An update for May

We took the girls off road motorcycling on a wet weekend to get them used to riding around in slippery conditions, I rode the trusty Honda, while they rode a pair of proper off road bikes. The Honda’s dual sport tyres weren’t up to it, which meant riding rather slowly to keep it going in the right direction and then paddling my way up the hills with my feet.

This set up the situation where the kids took great delight in passing me as often as they could. I didn’t mind this, as it inspired the kids to push themselves and ride faster, and out of their comfort zones.

It then became a competition of who had done the most laps, so I just kept going and going, in a turtle vs hare type of race.

In the end, my youngest managed 32 laps of a 1.2 km track, before she called it quits for the day.

Come Sunday night, Dad’s got a very dirty bike and boots, etc, to clean, and dry out

My regular skateboarding sessions have now gone on hold with the somewhat regular rain we are having, because skateboarding in water can ruin a good board (they can warp).

This leaves me with work, work, work, which is going well at the moment.

The kids are now back at their after school activities, but are still attending an online school as they are now quite settled there.

On the C front..

The mandates are mostly gone, but the battles continue..

Steve Oliver owns a gym that refused to discriminate against the unvaxxed and was taken to court by Worksafe over the covid laws. The court case is still going, even though the covid narrative has collapsed.

Steve is one of those Christian characters who contributes so much for the community as described in the video link below.

On another front…   The Government has abandoned it’s appeal to challenge the previous ruling that mandates were unlawful for the Police and military. This hasn’t been reported in the MSM as yet.

Going Phoneless

It was recently announced with great fanfare the other day that they going to ‘test’ the ’emergency alert’ system.

https://getready.govt.nz/sm_WS/prepared/stay-informed/emergency-mobile-alert/

Everytime they do this, my phone screems it’s head off at me, and flashes up messages as if the world is going to end (it hasn’t yet). It’s as if my phone has an epileptic fit.

They have a history of over using this system and I think it’s only going to get worse, as this government specialises in getting in your face and telling you how wonderful they are.

Some examples of past alerts…

1/ There was an earthquake in the Kermadec islands which are 800 Km / 500 miles away from NZ, which could cause a tidal wave. Everyone on the East coast got an alert that told them to run away and climb a big hill somewhere.
That ‘tidal wave’ was so small when it arrived, it got lost in the natural surf.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/437694/major-8-point-1-quake-at-kermadecs-people-told-to-move-to-higher-ground

2/ An adverse weather alert! -high winds are coming to wreak havoc.., except they didn’t because they never arrived..

3/ warnings of the next planned lockdown!, yeah, enough already

Since this alert system has been hard coded into any Android or Iphone, this means I can’t turn off these alerts, which leads me to questioning if I am better off without a phone.

That would result in the following…

lower blood pressure -no alerts, no anxiety.

Lets face it, if country X decides to go nuclear against country Y, there’s nothing I can do about it, and I would rather not know, (I would find out anyway (lots of people running around buying toilet paper would be a bit of a clue))

It wouldn’t be as convenient for my wife to ring me at work to say it’s going to cost an eye watering amount to repair the car, but this would be a good thing! I would rather she just got it the car fixed and told me the damage to the credit card later when I’m sitting down.

Less social media – I do too much of that already, in fact if I can also pry the phone away from my oldest daughters hands, perhaps I could have a real live conversation with her like we used to in the old days.

No more of those texts and emails that tell me to be a good citizen and go get the V thing, to which I say…

But what if there’s a real emergency you might ask!, I’ll take my chances thanks, just like people did in the days before cell phones..

Skateboards and bum steers

I got into skateboards because it was a way of getting the kids out of the house during lockdowns.

With the aid of google and advice from a neighbour, we sort of managed to ride around a local cul de sac. As is often the way, the kids moved on to other interests and left me with 3 boards to play with.

I’ve taken to using the Longboard on the right because this one in theory would be the easist to ride, but actually it isn’t, so it became a challenge for me to ride it and ‘fix’ it’s handling problems.

On the advice of the neighbour, I started off by tightening the trucks to make it real stable and prevent any chance of wheel bite (the wheels can catch on the board, causing an ungraceful stop), This meant though, that it made it really hard to get it to go around corners.

It’s taken me a while to work out that tightening the trucks was a bit of a bum steer. The instability problems were caused by me standing too far towards the back of the board.

In the meantime, I went back to google and brought some new bushings, and I’ve experimenting with the tightness of these for some time.


I started off with a hard bush in the back and a medium one in the front, and I’ve methodically easing off the truck tension about a 1/4 of a turn everytime I go for a ride. I got to the point yesterday that the front was so loose that the bushes weren’t doing anything, which caused the board to be wobbly in a straight line. That meant putting softer bushes in the front.

After more experimentation, it all really started to come together when I got the truck tension loosened off to the point where the wheels don’t quite touch the board when I’ve got the board heeled over as much as I can.

The board now has a much better turning circle and now I really enjoy going around corners, rather than struggling with it as I was before.

It’s opened up a whole new way of skateboarding for me.