiar if you've been looking at the photos on this blog. The first is the railroad station in the background with the law courts in the foreground. And the second is the Botanic Gardens.

The next two are scenes from the harbor, about halfway between Dunedin and Aramoana Beach.

Long Beach & Purakanui

On Saturday two weeks ago we went on an outing to Long Beach to pick up a drafting table for Dave that we saw in the classified ads. Long Beach is only about 12 miles northeast of Dunedin, but took 45 minutes to get there because of the windy road. Beautiful views over the Harbor and then farmland. Long Beach turned out to be a strip of houses along a beach about a mile and a half long with a stream flowing into it. The shelducks in the first photo were in that stream. The gulls in the second photo are red-billed gulls, which are very common here. Both their legs and their bills are red. The weather that Saturday was lovely, around 60 degrees. (Remember this is the equivalent of early March.) By Monday it was 71 degrees, and then on Tuesday it snowed. I have never lived in a climate with rapid weather changes like this one.

Just over the headland from Long Beach is a very small town called Purakanui. It is a cluster of houses on a steep hill above a bay. In the first photo of Purakanui, the white dots on the hill above the houses are sheep. If you double-click on the picture it will show in a larger format and you can see the sheep!