Well I never knew that ...

Do you know why the cricketing bowler bowls over arm? Well I didn’t,  until The Man told me. It never ceases to amaze me the interesting facts and figures he knows

It is, he informed me, because the game was originally played by women, OK I know that the fairer sex play this game today, but I am talking historically. Apparently they employed the over arm technique, because if the girls in their long and often full skirts bowled underarm their garments would hamper their delivery.  Howzat!!

Talk to him about the sky and he will give you speed and distance, size and all sorts of facts about the celestial bodies that we admire. For instance the sun is 93 million miles away, depending on whether or not we are in apogee. It takes 8 minutes for the light from the sun to reach us. We go around the sun, the moon goes around us. And we are rotating at about 1000kms per hour. Goodness me it is enough to make you head spin, well I does mine.

I have to say that one of the things we do miss about NZ is the clarity of the skies. Our difficulty here isn’t just from the light pollution either. Even on a blue sky day we are aware of the lack of clarity up there . Looking out from our third floor window into the far distance the view looks smudged, an effect created by particles in the atmosphere. At first we thought that there must have been a fire somewhere but we know better now. It is caused by pollution. I wonder if it is because there is not enough wind to blow it away.

We experienced similar skies when we lived in PNG, where there was defiantly very little wind, because it was only a few degrees off the equator. The only seasonal difference there was between the wet and dry .The trees held their leaves all year round and everything flowered or fruited all year round too. The sea was another matter. In the wet season it would become quite rough, often too much for our little boat. And there would be a bit of a breeze. In the dry, the sea would always be just about flat. Calm enough for us to take our 13 foot cathedral hull boat out more than 30 miles off the coast, that’s a bit more distance than across the Cook Straight. Wouldn’t dare do that in NZ even in a big boat. Our only major consideration was that we had to have enough fuel to get us out there and back. Thanks to The Man’s excellent planning we never once got caught short, always returning with fuel in the tank. In some cases even enough to tow some other less well planned travellers back.