Some people NEVER go crazy.

“Some people never go crazy.  What truly horrible lives they must lead.” 

~ Charles Bukowski (a German-born American poet and novelist)

It’s easy to confuse the hound.

If I DON’T leap out of bed at the usual time in the morning, she stands next to the bed

 ... head to one side ... puzzled frown etched across her brow.  

She's wondering what's amiss with the crazy human she loves.

THIS morning was one of THOSE mornings. Low pressure weather systems play havoc with my head and leave me reeling. It was a medication and more sleep morning before embarking on a more leisurely than usual, but lengthy, meander around the bay.

By the time we reached the waves the hound was chomping at the bit to be off leash.  She wanted to hunt for logs.  The ball was relegated to the backpack as log retrieval got under way.  Her idea of logs that are suitable for throwing and my idea of logs that are suitable for throwing are vastly different.  The ones she unearths are large .... VERY large.  I’d need muscles of gigantic proportions to fling those into the waves.

I left her to her log fetish whilst I went in search of Kingfishers.

There were 3 of them this morning and they were a tad tetchy ... maybe the low pressure system was affecting them too.  I half-heartedly pursued them up and down the beach for a short while but they weren’t in the mood to pose and took off to the upper branches of the trees on the cliff.  I WASN’T into climbing up cliffs today.

Mr. Heron was in the waves but he was being harassed by a couple of red-billed gulls.  He looked a little the worse for wear.  He’s normally the most elegant of our feathered friends but today his chest feathers were caked in mud.  He was rather dishevelled.

Goodness knows what he’d done to upset the Red-billed Gulls but they DIDN’T want him on their turf and pestered him mercilessly till he took to the air again.

He was so distracted by the gulls’ behaviour that he DIDN’T notice me sneaking up on him.  I might NOT have got close to the Kingfishers but I sure got close to him.

It’s not just low-pressure weather systems and earthquakes that are troubling NZ’s shores at the moment. GeoNet have reported this morning that White Island Volcano had a small eruption at 10.23.  They’ve raised the Volcano Alert to Level 2 of 5 and changed the Aviation code from Green to Red.  It does leave me wondering if volcanic activity is in any way linked to the seismic activity happening in Cook Strait.

Mother Nature seems a tad miffed.

Google and GeoNet provided these pics of White Island.  It’s pretty impressive.  Because of the continuous volcanic activity over the last 150 000 years it’s now NZ’s largest volcanic cone and to date, the most active one.  It last erupted in 2000 and the latest activity began on August 5th  this year.  The volcano doesn’t look that big in this pic but 70% of it’s mass is hidden beneath the sea!

It got me thinking.  Just IMAGINE the photos I’d get if Rangitoto WERE to erupt ... not that I want to tempt fate or anything.