I bet they do, and I bet it was! Looks like quite a climb!

Awesome! That looks like hard work!

I’m afraid climate change makes things more haphazard, not less 🙁

I hope you don’t take it too hard. Often the people who keep their jobs feel much worse than the ones who lost theirs, as a sort of survivor’s guilt.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if they let the people go sooner rather than later. Hopefully they get a good redundancy package.

I would have said January 😆. Four seasons in one day is kinda par for the course in spring.

Oh did you think that was the aim?

Yeah I really like the idea from the other article I posted in my comment where a school had people who would work with the families to help remove barriers to getting kids to school. Instead of using a stick, they worked with the families to increase attendance over time with reasonable and practical help.

The proposed plan here is more like sending the parents to the principal’s office, and if that doesn’t work then prosecuting them. It’s an approach that starts out assuming the families are evil and the government’s job is to punish the evil people.

Also see this previous article from May about attendance. Snippets:

[regarding attendance] The rates have dropped precipitously in the years since Covid-19, following years of a much gentler, but still steady, decline.

But although New Zealand’s overall rates are worse than countries with similar education systems, they fit a universal pattern of falling attendance in classrooms around the world.

[school principal talking about attendance support programme they have] But where the government has given with one hand, it’s taken with the other.

“The other thing that helped us get kids to school was the free transport for under-12s and, of course, that’s gone,” she says.

“I’m not being political, but if we’re cutting funding to things that get our students to school to save money for tax benefits, for our families who are really struggling with poverty, I’m sure that the tax benefit they’re going to get is not going to equal what they would have to pay for transport and lunch.”

For sure! Just as soon as I get better at it 😅

Govt: We’re taking advice.

Voters: And following that advice?

Govt: …

Voters: And following that advice, right?

I’ve scheduled the next post for Friday. Don’t seem to be able to schedule it reoccurring quite with the complexity I need, but I’ll try to keep em stacked up so they arrive on time each Friday.

Sounds good. I’ll set something up to try to get it consistent at perhaps 8am on Fridays.

The same reason I go to the pub instead of drinking at home! Because that’s where everyone else is drinking 😆

I guess for a cafe there’s also the benefit of not having to cook. I don’t often find anything in a cafe that I couldn’t make better myself. And by better I mean more in line with my own tastes, which aren’t necessarily objectively better.

Haha well I don’t go to cafes because they do coffee better than I do. I also don’t go to cafes because they do better food than I do.

Sounds a bit like you’re running a cafe yourself

If we’re gonna get nice and structured, what’s a good day to post? I’ve normally been aiming either for a Monday or Friday as I think people tend to have more to talk about just before or just after a weekend (normally pretty quiet on weekends themselves).

Thoughts?

Yeah, also the personal taste thing. Plus they probably do it much quicker because they already have their machines and grinders set to the beans.

Definitely a lot of variance in cafes. My wife laughs at me for swapping my order between long black and flat whites depending on the cafe. Often based on a snap judgement of a place I’ve never been before.

My machine instructions says water pooling on the portafilter is a sign you’re doing something wrong 😆

certainly not a plug and play!!!

I had no idea how much this was going to be true! It looks so easy in the cafes 😆

I’ve ground it a bit longer and tried what you suggested tamping it twice, which sort of helped.

It definitely has more flavour, and I had extract for closer to 30s.

However, with the grounds so dense, when I take the portafilter off it has a pool of water on the top.

I definitely think my method needs improvement. My machine extracts over about 15-20 seconds, any more and it’s over extracted. I’m guessing this means I need to either grind a bit more or tamp a bit more. I struggle to tamp it any more with the plastic tamper that came with the machine, maybe I need to get a better one.

I’d like a better grinder as well, but a decent grinder costs more than my espresso machine 😆

This page mentions a “Top cat” ferry as well as the lynx ones. As far as I can tell though, these are faster boats rather than shorter routes.