Matisyahu's Blog

After travelling into town to work for the two days in the office it makes the three days where I can work from home all the more enjoyable. I’ve got my alarm set for 10:45am where I’ll get up an go for my daily walk – I am wearing my cross country shoes because the New Balance ones that I currently have are really warn out and it has been over a year since I bought them but keeping in mind I’m averaging 10-15km per day so I’ve gotten a good amount of wear out of them. The Dunlop cross country shoes are pretty comfortable although they are slightly heavier. I was a bit hestitant about wearing them because I was concerned I’d get some nasty blisters having not worn them in a while but they were very comfortable when I wore them on my 8km walk on Thursday morning.

The good thing about going for a walk each day is getting to see how things are changing around where I live. When it comes to the rail network they’re putting up new overhead wires along with weight systems to keep the correct tension on the overhead wires. There is new infrastructure being built – probably to improve the reliability of power as well as signalling system. The signalling system along with the power upgrades and the double tracking they did down from Trentham rail station all the way to the Upper Hutt railway station should hopefully mean in the future more frequent service from Upper Hutt to Wellington. There is work being done on new rolling stock on the connection up to Masteron but what they really should be doing is fully electrifying it even if that means havving rolling stock that support 1700 volts DC and 25KV then maybe some point in the future they upgrade the Wellington network to 25kV but I guess one can always dream.

Another thing I noticed is that they’re finally tearing down the two lots of abandoned houses that have sat empty for quite some time. I’m unsure as to what took them so long – shortage of skilled staff? not enough funding? whatever the case maybe, hopefully with the progress being made we will see the land get prepared for more housing to be built given that it is in a prime location near shops, a train station as well as major bus interchange. It is rather disappointing at how quickly the National Party have folded in terms of pandering to the NIMBY types that appear to dominate Epsom all so David Seymour can win his seat. Sigh, it is a sad state of affairs in New Zealand when you see the early signs of progress only to find that that progress undermined all for the sake of pandering to a noisy minority more concerned about assets go up in value because they treat their house like a magical pinata rather than place to live, raise a family and provide stability in retirement.