Segregation Day

On 3rd December 2021, New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s ‘Traffic light system’ was implemented (Segregation Day).

Unvaccinated people were barred from cafe’s, gyms, sports events, and many were mandated out of their jobs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_Protection_Framework (traffic lt system)

It eventually leaked out that it was never about containing covid at all, but to ‘nudge’ people to get vaccinated

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/10/new-zealand-not-prepared-for-omicron-outbreak-expected-in-matter-of-weeks-experts-warn (The moneyshot is about halfway through the article)

Later on, Jacinda’s replacement, Chris Hipkins denied there was any compulsion involved as in the video below…

Three years on, people have ‘moved on’ and this is mostly all a distant memory.

I’ve posted this here for posterity.

Update for 2024

Teacher mandates got lifted officially on 5 April 2022, but there are various problems.
People that got mandated out were still pissed off about the whole thing, and wanted recognition that the mandates were wrong, but that isn’t happening. This means they haven’t got a good attitude towards a prospective employer, and they probably dont want their old job back anyway, because they have lost a lot of trust after what happened.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/463896/unvaccinated-teachers-could-remain-barred-from-some-jobs-when-mandate-ends

The nursing profession is similar. The mandates got lifted on 26 September 2022, but ‘the war on covid’ continued in the eyes of the powers that be within the Health dept, so in reality, most didn’t get or want their job back.

https://www.nursingcouncil.org.nz/Public/NCNZ/News-section/news-item/2021/10/Mandatory_Vaccination__Health_Exemptions__and_Unvaccinated_Patients.aspx

I personally know several people that got mandated out of their jobs.

They were just shocked at what happened to them at the time. (I cant empathise that enough).

Nowadays, it has evolved into sadness about their experiences.

The fast way to remove Agapathus and Privet tree’s

Pay someone with a digger, a stump grinder, and a decent chainsaw

It was worth every cent to watch those agapathus just get pulled up with a digger and chucked on a truck, never to be seen again.
It took just a few minutes.

To remove them by hand was several hours work for each one

The privet mostly ended up on a fire that burnt for about week.

The tree trunks were removed by a stump grinder.

Low oil pressure?

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about motorcycles here, That’s because there hasn’t been much to write about until now.

A ‘low oil pressure’ warning come up on the KTM, as i’m riding along one morning. It’s the sort of thing that can give you a sense of dread, but I’ve sort of had this experience before.

The bike sounded fine, and the temperature was normal, so I just kept going with my fingers hovering over the clutch lever.

Like so many things these days, warnings and alarms aren’t always credible.

I never that saw that warning again on the way home, but I thought I better find out what the problem is anyway.

A search of google brings up all sorts of horror stories, which didn’t do my mood any good, but gave me a few places to look.

First up was to check the oil level. It’s finicky to check this as the engine must be hot and the bike needs to be level.
To do this, I lie on the ground, hold the bike level, and look at the sightglass through the hole in the fairing at the same time. It sounds a bit awkward, and it is!

Second thing was to drop the oil out, and check the oil filter and the 2 oil screens.
To do this, the lower fairings need to come off first, which requires patience (lots)
The oil screens are easy to get to, one of them sits behind the sump plug and the oil filter simply sits behind a cover on the right hand side.

In short, I never found any problems, so I guess something went astray in the electrical/electronic department.

It’s just another thing to keep an eye on for the moment..

Day 5 -our holiday in Wanaka

We had planned to do some tandem skydiving today, and we were really looking forward to it, but after several postponments, it became evident that that weather wasn’t going to play ball.

That left us with the one attraction we hadn’t visited yet which wasn’t weather dependent.

Puzzling world…

It’s full of puzzles of all sorts, optical illustions, etc

‘Showcasing the photography of Guiseppe Calarusso (Italy)’ -www.guiseppecalarusso.it

And last, but not least is a giant maze that took over an hour to solve.

The afternoons entertainment for the kids was the local movie threatre. It was small and very old school, and even had ‘intermission halfway through the movie, which caused a mass exodus to back the snack counter.

All up, another good day.