Busy Friday

End of another week and the pace picks up as the year winds down. I visit Dianne from Kenneally Timber where the Tasmanian Blackwood is. She's something of an expert and shows me a range of products. There's a relief map of Aotearoa made of wood and I'm surprised by how little flat land these islands have. The Canterbury Plains seem to be an anomaly. The fault lines which have caused so much trouble are not obvious but the Alpine Fault at the juncture of the Indo-Australian/Pacific plates, is. It runs for 480 km, almost the entire length of New Zealand, and has caused the uplift of the Southern Alps over the last 12 million years. We're waiting for another big one, or, as seems more likely, a continuation of a series of smaller ones. Apparently we're in a period of high activity.
I touch base with Kirk to check on roofing. I need to finalise a colour. Back at 22 College Ave, it's quiet.
In the evening Behrouz Boochani is talking to John Campbell. He wrote the book, No Friend But The Mountains, on a mobile phone using WhatsApp and smuggled it out of Manus Island as thousands of PDF files. His eyes are haunting and I'm struck by the impact of his dehumanisation at the hands of a cruel and callous system.

Dianne the expert