No posts until late July or August

We're off to the U.S. this week for almost the whole month of June. I know what early July will be like: fatigue, jet lag and lots of catch-up. In late August we're going to Auckland, so we'll have photos to post then. Perhaps we'll have something to post earlier, but in case we don't, I wanted to let you know that posts will definitely resume in late August.

An unusual theft

Here's a brief news item from the Otago Daily Times, our local newspaper.

Brazen Theft
A brazen thief stole a Scotsman's passport, but Te Anau police are not pursuing an arrest or attempting to recover the document. The man reported the theft of his passport from a bus heading into Milford Sound this week, The Southland Times reported. A kea swiped his passport from a coloured carrier bag, when the bus stopped at the Chasm on the Milford Road.

You may remember that I posted some photos of keas at the end of last year (my post from December 29, 2008). We spent Christmas last year in Te Anau, the jumping off place for Milford Sound. On the day we drove to Milford Sound, we stopped at the Chasm, a cool gorge with a waterfall and a pedestrian bridge. In the parking lot we saw several keas. They are the only alpine parrot in the world and are known as very cheeky birds. Here's one kea we saw.

A strange autumn

Our camera is broken, so this will be a picture-less post. Ever since the camera broke, I've been wanting to take a photo of the two flowering cherry trees in our back yard. About half their leaves are green and about half are orange. On my "wall of trees," the hillside opposite my office window, a few trees are bare, but most of the deciduous trees are still orange. Yet it's late May, the equivalent of late November in the Northern Hemisphere. In Seattle, all the trees are bare in late November.

The weather has been COLD off and on for weeks, a few days with snow in the hills that we can see from our house. It seems like fall comes later here. (Summer comes later too.) Maybe the key is that the cold weather has been off and on, with warm days interspersed. It's fascinating to me that it's so hard to equate the seasons with the seasons in the Pacific Northwest, even though the latitude is similar and both are maritime climates.