Zuk - The gremlin returns...

After rejoicing over the faulty distributor discovery and the subsequent fix, 6 months down the track the engine splutter and miss returns.
Rob reports the engine shuts down completely if you turn on the wipers or lights.
I give up, so its out with the tow rope, and in to Dion at Wanganui Auto Electrical, with instructions to submit it to Auto Electrics 101.
Didnt take them long at all.
The main earth cable, (multi-strand copper is it?), has corroded away and the strands a brittle mess.
New earth cable, and we're on the way home and back to work.
Hasnt looked back since, and the engine temp's behaving itself even better.

Massey University 50th Anniversary

Tiritea House, the old VC's residence

Nostalgia day today. This year marks 50 since Massey changed from an agricultural college, to a university, celebrations have been going a week, and my decade went through today.
Just a couple of my old class-mates turned up, but a distinct collegial familiarity with all the other faces, ancient recognition from the old campus, hostel, or rugby field, or careers in tandem crossing years and fields of endeavour.
Naturally, conversations lubricated broached with the more infamous and hilarious exploits of university student-hood. Pre-varsity at the time, I had the view held by wider society of uni students looked on with some disdain, long-haired protesters, but I quickly came to admire the absolute creativity and sheer audacity of some of the pranks and pranksters here.
I guess to open reflection at this level might seem hardly appropriate, but its this immersion in the creative melting pot that is a university that made me, and the critical thinking path I think, or hope, I've taken in the business of life and living. And my contribution to humanity a pretty humble one compared with those of the shoulders rubbed today.
It was great to catch up with farm management lecturer, Peter MacGillivray, naming me in one, with his fantastic memory recall. No one lecturer made so big an impression on critical thinking with so few notes, all our dip-ag class agreed. He's been a great lifetime servant of Massey.
TS Chang provided the other trigger, sheep performance research, that launched my sheep and beef breeding interest and career.
Less than 1000 students back then, 30,000 today.
Very pleased to hear that university planning includes restoration to original of Tiritea House, the Main Science building and the Refectory as part of earthquake upgrading. A couple of dippies drove a mini and a fiat round the ground floor corridor of Main, passing at the front vestibule, and the Refec was the scene of many a Sunday bun-fight and table run.
But I do remember my lecturers with just as great finity as I do the hallowed halls, MacGillivray, Small, Chang, Bowler, Jacques, Rees, Meek, Regnault, Baker, and sadly, the face but not the name, of the economics/accountancy man, (Ward?), who put me on the path to vital cashflow/budgetry skill.

Looking across the Common to the Refectory and Pink on the right

Old Hostel, where I lived for the year, (125 quid for the year it cost), is gone now, used to be to the left of this pic. Its reputed one student went a whole year without underpants, every week or so he'd flog another pair off the clothesline. Another character rolled his station-wagon on the access road with the hostel beer order aboard, 18 flagons-worth running in a stream down the hill to the hostel entrance. And when the Mog girls hi-jacked and apple-pied our laundry basket, my pillow slip got a nice lip-stick kiss mark on it, I day-dreamt it was that pretty little Johnson blondie did it, lol.