Congratulations, you've made it through the week!

Have a Happy Thought:  You get to learn a new word today – Warblish. Have you ever been listening to a bird singing, and wanted to know what bird that is? Well, you’re not alone. For example, I typed in “bird song mnemonics” into google, and I’d like to share the third result in particular with you: (the answer was apparently a Black-Capped Chickadee, by the way, which is a North American bird. I learned their song as chick-a-dee-dee-dee though, so I strongly disagree with the wee woo wee woo description…)   A very smart person recently thought about the fact that most people assume this is a type of onomatopoeia (yes I had to use spell-check on that), which is  “the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named (e.g. … sizzle)” (Definitions from Oxford Languages).   Birders recognize that what they’re doing in ‘translating’ the bird sounds into words is… slightly different from that, because they’re not creating new words, t...

Vaughan has 13.6kg as his base weight, which means just the gear, no water or food. Eliza has 10.4kg. So she'll be carrying more of the food. Not too shabby, and we've definitely included a few comfort items each. That being said, we'll probably each find some more things we want to take, so I'd expect those base weights to crawl up a bit more before we get started. (And those will probably be the exact things we decide to dump or mail home after our first weeks on the trail 😆) You can see Smaug does not want us to go...

Ahhh that feeling of buying new outdoor gear! This one hurt the bank balance a little because shops have been closed since August 17. But it's all essential kit for our walk. I bought a sleeping bag to replace my 20 Yr old Fairydown (does that brand still exist?) and it's nearly half the weight! New pair of boots which will be a different experience, I usually use trail runners for tramping/hiking. Eliza has a new sleeping mat, apparently the new ones don't deflate overnight 😁. And after trialling a hiking pole my parents gave Eliza, we bought a lightweight pair each. Some other bits and pieces in there too. I think we're 95% there with gear. Today we're going to check out personal locater beacons. 

Have a Happy Thought:    (Reminder: There’s still time to donate to the great cause of men’s health (mental and physical) by supporting Vaughan’s mo’ growth )   Each year, the Hubble space telescope does a “Grand Tour” of the giant planets of our solar system – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune – and sends back new spectacular images for us to gawk over. I present to you some of my faves from this year’s crop.   But before you get sucked into the beauty of the gas giants, don’t forget to go out between 8:30 and midnight tonight (Aotearoa time) to catch the partial lunar eclipse – aka “Blood Moon” – that’s shaping up to be pretty spectacular (it peaks at 10pm)! Also the moon will be right next to Matariki. For anyone with cloudy skies, or outside of the eclipse visibility, NASA has a livestream going on for you to tune in to.     Jupiter: The Great Red Spot is on beautiful display, but you can also see massive storms a few layers “northward...

Also, getting a bit nervous-excited about the journey! We've added the ability to subscribe, two ways: 1. Add us to your RSS feed. If you don't know what that is, you're probably better off with option 2 2. Subscribe to get email notifications whenever we post. You should find links for both of these options to the left of where you're reading this. You don't have to subscribe, you can always just come visit the blog to catch up on what we've been doing. Or not - there is no required reading here :D

Our flight to Invercargill on Dec 31 is locked in! [The TA starts a little further south]. Another step forward on the path to starting our adventure. Should we give it a cheesy name like The Wander, The Wee Stroll, The Hīkoi, The Hike, The Big Tramp? This weekend is the first that shops are open in Auckland since August 17. So we'll be spending up large on some new gear in one big hit rather than drip feeding our purchases. Boots, sleeping bag, trekking poles. $$$! But we've done really well with our savings for this trip over the last couple of years. Will post new-gear pics later. 

  Have a Happy Thought:    I heard this week that dinosaurs didn’t eat grass, because grass **didn’t exist yet** at the time that the (non-avian) dinosaurs all died.   So, that blew my mind.   And I was going to tell you all this as the Friday email, but I’m dedicated to making sure that what I put in these is the truth. So I did some research. And it turns out that..   Grass DID exist before the (non-avian) dinosaurs all died! Not for too long, though, and not for the entire time dinosaurs were around – grasses evolved probably 70 million years ago (non-avian dinosaurs died out around 66 million years ago)… maybe as long as 100 million years ago. (Before grass was around, herbivorous dinosaurs were eating other plants like cycads and ferns. I might have to do a Friday email about cycads because they are so. cool.)   How do we know this?   Well, coprolites.   What are coprolites, you ask?   Fossilised dun...

 Welcome to the blog   Congratulations, you've made it through the week! The name of this blog was inspired by  this brilliant tweet  by Rosemary Mosco: Hey, you. You did it. You made it to the end of this hard week. Some butterflies only live a week as adults. But you just survived an entire adult butterfly lifetime, AND you did it without a single drop of sweet nectar from a flower or an aphid’s butt. Since 2018, inspired by that fact, I've been sending random bits of knowledge to an ever-growing group of workmates, friends, family. Every Friday, they get an email that is honestly a grab-bag of strange facts, cute animal photos, or just whatever has grabbed my fancy that week that I just can't wait to share with people. The subject line of that email? Yep, you've guessed it -  Congratulations, you've made it through the week . (It's also known as "Eliza's Friday Email" and/or "Happy Thoughts", or possibly "wow is she  s...