No, we don’t know who DJ Roo is or the style of music — maybe someone from the other side of the Tasman with songs by Oz bands? Actually, that would be good. 🙂

Yes, Christmas isn’t far away.  Painted by Sylvie on the window of the Cameo Drop-In Centre, these show a Santa Kiwi and a Reinkiwi, as distinct from a Reindeer 🙂

And those who haven’t visited the centre for a little while will notice the inside walls have been repainted in a colour very similar to our blog’s wallpaper. 🙂  (If you’ve wondered, it in turn is the colour we repainted our master bedroom with in 2006 as we couldn’t stand the lurid pink it had when we bought the house.  Later we extended it to the corridors downstairs and upstairs.)

This spot near the Te Moana Road / Karu Crescent intersection is popular for billboards although we have doubts about how many actually see them there, only those exiting Marae Lane south are likely to.

The first up of these events shown is the Kapiti Coast Festival on Saturday in Paraparaumu, at the Kapiti Primary School, cnr of Kapiti Road and Rimu Road.

The Blind Eye theatre piece is also in Paraparaumu: at the Kapiti Playhouse at 7 Ruahine Street.

It obviously had a goods shed, a goods loading/unloading platform and a livestock loading ramp further along.  A photo by John Le Cren who was one of New Zealand Railways’ staff photographers.

A veritable field of them.  We noticed the cocker spaniel dog in the distance and it stayed there as we approached.  This is actually a compulsory ‘dog on leash’ area, but we think it must have absconded from its home in nearby Fleetwood Grove.

Theo Arraj has been adding to the paintings on the piers — we think he’s in the pic putting the finishing touches to the very new tuatara/’life is but a dream.’

We also noted this bird art (a Royal spoonbill we think) on a big pipe under the road bridge, the standpoint of the top photo — likewise by Theo?

Fortunately, Waikanae has a wet climate; the average annual 55 inches or 1,400 mm mentioned in the L.A. Times article below is about the same that we get and this year’s rainfall so far is right on average.  Still, the KCDC stores none of it with a dam and when summer comes around and things dry up….

“This is a wet place by California standards. It averages about 55 inches of rain a year, thanks to its prime location in the verdant foothills of the Sierra Nevada, which wrings rain out of Pacific storms…

When Greg Bolin arrived in Paradise in 1967, the Sierra Nevada foothill town was too small to require traffic lights. It felt unplanned and slightly spontaneous. Rustic wood-sided cabins sprouted up along winding, often narrow roads and cul-de-sacs. It was the kind of place you could live in for decades and still not know all its secrets. “It just kind of evolved over the years,” said Bolin, the town’s vice mayor and also a builder.

“Was it something I would design? No, not at all. It was something we had to live with.”

Bolin was part of the mass migration four decades ago that ultimately doomed the Sierra ridge town. Everyone wanted to live in Paradise. When a massive wildfire swept through its streets on Thursday, residents found themselves trapped by bumper-to-bumper traffic as they tried to flee.

To date 42 people on the ridge are confirmed dead, and more than half the dwellings of Paradise are gone. Still burning and uncontrolled, whipped by winds, the fire that began five days ago on Camp Road is already the worst wildfire disaster in California history. The irony is that Paradise was one of the few Sierra slope towns built in a tinderbox that tried to change its fate. Los Angeles Times

Vicious cycle: This month’s firestorms come as California continues to see much less rain than it used to get. That makes an already dangerous situation much worse. Los Angeles Times

While not as luxuriantly leafy as some other Waikanae streets, the mature trees along the curving Rosebank Grove give it the beauty which home buyers put a premium on, and realtor Della Randall says, “Rosebank Grove is one of the loveliest, safest cul-de-sacs you could ever wish to live in.”

Made from pieces of wood and presumably about the actual size, a bird that was hunted to extinction in NZ’s pre-European period.  “Moa were nine species (in six genera) of flightless birds endemic to New Zealand. The two largest species, Dinornis robustus and Dinornis novaezelandiae, reached about 3.6 m (12 ft) in height with neck outstretched, and weighed about 230 kg (510 lb). It is estimated that, when Polynesians settled New Zealand circa 1280, the moa population was about 58,000.” (Wikipedia)

From the Waiongana Gardens Facebook page