You know your raver days are two fucking decades behind you when you start getting just as excited about incoming blooms as you once did about BPM, random sex and synthetic stimulants.  My stimulants are organic nowdays.  Autumn used to be a bit of a dud around here since we don't get great deciduous colour, being windy and maritime; all the summer flowers are fucked out and the aloes have yet to get their shit together.  

So I decided to establish a bit of a crazy pot farm in the front yard.  It covers the scabby concrete and tarmac patches, feeds the bees and pleases the eye with an array of exotic salvias and all the half-hardy beauties that might lose their roots in the clay.  It's getting more and more crowded as I get into all those mesoamerican sages and South African bird polinated thingies that do so well here.  Above: Aloe hoffmanii, first flowers I think tee hee!

The first flowering on this exceptionally emerald green Aloe glauca clone.  I almost lost it a couple of years back to root rot after letting too many old leaves get manky around the base.  Don't do that.  

Salvia splendens 'Giant Form' apparently tops 6 feet and the hot red variant certainly curb stomps the colour gamut in late afternoon sunlight.  Bought both the merlot and the scarlet versions; it was the right decision.

Salvia involucrata  
​This head is only half-out but is already gratifying us with this intense candy blue-pink. I have several largely unnamed forms of this group and I love them unconditionally.  They become enormous here with our decent rain and pissweak-to-absent frosts.  The foliage is huge and plush.  You can hear the clickety clack of bumblebees sawing into the base of the flower to get at the nectar (they are bird pollinated in native situ I think).  Plant some today.

Salvia fulgens 'Red Dragon', a tall, open bush with attractive corrugated leaves and nonstop fuzzy scarlet floral business.  Something, I suspect a Bellbird, comes along and snaps off half the damn heads trying to get at the nectar.

Fuzzy.  Silky.

If I had a dollar for every euphorbia I had going on, I'd have about $12.50.  The lazy gardener's main ho.  Can't remember the name of this cultivar, but it's from Marshwood Gardens in Invercargill.  Their online shop is like a tinny house for plant tragics.  Sheeeeeeiiiiit.  Peruse at your peril.

Salvia sagittata supposedly but it looks like it might be a hybrid with something else.  The flowers and parts of the stem are an incredibly dense Afghan lapis blue, which is as much as you can ask of any given organism really.  Not quite out yet, but you get the picture.

Below: good old Salvia leucantha, which I only discovered a couple of years ago after encountering its luxurious, almost extraterrestrial plushness in the flesh at a garden centre.  

​​Always touch plants.  The tactile dimension is a whole nother thing.

I always try to have some Dagga (Leonotis leonurus) going, even though this plant seems to labour under a curse in our garden, attracting all kinds of misfortune and mysterious fatalities.  I have a slightly disappointing creme version too, which unfortunately looks like used bogroll a lot of the time due to the unsightly off-whiteness of the bloomage so I might pass it on.  Dagga is supposed to be psychoactive but it looks  like it tastes like something you would do in your late teens because you couldn't get any real drugs.  So I haven't been tempted.  Give it a few more years.  I may well regress to vomiting sludgy decoctions in someone's backyard.  Lol.

The honey-seeking birds tend to give it a fucking hammering, which is why some things are better closer to the house where the avian contingent is a bit more circumspect about humping the shit out of popular plants.

The Port to Port ferry was a long time coming, even though the 15 minute route across the harbour from Port Chalmers to Otago Peninsula obviates an horrendous hour-long, vomit-conjuring drive around the entire bloody inner coastline.  They had to have their shallow-draft boat custom built; there are one or two vintage ferries that used to make the trip still lying about the place in various states of disrepair, but the romance of an historical vessel is one thing and the economic reality is another.  I grew up in remote Northern Australia and still have a soft spot for tinnies anyway.  

​The boat is neat, stable and boarding from the low jetty in Port shouldn't pose any challenges if you have half-decent bipedal motility.  You don't have to wear lifejackets but they have all the requisite safety shit on board; I checked.

 Looking out at Taiaroa Head with its lighthouse and albatross colony.  Below- Mt Cargill and the inner harbour, toward the Dunedin city end of things.

Heading back toward Port.  It was a really pleasant trip and we definitely intend to do it again on one of those nice flat-water days over winter.  There was a half-decent nor'east swell on the day and the boat handled nicely; R gets motion sickness sitting in a driveway contemplating movement, and he was fine, as was Fir.

 Our one small gripe was the lack of commentary volume once we picked up speed in the rear half of the vessel.  But you know, there was plenty of room in the cabin if we'd really needed to know more, and a low key approach to audio is one thousand times better than being fucked in the ears by some rote-droning halfwit, as any bus tour veteran will probably know.  The experience was pleasant, affordable, low-key and irritant-free, so the Port to Port Ferry goes on our used+recommended list of local attractions.

​He spends all day taking and fucking around with them, then posts them in his blog and doesn't tell me.
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Every dramaturgical lipstick has its breathless following and Train Bleu's adherents praise its elevated colour balance and suave texture.  It's definitely nicer to wear than most of its equivalents, but I'm not sure that's saying very much.  Night Moth is the MAC pencil heart of darkness OG, but my god it feels like Akhenaten's crackly taint upon one's lips.  More emollient purples just end up in greasy hepatic horror.  TB is by no means perfect, but it strikes a pretty rational balance between workability and refinement.

Let's talk a wee bit more about yay and nay, vis-à-vis le violet.  There's not much middle ground between sulky, smells like encrusted Hot Topic-type manky darkness, and adult statement purple, is there?  The difference is elusive; for reasons that escape me, Train Bleu is dominant and austere rather than angry and slutty.  You won't look like you're wishing you still needed fake ID.  The choice depths of its intense baked blueberry character is well illustrated in the stigmata swatches below.  Perhaps it is its reference to the natural spectrum that keeps it classy.

I just want to share with you that I got that above piece of astrakhan in a job lot from an ex-furrier to the Queen.  (While I would never buy or wear new fur for obvious reasons, I support the respectful utilisation of old furs, as I would anything that had cost an animal its life; they exist, and it is unethical and stupidly wasteful to discard them).

Anyways: TB can be smudged out and smoothly gradated, as you can see below, and never fully dries down to the extent that you can't budge it.  It's thick enough to feel persistently present on the lip, but it won't migrate embarrassingly or stain your mouth very much upon removal- always a bonus.

The palm swatches demonstrate how little operational difference there is between Train Bleu (big S), MAC Night Moth (little s) and Pat McGrath Blood 2.  If you have one, you don't need the others and I would add MAC Smoked Purple, Night Violet, Bite Beauty Marsala liquid lipstick (not shown), and MAC Sin (right smudge) to that list, even though the latter appears very red-brown here in comparison.  They're all effectively the same once maxed out.  I have the original version of the Pat McGrath and the formula is fudgier and a little more slippy than the Nars stick.

As with almost every super-dark lipstick, Train Bleu has some failings.  It's just too perimortem-esque for the squeamish and will amplify dark eye bags and sallowness issues.  You will need to moisturise very well if you have ashy skin.  It will end up on your teeth at some point, which is odd for a matte.  It is slightly, although not tortuously, drying.  Those of us with full lips already know that it will skip the middle of our lower one unless thickly and patiently built there.  Older bitches like myself may experience a very slight peripheral wander of the purple tint into our biddy wrinkles, though that effect is not particularly odious and can even seem artful.  

On the whole, Nars Train Bleu is probably as dignified and utile as this sort of colour can be and I'm glad I acquired it.  Its singularity demands an exclusive focus, so it's probably a mistake to contrive a competing eye situation.  You could do a tiny hollow flick or a grey tightline, if you look too mooncalfish without a little something.  My favourite TB look is minimal and sort of baby-eating; no mascara, brows powdered over.  Halloween and Monday, taken care of.  

Meaningful juxtaposition + stylistic assurance = 🤘
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Here in Port Chalmers, the cruise season is over, by and large, for another year.  Forgive me if I express deep gratitude for that blessed cessation, as an introvert domiciled in an increasingly visited small town.  This has been the busiest year to date.

Boatpeople, for us hapless residents, the season is long.  Have a thought for the flesh units trapped in those destination towns.  Your oceanic hell wagons belch carginogenic smoke, blast us with their fucking PA and mediocre musical stylings whilst decanting far too many people into the surrounding countryside.  Day after day, for months.  It starts tap dancing on the nerves.

We didn't ask to be put on the CS schedule; in fact, we were given no say in the matter.  You may be on an expensive holiday, but no one else is.  While your paying presence might provide benefits to a narrow demographic, you should probably know that much of your sweet, sweet visitor spend is expertly snatched back by your bloodsucking cruise co affiliates, which is why all those pre-booked day trips cost twice as much as they should.  Your dollar isn't equitably distributed and much of your impact amounts to exploitation.  To too many of us, you are just the thudding chug that wakes us in the morning and the smokestack emissions that permeate the contents of our clotheslines.  We twist the names of each boat into childish obscenities just to make ourselves feel better about the whole situation.  I'm not telling you what they are.

​You know how you wander in and sit your arses down en mass in local businesses, purchase-dodging and using their internet while actual customers stand out on the footpath melting your brains with their stares and wishing wing'd death on you?  You fool nobody, and the accrued karma will send you to an ER one day.

It would be great if you could use the literal biblical plague of buses specifically laid on for you to get into the city, instead of the local public transport which is already inadequate for our purposes.  These tourist buses create toxic stank and inconvenience for locals and they will not go the fuck away until you give them your fare, so have a heart.  You're making people late for work and school when you form 30-deep lines trying to save $1.50.  You even fill the bus sometimes so that locals miss their rides altogether.  Come on now.  Also: don't loudly complain when another passenger opens a window on the trip into town.  You wear 500% and 355% too much Red Door and Flower Bomb, respectively.

I know you're on a boat motherfuckers, but remember those basal social skills.  Treat locals with the respect you presumably afford fellow travellers on your amazing prefabricated journey of discovery.  We aren't props or extras.  Those people with dogs outside cafés are probably deliberately avoiding eye contact.  You are never the first person to loudly interrupt their personal convos by declaring how much you miss your dog, seizing and handling the unknown canine, snapping memorial photographs and going on to wanderingly impart your unsolicited attitudes to everything from race relations to phrenology.  Don't expect on-demand deferential engagement.  We're trying to chill for 20 mins with a friend and every successive version of you edges our hand closer to that cake knife.  Just smile at the dog and move on.

Further to this, people going about their business at their private addresses aren't props, either.  I say this as someone who lives on an increasingly popular walking route.  Please don't stare in to our houses; we can see you.  Think twice about coming up driveways to take photos of private property.  Don't pester strangers in their gardens when they're busy or obviously disinclined, and staring fixedly at them over the fence until they acknowledge you is a pretty fucked up thing to do.  If you're determined to go ahead with this behaviour, the least you can do is throw money; it might stop me clipping you in the head with flying dog shit.  I cannot tell you how much the imposition of awkward pleasantries with a day-long stream of randoms takes the shine off enjoying one's own yard.  ​It sucks.

So does trying to patronise a very small local supermarket packed to the tonsils with boat people who have just emerged from a vessel groaning, nay, listing with every fucking foodstuff known to mankind.  They need more, and right now.  They cluster in impenetrable clots in every aisle and in front of the items you need, stripping the stock whilst glancing over their shoulder at you but never, ever conceding access voluntarily.  They don't bother carrying local currency but do want to dispute the exchange policy at the checkout with 20 peeps banked up behind them.  They're always up for an arguement over NZ's alcohol ID requirements, the high cost of cigarettes here and maybe demanding the checkout person's help to sort through the things they actually want from the two stuffed baskets they've emptied on the conveyor while shouting to their sister in law who is jumping the cue with another two baskets.

Visitors, there's a reason why you don't shop like this at home and that reason starts with throat and ends with punch.