On that note, have you taken a good look at the country of origin of stuff you're regularly buying?

We've been recently very surprised to find that:
* Sunrice (Australia) now import from Thailand + India only IIRC

* Practically all cooking oil now comes from Malaysia... But god knows if some of that actually secretly comes from China now! (For record, China had scandals involving "recycled" cooking oil scraped from filthy back alleys... and/or other ones involving cooking oil transported in petroloum tankers!!!)

* Equally disturbing is how we're increasingly having no local garlic across increasingly many months (I.e. used to be only summer, but now winter too), with only the Chinese produced ones (looking way too artifically uniform)/beyond stocked!

* Oh, and Nashi pears have long ended up being mostly China only too, despite us previously having some local supply (oh, and the supermarkets often mislabel these!)

Woah.... the office apparently has only 21% humidity today / currently. It had been sitting around 30% all of last week, going as high as 32 and as low as 29. (It used to be up around 40-50% a few months ago)

For reference, my room at home had 47% after keeping the heatpump on all night long too, after usually being in the 55-64% range. (Heck, the one in my other house usually shows 63%, but I discovered that the cold has done in that one's battery, so I didn't know how cold exactly it was in there yesterday after the -4 nights!)

😳

Reposting this from something a friend shared from evil network. Can concur with that assessment!

Image:
"Unofficial NZ Forecast" - Shows "COLD AF" everywhere... except for those banana farmers up at the very tippy top 😜

(I assume they're all the way up there, and not slightly down from there, right?)

A major problem of the modern world is that when there is a big new shiny thing, *everyone everywhere* has to jump on the bandwagon and also do it.

Result:
* When a big blockbuster / major studio film comes out, every cinema screens it, with most dedicating the majority of their screenings to it, and very little of anything else

* When one food ingredient / recipe starts trending, now every cafe and restaurant is offering it (*ahem*, "Strawberry Matcha" and "Hot Honey")

* Every major city gets their own Ferris wheel... sorry "Observation Wheel"

Dad just texted to say that this morning (right now actually) marks 40 years since they've been living here in NZ! 🥳

They moved here with literally just a suitcase and very little in savings, so that Dad could take up his job as an academic at the University of Canterbury, where he is still working today!

(IIRC, apparently, they were offering a tenured position with citizenship, which made this the favoured option over taking up a similar position in St Louis (?))

Earlier this evening, there was a rather disturbing item on the telly about this tannery operating in the lower south island that was skinning stray cats and selling the pelts 🤢🤮🤮

Granted, they said that these had been caught eating "too much bird-life", and would've been culled anyway.

But skinning them?!

Yeah nah... can't say I'm a fan of this morbid idea...

Had a very productive trip to the Mitre10's garden centre today LOL:

* Got a replacement "Little John Bottlebrush" for the one that *DIED* this autumn as a result of the interminable roadworks outside our house making it hard to return home to tend to the garden for a good 2 months (after spending the first month enduring the shit)...

Therefore, I'm officially putting this on the tab of debt owed by the blasted roadworks company (on top of all the extra petrol costs incurred during the oil crisis spike from having to move out). 😜️

* Finally found some replacements for the "Ring a Ding Ding" Correa that I got from them a few years ago... that thing lasted barely a month! Will see if I manage to keep these alive for longer this time...

* Got some new "potting bags" as i've run out of those....