A tale of three houses

At last, crimbo over with and the new year looming, I've found some time to fire off the last blog of 2009. It's ending well, everyone fit and well with work picking up for me and our housing situation finally sorted out for the foreseeable future. How we got here, the lovely old wooden bungalow we're now calling home, is a bit of a saga going back to last October.

A wet Saturday morning it was, when Pete, our ex-landlord, rang from the little old Ardèche B&B he & Lois were running. He sounded unusually businesslike and a little nervous, but quickly got to the point: while things in France were verging on idyllic, their restaurant in here in Lyttelton was hemorrhaging cash and, long story short, they were coming home early. Something like a whole year early, in fact. Just days before that phone call we were congratulating ourselves on having properly landed at last, how happy the kids were, how good it was to have all the boxes unpacked, feet under the table, all that sort of dangerous talk.

Tempting fate, me Mam calls it.

I was shocked, Nik was really devastated and neither of us knew how to break it to the kids. That afternoon we received 3 months formal notice by email and all was doom, gloom and long faces, wandering round letting it slowly sink in, but kind of panicked too, as if we had to be out the following day or something. In the day or so that followed we started mentally packing again, began searching the small ads for a new place, had friends offering us a place, still said nothing to the kids, just in case. At times it felt like the best thing was to accept Diane's offer of her garage, which is decked out ready to use as a self-contained flat, and storing our stuff somewhere. For all it would be fun, we would surely miss living up on Voelas. I found myself taking shots of the place – those views from the windows I posted on the losNemo site were part of that – like you do when you're about to return home from holiday and realise you have nothing to remember it by.

And then it all changed again. On the Tuesday we got another email saying he and Lois had had a chat and decided it was a bit unfair to boot us out so soon after we'd moved in, and – sorry for the messing around, but – how about they found somewhere to stay until we got our new place sorted out? They had a friend with a place in town that they rent out, the lease was up for renewal, they'd know by the end of the week for sure. Of course we were hugely relieved and when they confirmed it at the weekend, verging on the euphoric, but something wasn't right. When Lois emailed a list of stuff she wanted to retrieve from the house when they got back, it started to sink in: this was their home, not ours. It would never feel like home to us while they were camped out round the corner. It felt more like squatting. Nik had an urge to start packing again, even though we were probably 6 months away from eviction time. I was completely fine with the squatting thing and carried on taking pictures.

In hindsight I can see I was in flat denial about how comfortable we could be in that situation. Hell, we'd just suffered a bitterly cold, uninsulated winter in a house so summer-oriented, it barely had functional doors and windows. There we were in late spring, the garden bursting with flowers and ripening berries, our little veggie patch just about to yield up its beans and potatoes... there was no way I was giving up all that pained investment so easily. Worse, I'd just spent better part of a month trying to find a rental place for Matt & Antonia who were trying to move here from Auckland and there was nothing even remotely like Voelas Rd on the market. This wasn't deterring Nik, who was finding potential new homes on a daily basis; one was a subdivision of the house next door, but not available til the new year; another just down the street turned out to be little more than a prefab with a driveway. So when she spotted a "to let" sign on the little cottage at the end of the quay one morning, I wasn't holding out hope.

We arranged a viewing that evening and met Sally, the agent, on the doorstep. What a place. It had a familiar smell of old wood and carpet that I couldn't quite place, but belonged somewhere between taxi booking office and school stationary cupboard. The wood-panelled hallway and institutional paintwork gave it a stuffy, unfriendly atmosphere, but the rooms were all full of light and the high ceilings made it feel airy and spacious. Everywhere were the sort of odd little details and quirky anachronisms you only get in houses that haven't been touched in decades; a larder hung on the outside of the kitchen that you access through a little hatch next to the sink; an open fireplace with brass-edged tile hearth and thick wooden sill that was only missing a bakelite clock to be my grandma Huntley's, gawd bless her soul. The new owners, who'd bought it to rent, had added a load of MDF wardrobes and cupboards everywhere, apart from which it was pure untouched Kiwi-ana. It was also quite a bit less expensive than our current place. I really didn't know what to make of it. Deep inside, I knew I would have no say in the matter anyway. Before we even left, Niki was shooting me looks that gave me little doubt. As we said goodbye to Sally I found myself telling her, "We really like it. Can you hold it for us until the morning?"

By suppertime we'd pretty much realised what it would mean to move out of Voelas and into the cottage on the quay. We would definitely miss the garden, and... er... well, that was about it. For all it was a lovely house, it was a pain to live in. More than that, here we had the chance not only to have a place that really felt like home, we'd also be solving a really prickly and complex problem. As chance would have it (or more likely, as is often the case in a small town) Sally was also the agent for Pete & Lois' temporary let. When we explained why we were interested in the cottage, she immediately put two and two together. The owners of that temporary let had decided not to renew the sitting tenants' lease in order to let P & L move in, and she was having trouble fixing up the people who were getting booted out with a new place. That coming Saturday they were due to move out and into a friend's back room, putting their stuff into storage, with P & L to move in on the Monday. A very familiar situation... and for all this craziness was not our doing, it felt like it was in our power to let not only ourselves find a home, we could let two other families have their homes back too. I guess sometimes it's not about desires, it's about wider needs, doing the right thing and all that stuff.

I rang Pete on the Friday, as soon as we'd been and paid the deposit. He was a bit stunned, I think, to hear they were moving back into their own place after all. It was also very much the 11th hour by then. In a minor twist to the saga, the owners of P & L's temporary place had asked Pete to take over from the agent (logically, as he would have been living there) so if the sitting tenants were no longer moving out, he was to be their de facto landlord. Pete therefore asked me to sidestep Sally and contact these guys directly with Pete's details. Not having their phone number, it was a case of trial and error, catching them at home. No-one there Friday lunchtime, I drew a blank in the evening too. Saturday morning I finally caught up with them in their garden, along with all their furniture, piles of boxes, bags, bikes and houseplants and two big blokes with gloves on who clearly owned the van I had to squeeze past in the driveway. I wasn't sure whether to expect hugs & kisses or a good hiding... but they were lovely people, completely gobsmacked at the news that they didn't have to move out after all, which apparently had been breaking their hearts. I saw them in the market a couple of hours later, all chuffed to bits. Apparently the weirdest thing of all was unpacking their boxes into the same house they'd just moved out of. Result!

So here we are in our new place, and feels great. We've grown to love it way more than we thought, much quicker than I imagined. Barely a month on, it feels like we've been here a year, which is always a good sign. The nieghbours are lovely, have two kids slightly older than ours and couldn't be more helpful, introduced us to June, the lady who lived here for almost 50 years before selling up to go and live with her son, at a barbie they threw for the whole street when we moved in. Our first crop of rocket is filling out the veggie patch and the boxes are all unpacked again. Christmas was lovely, relaxed and cosy, largely because it's summer here (duh..) but also cos when that sou'westerly blows, the doors and windows actually keep it out. The view across the harbour are amazing, the port that never sleeps is the source of endless fascination, town is a short walk away and somehow, in all the excitement, we seem to have lost sight of the section up the hill. This is now the challenge, to keep pressing on with those plans without the pressure to move that we always had before. Next year might well prove to be a test of our commitment and determination but at least it'll be free from disruption and cardboard boxes. Touch wood!

Meet Louie

So much has happened in the last couple of weeks it's taken for ever just working out where to start. This blog was supposed to happen about a month ago, as promised in the last blog, as a welcome note to our newest family member. He kind of got in the way, as puppies often do, accompanied by a bunch of other events that conspired to prevent any and all blogging until around about now. There's still so much to do that I'll have to blog it in bits or it'll never get blogged at all.

Here's the thing: we've moved house. This isn't something we secretly planned or even contemplated, apart from the time back in September when our landlords decided they were coming home early, we baulked and they agreed to find somewhere else until our lease ended. For now, let's just say we took a broader view on things and decided to get out. More about the house, the move and all that, later.

First, the dog.

He's very naughty, has mad floppy ears and a metronome tail. After literally weeks of indecision, we decided to call him Louie, or Louis I suppose, considering he's named after King Louis XIV and his daft haircut. Recently we've been wondering if Bluey might be better since it sounds very similar and we discovered during a preening session that he has skin the colour of a faded tattoo, like he just had his roots done and they put too much dye on.

He was Big Black Boy for ages but he's actually blacker than black, a kind of ultra-black that blends into every shadow and renders him invisible even in broad daylight. This, combined with that thing puppies do where they lapse into deep sleep as soon as the food runs out, means he can be a complete nightmare to find. A couple of times this week I've searched high and low inside and out and eventually got back to my desk only to find him unconcho under my chair.

So he could easily have been Shadow or Shady or something equally lame, but he seems to like Louie. Another short-lived but popular proposition was based on him spending all his outdoor time in the impenetrable undergrowth of the jungle that was Voelas Road: Russell. It very nearly stuck, except for the fact that when you shout it out it sounds like you're trying to get him to chase a cat. And he doesn't really do that.

No, louie's hobby is chewing stuff. I forgot about that bit; my recollection of puppy training (apart from the entire house becoming a doggy toilet) was being woken up far too early for no apparent reason and lots of random, hilarious antics. Thing is, we keep forgetting to put things out of reach so his tally has been quite impressive; he's had a go at just about every shoe we possess and completely destroyed four pairs, including Nik's fave pink sandals. Yesterday he decided to eat the living room carpet. It's really old and threadbare but that's not the point! He really is very naughty like that. I also forgot they lose their teeth just like kids do. If he doesn't buck his ideas up it could happen sooner rather than later...

Right, that's all for now. I've missed out loads of stuff but it'll have to wait. There's some pics in a doggy album on the LosNemo site and I'll follow up with others as I get the chance, along with details of the new place. Anyone who gets missed off the "new address" email (that I still haven't sent...) for whatever reason speak up (leave a comment) and I'll include you in.

Remains to say we're all good, no worries, sweet as, etc. Both of us enjoying our work (a first?) kids handling the disruption reasonably well, weather really lovely and bloody awful, usually at the same time.

Back soon with more.

x

Home on the range

View over the Wanaka © Me, Oct 2009

Hey there campers, it's that time of year where we in the southern hemisphere break out of winter hibernation and openly gloat to you in the northern half about longer days and lighter nights, the sun streaming into our bedrooms first thing in the morning, mister bluebird on my shoulder, all that springtime stuff. We just finished celebrating this fact (purely by accident) with a trip south to the barely-out-of -thermal-underwear Central Otago region. While it's been buds and blossoms for several weeks here in Canterbury, 6 hours south of here the seasons are only just turning over. It snowed as we arrived on the first night and half way through the first day, dressing up the low-lying hills in brilliant white coats but also clearing the air so much that you could just about reach across the lakes and make snowballs. Right on cue the clouds drifted away, still really cold but bringing out a powerful sun to melt the snow and make bike rides and beach barbies happen just like they do in summer, albeit with an extra layer of defiance.

We'll be back before winter returns, for sure, but the spring there was a magical, rarified experience. Anyone out there who was ever tempted to visit the greener grass, now's the time and south of here is definitely the place. It's astonishingly beautiful; no matter if you're primed to be impressed, it completely takes your breath away. Even the kids tore their eyes from the DVD player long enough to gaze out the car window aghast at the scenery. Of course nothing's more interesting than DVDs. Oscar drew a picture, after we finally arrived and everyone got ready for bed, of a lovely dramatic scene, all neatly framed in a big black rectangle...

On the way back, thanks in part to genuine interest and partly utter boredom with the same film over and over, they both got a bit of a kick out of looking out the window instead at the sheep and cows and deer, and even the awesome beauty of an unspoiled wilderness – although to be fair nothingness is something you have to really point out to your pre-tweenines. In my experience, on any given day, they only really fully absorb the essential reality of playgrounds, movies and fish 'n' chips, in that order. Which, when all's said and done, is a pretty enviable state of mind.

Two weeks later, I've finally got round to posting the pics up on the losnemo gallery and quaffed enough vino to sit down and recount the last few weeks for the blog. Despite not wanting to leave, it was surprisingly good to get home, and some stuff has come good since. Niki's volunteering a couple of afternoons at Ellie's school next door, which she's really enjoying apart from the desire to be there permanently tainting her appreciation of her real job in town. It really is an utterly brilliant school, relaxed and approachable, totally devoid of the airs and graces you often get with other schools. It's a special place even before you meet the staff and kids, quite apart from the stunning setting on the steep sides of an extinct volcano, without appreciating the unique ethos they seem to inspire in the kids. It's a small school with a big heart, the true center of the community; we feel privileged enough to have Ellie there, never mind Niki. Ok, it might not end up working out for teacher, but it'll always be a great asset.

While we were away Jessie rabbit moved in with Dianne for the duration (she's the lovely neighbour over the valley from us) and apart from having a lovely time, developed a strange condition: two large swellings between her hind legs. That's right, Jessie turned out to be a boy rabbit after all. Explains a lot, as he's extra feisty and looks at you with such a determined, fixed stare, you'd think he'd caught you looking at his pint. Maybe he objects to being called Jessie... anyway he's very bright; I've already trained him to go back in his hutch at night, more through necessity than a cute trick, as he was becoming impossible to catch. He's a lot calmer and more affectionate now too, hardly surprising when the sight of me approaching now means carrots and celery tops, rather than carrots, celery tops and persecution by a big blonde bloke with a torch in his mouth.

I'm struggling a bit in all departments, to tell the truth. Work is patchy at best and the new build is taking a lot more to get started than I thought. Aiming for a late-summer 2010 completion is looking more and more ambitious and less likely with every new discovery. According to Dave the Designer our best option at the moment is to aim to build in two stages, initially no more than we need to get a roof over our heads, then sit out the wet and cold seasons until a second phase can be realistically finished, sometime after this time next year. The only real consolation there is that I probably got all my sums right, I just failed to appreciate the way things get done here, and what you need to do to get things done fast.

My timings have been based on one stage moving seamlessly on to the next, with contractors and materials turning up right on cue, and you only really get that sort of assurance if you're an established builder with plenty of clout. As Dave pointed out, if my electrician is booked in for Monday morning and a big builder client of his wants him in Timaru instead, who's he going to let down? Right. So instead of being ready for the concrete pour on Friday that's been booked for weeks, I have to rebook them, costing me another load of weeks. Better to work it all out, add a month, tag on 20% for the weather, then double it. It's not the end of the world, just a bit of a cloud over a big project that's got the silver lining of freeing me up to get some paying work in.

The kids are splendid. Ellie seems to grow an inch a day, reads everything in sight, wants her ears pierced and doesn't care if it hurts, bites her toast with her back teeth and likes to stick her tongue out at you through the gap in her front ones. Did I mention she decided to change the spelling? I never liked "Elly" that much anyway and when we named her Elizabeth it was largely to give her the option of changing to another variation in later life. I wasn't expecting it to happen on a monthly basis but at least it seems to be working...

Oskie's just brilliant, getting on very well at kindie but wants to go to the big school. We've been to see Andrew, the principal, more than once and each time had to convince him that he needs to grow as high as the school gatepost before he's allowed in. He started a Saturday morning music class this weekend which he loves, basically because Brooklyn, his bessie mate from kindie, is there as well. They're amazing together, run riot all day long and have to be separated for meals as they're fond of swapping lunch boxes, and Brooklyn's a vegetarian...

It's an another amazing place, that nursery. Tagged on the side of Ellie's school, owned by a lovely local couple and run by the nicest bunch of people you could ever want to meet. Like the school, it's refreshingly devoid of any dogma or obvious, in-your-face regime, just dead open, relaxed and loads of fun. Did someone mention dogs..? Oh yes, the owners also have a Spoodle, a Cocker Spaniel / Poodle cross so-named (I'd imagine) to provide a better alternative to the ever-tasteful American breeders calling them Cockapoos, for crying out loud. "Spoodle" isn't that much better, I'll grant you, but at least it doesn't put you in mind of the erm, Greek olympics. She's a lovely dog too, and so are her puppies... one in particular, the Big Black Boy we're calling – as a working title – ThreeBee (geddit?) is coming to live with us next weekend.

We're very excited, if a little unprepared. Our back garden might be the perfect run for him except that a couple of weeks ago, a Very Big Black dog that we called VeeBee (only kidding) suddenly appeared there while we were having a barbee... I realise the wafting smell of sausages is the reason why, but exactly how has us slightly worried. I cant see a single gap in the undergrowth around the border (I'm not sure if there's a fence there or not...) but if Veebee could get in, Threebee will definitely get out, probably the first time next door have a fry up. So I'm off now to have a good rummage about up where the bamboo grows thickest, and no, that's not another euphemism for alternative bedtime practices, it's high time we got ready for whatever the Threebee might throw at us.

Look out for a special bulletin dog blog next week!


Once again, two new albums of photos are up on the losnemo gallery. Enjoy :-)

Rabbits and responsibilities

Wow, over a month since my last post. Why does that always sound like a confessional? Have I failed in my vows to the blogosphere? I really didn't want this to become a once-a-month chore performed out of a guilty sense of responsibility; that's the death-knell of many a blog (and innumerable marriages, heheh) and I can't let it happen. It is on my mind though, because I really want to set up another one to catalogue the progress of our housebuilding larks, but, as I keep reminding Elly, if we can't look after one pet there's no way we're going to be able to look after two...

This month's excuses are quite good, as it happens. We did get another rabbit. Not that we were looking for one: she found us, or rather the people looking after her did. She was discovered wandering the streets of St Martins late one night by a guy chasing a car thief. I know it sounds completely unlikely, but apparently this bloke was in his mate's living room when he spotted some guy breaking into his car, ran outside & chased him only to see the thief jump into another car and speed off. He turned back to check the damage and there in the middle of the road (I'm not making this up, honest) was a little black rabbit.

How he managed to get hold of her I don't know, but she's was quite obviously not wild so he knocked on a few nearby doors; no-one had any idea who she might belong to. And no, she didn't get a good look at the car thief ;) His neighbour back in Lyttleton is our good friend Diane, who heard they were looking for a home for the bunny, suggested we offer her our recently vacated hutch and thus the deal was done. She's a feisty little thing with a real twinkle in her eye, impossible to catch when it's time for bed (er, I'm talking about the rabbit here...) I really don't understand how she failed to make her escape in the middle of a suburban street. Diane suggested we call her Jessie, just in case she turned out to be a he. There are a couple of pics of her in the newly-updated losNemo gallery. You no longer need to click on the "next gallery" link to find the most recent albums. (I found a fix that makes it work in reverse order, so new albums appear first in the list, blog-style. Also fixed a problem with the Oscar's Cheese Scones album that basically stopped you seeing the pics).

I've been right back into the photography of late, both work and play, largely because of the unmistakable sniff of spring in the air. We might still be getting some very chilly nights but there are occasional days when butter spreads noticeably easier on the bread, warm sunlight peeks above the crater edge just a little earlier, flowers are bursting out where I didn't even know there were plants and all of a sudden wearing long johns seems like an even more ridiculous thing to be doing... and then the wind will shift to the south, howling up from the Antarctic, cutting through any number of layers like they don't exist. Its not like other places where you don't know what to wear – in Auckland you can remove and replace a jacket three times in the space of a single street – here, if that wind's in the south, there's no escape. Similarly, if it's blowing from the north your bread practically butters itself. But the Lyttelton springtime light is sublime, especially at the extremes of the day, and I've been lucky enough to win a commission shooting panoramas of the harbour. Maybe I'll post up some of the reject ones in a later blog, the place is just looking so good at the moment.

So there are three new albums in the losnemo gallery, one of them unashamedly containing nothing but pictures of flowers. Partly because I don't know what they are (and someone might enlighten me) and partly because they're suddenly everywhere. We never really saw Canterbury in anything but the bare bones of its autumnal nakedness and now the most outrageous things are growing on trees, or at least I think they're trees because a lot of them look like waay overgrown rhododendrons, or magnolias with enormous ice-cream flowers smelling of lemon sherbet... I just can't pass them by. And that's just our back garden!

The breaking of winter inspired a major garden tidy-up during which we managed to restore the greenhouse to nothing like its former glory, using bits & pieces we found lying around and costing us just the one trip to the big DIY shed. It became clear the door was going to need something better than a tatty old sheet of duct-taped fibreglass if it was to be more useful than a sheet of A4 paper, so we invested in a nice new piece of corrugated plastic & siliconed it into the frame. Potting soil came from the compost heap at the bottom of the garden in which we sowed the indeterminate contents of some old seed packets found in the shed. Amazingly, hundreds of little green leaves appeared almost overnight. Disappointingly, they turned all out to be the offspring of some hideous weed that must have been lurking in the compost heap. But an interesting mix of lettuces and lobelias seems to have sprung up in their place, inspiring us to get more trays and see what else we can create.

That's no royal "we" either, the kids are right into their gardening. The greenhouse remains an endless fascination but most of the rest of the time is divided between cutting the borders of the lawn with kitchen scissors and getting very dirty. Oscar's sandpit is now a mud pit, or as he calls it, a yucky pie. Elly's a bit more dainty but just as much a scruff as her brother. She's also losing her teeth like they were out of fashion, which is hilarious and even more fascinating than the greeenhouse. At the moment she has one missing and one half-grown-in on the bottom deck, one top front missing and another defying gravity as I type*. She enjoys sidling up to people and waggling them at unfeasible angles to her gums to give you the willies. Honestly, she's got a gob like a Terry Gilliam cartoon, even though she is still utterly gorgeous :)

Oscar's growing up very quickly, following what seems like an ice age of transition from nappies to knickers. He was hopeless for ages and then he was fine, then his mamma went back to work and he lapsed into virtual incontinence, before finally, out of the blue last weekend, he was dry all day. We tried everything: sticker charts, massive praise, treats, threats (which are the same as treats but with a vocalised "h") cajoling and coercing, even making him do his own laundry (actually a high point in the whole saga, I won't go into details) and the thing that made him change? It's as if he just turned around one day and said, "nah, I'm just not doing this any more" – and that was it. Nothing to do with us. Now all he has to conquer is getting up through the night on his own, which he has no excuse for not doing, now that it's warm enough to leave ajar the impossible-to-open-unless-over-six-and-sober back passage door.

And so, back to the weather. It's been lovely and sunny again today, as it is for so many days, but that doesn't mean it's always warm. In fact the sun has nothing to do with temperatures in Christchurch. You'd think it was a winter/spring thing: apparently not. As I say, it's all about where the wind comes from. Yesterday – dull, overcast, wind from the north: 24ºC. Today – cloudless sunny day, light breeze from the south: 14ºC. By all accounts, in mid-summer, you can bask in glorious sunshine all day, but it'll go from 32º late morning to 15º in the afternoon, just as soon as the easterlies kick in off the ocean. Such a weird place.

Oh, and us big 'uns are doing ok. Niki loves her work, it pays about the same as a checkout chick and it's two busses away, but she's well into it: teaching Special Needs kids, I think I might have mentioned last time. Heaven forbid the CV might develop a prolonged period of stability to offset the two-jobs-a-year syndrome, she's brushed it up and applied for another one in a very interesting "alternative" school in the city. Fortunately (we discovered) Kiwi Cvs are expected only to list the more relevant positions held, which puts her at a distinct advantage, choice-wise :) We need the cash, more than anything. The husband has the usual trickle of relatively well-paid work but once the build starts it'll be a lot more difficult.

Latest news on that front is the soil looks to be eminently suitable for earth building so that's how we're going to do it. Had a great meeting with a designer/architect chappie at the weekend, friend of the structural engineer I spoke to who works with the geotech guy we met, and he's busy right now with the stats from the surveying company suggested by the same fella. Just like one big happy family... we're getting quite excited now and not a little bit anxious, as the year trundles on relentlessly and our tenancy here looks to be a little shaky... our landlords are coming home early... fortunately (after hearing of that massive bombshell) they think they've found a friend's place to stay in until we can move out, but it's pretty clear that needs to be sooner rather than later! We could find yet another place to tide us over but I'm thinking it's not inconceivable that we might get plans submitted by early November, which (if they're compliant, and they should be) could be approved by early New Year, in which case we might conceivably have a roof on by next autumn, and that would be within our existing rental agreement.

With all the good will in the world, and a favourable, warm, following wind... well, maybe you can see why I'm skeptical about maintaining another blog, although I feel like we should be filming this for Channel 4. That way it gets to be someone else's responsibility. I wonder what the Grand Designs production team are doing for their holidays this year...

*The second of her two front teeth dropped out this afternoon after school. The tooth fairy's gonna want a bulk discount at this rate.

Incidents, accidents and prophylactics

Yuk, I'm full of cold. First one in ages, it really took me by surprise. The first shivers arrived as I was working outdoors on Friday afternoon and by bedtime I was in a right state. Niki had the same thing earlier in the week and just worked through it; both the kids had what I assume was the same thing before that and we suffered no more than a bit of a runny nose and mild to moderate whinging. Seems like the bigger you are the harder you fall, or maybe they're just hard as nails, but it's definitely got me reeling. I've been fighting it with all sorts, Paracetamol-ed up to the eyeballs, lots of vitamin C, big mugs of coffee to keep me going... and something I haven't seen for years: cod liver oil. Whatever the science behind all the hysteria over swine flu, this cold has made us appreciate the need to load up on vitamin D, especially at his time of year, and cod liver oil delivers it in a reliable way. I've just spent all morning reading up on it and the message is: vitamin D will stop you getting flu and cod liver oil is the best way of getting a regular dose of it.

It also gives you a big dose of vitamin A and some recent studies have claimed there's a need to be quite careful with it due to the possibility of vit A overdosing. The web's own GP, Dr Mercola, is one of those to have suddenly stopped recommending daily doses. It's true that you don't need cod liver oil to get enough vit D; just 15 minutes unprotected exposure to the sun per day is enough for the body to synthesize it – assuming you're in a permanently warm-enough climate to sunbathe every day. If not, it's entirely up to your diet to provide it, especially during winter months when more people get flu... and why more people get flu then. I tend to go with the Weston A Price Foundation on dietary matters, who argue that the two vitamins in the natural form of the oil complement each other perfectly. It's the synthetic, lab-produced "fortified" cod liver oils that are the source of the controversy – and that recent study data. As a rule (to save you reading the whole thing) remember cod liver oil is a nutrient dense food, not a medicine, and if you make sure yours is a natural oil it should contain vit A and vit D in roughly 10:1 proportions, which makes the vit A content perfectly safe and actually very beneficial, just as it was when I was a kid.

Yes, I have all sorts of opinions about the whole swine flu thing too, but I won't bore you with them here. What's important is that we protect ourselves and that we absolutely do not include vaccination in that protection. You don't need a vaccine and nor do your kids, you just need a decent diet and a functional immune system. Even Dr Mercola agrees there. Just say no! And get your cod liver oil down you.

Ok, enough of that. Because we're both working things are extra crazy here, complicated slightly by only having one car, exacerbated by Nik also doing a teacher training course and thrown into total disarray by two young children and their frenetic social lives. I've been working on some offices near the city three days a week, fielding the kids morning and night and getting drawings and plans together for the house, while Nik does 30-odd hours at school plus a further 20-odd on her university course, so it's pretty full-on. To be fair, were it not for the kids' play dates we'd be completely stuffed, as they get collected from school and ferried to a neighbour's house where we pick them up after work. It's great to let them have that semi-independence; it builds a sense of responsibility and self-confidence in them but you can't help worrying, largely because you know they're more than capable of running a mile with every inch you give.

So it was with Oscar's burst lip. He's still not very good at all on the skateboard and although his scootering seems to be pretty fluent, he's a bit lost (as I admit I am) on wheels without handlebars. A bit like unicycling, I suppose. You're fine while you're on the move, it's the stopping without serious injury that's the problem. In this case, the inch I gave was not only agreeing to him riding the board on all fours, it was the push he wanted besides. I really should have known he wouldn't make any effort to let go with his hands to stop himself when the board hit the kerbstone and he was thrown forwards onto his face... despite this happening at ludicrously low speed, he managed to land mouth-first with an audible splat, causing a perfect gob-print on the pavement and one extremely large fat & bloody lip that took three days to subside. Poor little bugger.

It also turns out we were even more lax with Sally rabbit. She had the run of the old chicken coop and her hutch in there, serving as canteen and sleeping quarters, was lockable but we never really thought anything could get in there so we never locked her in at night. One devastating morning last week I went to feed her and found her dead, killed by a stoat we think. Sure the kids were a little bit upset (and Elly still misses her) but we were completely distraught. She was such a lively, lovely pet and had only just settled in with us, spending more and more time in the house and growing in confidence all the time. Such a sweetie, everyone loved her and I guess worst of all we feel like we really let her down, even though all we ever really wanted for her was the freedom to do her own thing. Certainly gave us pause for thought, anyway.

How that gets me back to cod liver oil I don't know, but if you didn't click the link in the first paragraph and you're in any doubt about the importance of dietary vitamin D, please do have a read of this article, it's a real eye-opener. Also remains for me to point you to the losNemo gallery again: you need to click on the "next gallery" link to find two new albums. And, as is becoming traditional after a way-too-long post, a promise to make them shorter and more frequent in future. I really don't want to rely on cold-induced house arrest to find the time to write them, at least. Took me so long to grind this one out, I'm starting to feel miles better already :)

Southern exposure

Tell you what, Canterbury might not be the most progressive county in New Zealand but they know how to deal with school holidays. The council organised something called KidsFest that lasted the entire fortnight, full of shows and events and stuff, some of it a bit old for our two but all top entertainment, much of it free. Everyone's favourite was the Dog's Day Out, a (free) just-for-fun Crufts type show in a proper arena with judges and prizes and a surprisingly good live bluegrass ensemble going by the name of the Johnny Possum Band. Whether they're any relation to the famous Johnny Armadillo Band, I leave to you to decide ;) We've never been so spoilt for choice and the two weeks just flew by, all topped off by a trip up to the snow.

Ever since our first view of the Southern Alps, showing white peaks even in the middle of summer, we promised the kids we'd go there and catch some real snow in the winter. It's even more stunning up there now, the sky's crystal-clear, gemstone blue, the snowfields just stunning.. I've never seen such a completely pristine landscape, it's just breathtaking. We barely brushed the outskirts (one hour's really, really straight drive out of Christchurch) and yet the roads were only just passable. Teams of maintenance guys are stationed at key points to keep the way clear, through Arthur's Pass to the west coast, and serve as informal information centres. Depending on conditions they might advise needing four-wheel-drive, or chains, or both, just to pass the point where the terrain starts to rise. We picked a good day, sunny with no snowfall for 24 hours, so only the shady roads were ice-bound and it was relatively easy. Chains-only up to the ski slopes though & we left it a bit late to catch the shuttle bus, so we just had a bit play about. It was crap snow actually, probably great for skiing but hopeless for snowball fights. Snowmen were just out of the question and Oscar's first real sight of decent quantities of white stuff had him a bit freaked out because not only was it freezing cold, it stuck to his hands... bless 'im. We ended up have a good laugh, at least.

Osk's talking is really coming on, really quite scary how good his enunciation is nowadays. Still says some hilarious toddler things, like the other day when he sheepishly sidled into the living room and told me, "Papa, a normous dragon did make a tebbiral mess in my bedroom!" These days, whatever he says, it's mostly in very clear, very broad Kiwi. He loves riding his boik and scooder, although we're relieved to know, when it comes to taost, that he still prefers mahmoit to vigimoit. Elly seems to be very aware of the local twang and seems to be resisting more than I thought, in fact seems acutely tuned-in to the healthy self-consciousness New Zealanders have about their accent; in a classic pot-calling-kettle situation, Aussies have historically teased the Kiwis at every opportunity over their "fush and chups" delivery. The Kiwis apparently turned the other cheek until they could bear it no longer, finally hitting back with Flight of the Conchords and, er, lets just say the ball is firmly back in the Oz side of the court. It's maybe because of this old feud I often hear people here say they rein in their accent because they think it makes them sound a bit thuck. Maybe Elly's picking up on that. If you're interested and would like to study this further, Kiwi-ese is frequently the subject of more adademic analysis. Naahyeh, awesome, y'know?

Anyway, the holidays were good for a few other things, particularly sorting out work and house strategies. I think I mentioned us wanting to have a clear plan of action by the start of this term and thankfully one of the bubbling-under work prospects has come good: Niki's got a job! She started today in a two-room school just outside of Christchurch specialising in kids with special educational needs – Aspergers, ADD, that sort of thing – working closely with other teachers in a really small class. Apparently the principal is lovely and the kids are lovely and... it's basically the exact spectral opposite of that godforsaken place up in Auckland. While the pay's quite a bit lower, the hours are miles better and we're hoping there won't be too much in the way of paperwork, the bane of the Kiwi teacher. She just got back home, beaming all over her face, which is such a lovely thing to behold after enduring all that grief. It's hard to be sure so early on, but it looks like this could be The One. Let's hope so!

I've been getting some photographic work and these days I seem to get positive interest from practically everyone I meet. With any luck we'll get back onto the same footing we had in Spain, but I think I'll need to mix up the camerawork with building work a lot more than I used to . It was always one or the other in Spain and in hindsight I think I steered it that way; basically, it's much easier to dedicate to one or the other, from a "chip-changing" point of view. The difference here, at least in the short term, is the house we're about to build for ourselves. I need to dedicate every spare minute to it while making sure I get as much paying work as possible, if we are to stay solvent through the build. There are lots of things in our favour here: the plot is just up the street, we already have great support for childcare etc when we need it, I can effectively draw a nominal wage from the project and – crucially – the networking effect of project-managing it should spin me some useful photographic leads.

Well, it's a plan, at least. As we all know, a plan is the thing you have in place for when the random series of events that is Real Life lands you somewhere you don't want to be. At the minute the house building plans seem to be a hedge against anything better coming along, rather than what it surely is: the biggest thing we've ever set out to achieve. Once I get some stable drawings in place it'll feel more real I'm sure, and events will start to take over from aspirations. We're dead excited about the whole thing, moreso every time something essential falls into place, even though it's dragging on . It'll all be upon us before we know what's happening. As we've seen lately, time flies when you're having fun :)

The new album up on the losNemo.net gallery – Early July 2009 – should be quickly joined by Late July 2009, as it's suddenly almost August, for crying out loud. I'll post another blog up when they're ready.

Oscar's Third

"Look, a number 3! Have a really good look... a little closer... head down a bit..."

As promised, the pics from Oscar's party are up as a new album on the LosNemo gallery. Not as many as there might have been; for some reason I completely forgot to pick up the camera until it was nearly cake time. Too much jelly and crisps, too early in the day, I suppose. Actually, there were just too many things going on at once for this bear of very little brain. I put it all down to a combination of a mis-spent youth and having kids late in life. I realise that would appear to amount to the same thing; the fact is, they're very different things indeed...

Too much going on seems to have become a permanent state of affairs. You might expect, what with two posts appearing in a single week, that there's not a lot to write about: far from it. On the day of the birthday party, Matt and Antonia arrived from Auckland around the time it all kicked off, just as I was fully committed to woking up a venison vindaloo and tarka dhal, round about the time the lady from the Department of Statistics knocked on the door hoping to conduct a 2-hour interview. It's been non-stop ever since. School holidays don't help either. It boils down to a basic parental fact: when term ends, very little of a serious nature gets done unless you get serious about multi-tasking. Saturday was an inspiration: you basically need to do everything at once to get anything done at all.

Yesterday, for example, it was the Music Fairy that did the job. The brainchild of Nicky and Joseph down the street (the people we stayed with when we first got here) and an extension of her music school, once a year they get the troupe together and do some stage shows. Not only is it great fun for the kids, it was also the perfect opportunity to snap the photographs I've been promising to do them and a good chance to arrange a bike ride with Joseph for later in the week... plus it gave me a chance to drop everyone off in town afterwards while I scooted back to Lyttelton to sort out solicitors, planning officers and elusive landowners.

That side of things is putting up very little resistance. People at the council continue to be really helpful and it's looking like our wacky ideas about building mud huts might have a sympathetic reception there. Plus I finally spoke with the vendor today and he seems right into the idea, even going so far as to "wish everyone buying there had the sort of approach" that we do. Which was nice. We sign for the land on Friday, following an overnighter in Christchurch and a late night torchlit search of the Museum, just before we go to see The New Adventures of Auntie McDuff's Magical Trunk at the Arts Centre.

Roll on the weekend? Aye, those were the days :)

An eventful fortnight

This'll be a quick one cos it's Oskie's birthday tomorrow.

I've done the balloons and Niki's iced the cake but there's still presents to wrap and streamers to put up and it's getting on for midnight. It's a particularly big occasion for him not just because he's three, or because he's finally getting a skateboard (and talked about nothing else for the last three months) – these things are big enough, but today was the day he gave up his dummies. You know, those pacifier things; all 5 of his beloved dodies were traded in this afternoon at CheapSkates for an outrageously oversize lime green skateboard. Bless him, he can't even look at it without falling over but he gave the man his precious rubber teats without so much as a grimace and went almost straight off to sleep tonight without them. And he wasn't well; he's had a nasty cough for a few days and went to bed with a bit of a temperature. His last words before drifting off were, predictably enough, "but I want them!"

Nice one, Calpol...

It's all big events round here at the moment. The Festival of Lights was a sight bigger than we expected, the town completely choc full of people on the final night, kind of like a sedated Spanish Fiesta Major complete with stage entertainment and even a churrerira stand. The churros were ok, considering the distance the recipe had to travel and the Brazillian-French team that were running the stand. Typical Kiwi catering. Wacky food was everywhere, involving fundraisers for local schools and a mulled white wine which completely erased my memory of everything else on offer. All in all it was a pretty spectacular event for a little harbour town. I've put some pics up on the LosNemo gallery site.

There's news on the job front too. Niki's been making progress with local schools and, as predicted, the best leads have come from personal contacts. She had a few days relieving work (that's Kiwi for "supply teaching") at a big city-centre school, full of brutal pre-teens but still miles better than the one she was at up north... and an interview at a Catholic school in New Brighton that turned up some interesting part-time possibilites. It's looking like a combination of part-time and relieving will work out best (and probably best-paid) if only because the real prize – promised sessions of Spanish teaching at the local Steiner school – then remains a viable proposition. Fingers are crossed. Me, I'm still not absolutely sure what's going to come my way but it's currently looking like construction work might be looming on the horizon again. And not just any old construction work: I might have an entire house to build before too long.

I've been saving the biggest event til last, even though it actually appeared first. See that view over the harbour in the photo? Nice picnic spot, no? Just above where we're living at the moment, too. Well, we might have just accidentally kind of bought it, sorta thing. We were chatting with a neighbour who mentioned the land was up for sale, said she'd had her eye on it for some time, dropped a very big hint that the owner was extremely keen to offload it, so we put a daft offer in. Which he turned down of course but we still ended up getting it for a really good price. The rest of the month has been a meetings and drawings and plannings and overall, a slowly-kindling hope is evemrging that we might be able to get the whole thing off the ground by the time we come to move out of the place we're in now.

People we're talking to are speaking of a council planning department suddenly free of backlogs, presumably (like everywhere) due to the lack of building going on in the region, able to turn what used to be an 18-month approval process into something much more immediate, for the right kind of application. If we can keep it simple, within known limits, the fact that our land already has outline planning permission means we might even get it down to so many weeks. Naturally, this has me thinking we can possibly afford to push our luck... we'd love to build something out of the earth, rather than just pour concrete all over it. Wattle and daub? Almost... there's a long, fairly strong tradition here of rammed earth construction, just like poured concrete but using compacted clay-based soil instead: exactly the sort of soil we have here, in fact. As our place will be quite conspicuous, we're keen to make it blend in as much as possible and you can't get much more incognito than a mud hut on a hillside.

Will the town planners like the idea? Well, the nice thing about this place is, you can just walk into their office and ask them. It's way more open and informal than anywhere else we've ever lived. You meet these people and they're just incredibly personable and helpful, plus it's such a small town; you get to know a proper local and they just seem to know everyone and go out of their way to introduce you to the right people. It makes the idea of building here much less intimidating and living here a genuinely positive, exciting prospect.

We'll see. We haven't even paid for the land yet...

I did mention the new album in the LosNemo gallery earlier but it's becoming customary to include a link at the end so here it is: Link. You'll want the "Late June"album for the most recent pics. Finally, a solemn promise to post up the birthday party pics there. Like, as soon as possible. Hey, c'mon, I've got a lot on my plate these days...

No small change

The lava flow valley overlooking Pigeon Bay, Banks Peninsula

So here we are, mid-June and we're all done and dusted, pretty much all the basics sorted, more or less as planned. We moved in, we unpacked, we settled ourselves and the kids (not in that order) housed the rabbit and ignored the garden. The winter logs were delivered and stacked, I gave my little purple studio (one of the two rooms upstairs) several thick coats of white, Nik scrubbed the bejeezus out of the rest of the place, shelved books, warded robes, washed a mountain of long-boxed clothes... it might sound like chaos but it wasn't, in fact it was quite relaxed in some respects. Although we did have our moments.

Moment one was the acceptance that a nice, casual week of demolishing our box mountain (the contents of which, in some cases, hadn't seen daylight in almost 10 years) was in deep jeopardy. The first job on day one was to get the kids' bunk beds up and we were about two hours, 25 boxes and some premature baldness into day one when we started wondering whether the bolts that hold the beds together were going to be at the bottom of the last box we would unpack. This turned out to be a pretty accurate prediction. It also meant that we were completely unpacked by the end of day one, even if we were neck-high in cardboard for the best part of the week.

I think moment two, even if it wasn't the second one chronologically speaking, has to be the realisation that we'd probably been going about heating the place the wrong way, round about the time we had a week's worth of wood left, just three weeks into our stay. It was supposed to last three months. Other realisations, like exactly how steep is our street?? and oh no, it seems we've shipped 16 cubic metres of worthless crap halfway round the world were more gradual appreciations than sudden shocks.

Honestly, our street has to be one of the steepest in all Canterbury, although possibly not as steep as the famous Bridle Path along the way a bit, which I discovered to my cost when I tried to cycle up it. Some people even try to run up it. Even when you attempt to walk up it you quickly understand why the early settlers found it easier to dig a tunnel through two-an-a-half kilometres of solid granite than haul their belongings over the top to Christchurch. Maybe if we'd been forced to do the same we might have been a little more discriminating about was actually valuable enough.

It's taken a month to realise a few other things.

1. Work might be there for the taking, but the job you want isn't. We've both been knocked back on the job application front, mostly (we think) because a Kiwi CV is expected to be more of a sales pitch than our starchy European ones. Even having fixed that, another big reason is the who-you-know factor, which seems to be huge here. It's going to pay us to take whatever work we can for now and hopefully find an "in" to the work we really want. We're giving it until the end of school term and then it's anything goes. Nik's already sourcing supply work. I'm knocking up websites like crazy (see below) after which I'll be seeing what work there is down the docks. Labouring I mean, not what you're thinking...

2. Kids are incredibly resilient. It's as if they've lived here all their lives. The little un's very happy in his new "school" (we're not allowed to call it "kindie" due to bad memories of Little Angels in Auckland) just as much as Elly is in hers. They're both like seedlings dropped into sh... er, fertile soil, shooting away in every direction; she can read and write really fluently, ride a bike, has bags of confidence and loads of friends; he can also ride a bike (just about) and could talk the wheels off it if it had ears, is Mister Popular at school and is suddenly about six-foot-two. Seems like every time we take the bikes out I need to take a spanner along to raise the seats.

3. We love this place. It's just brilliant. The streets might be vertiginous and our house full of cluster flies, it's much colder than we thought and the super-warm & friendly people are proving difficult to really "connect" with, but we love it all with a passion that more than sees us through. The port is a magnetic focal point for everything, the town buzzes with ideas and activities, the city is really easy to access but feels miles away and the world this side of the tunnel is just stunningly beautiful. Yesterday we took a day trip to Akaroa on the other side of the Banks Peninsula and discovered a lifetime-worth of walks, picnic spots, bike rides and boat trips, all in the most jaw-dropping landscape. I might even take some pictures there one day...

4. Blogs don't write themselves. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just the words but for me at least it's important to have some pictures to make the story more complete. I've finally finished a new website to accompany the blog, which will (at last) save everyone from the dull-as-dirt Picasa and give me an incentive to keep things up to date. We now have a shiny new domain at losnemo.net that's our very own blog gallery. It's (hopefully) very easy and intuitive for visitors: when you first get there (and when you reach the end of a slideshow) you should see a gallery page with lots of albums on it. All you do is choose an album (they're vaguely date-based) and then look for on-screen clues to find your way around. I'm not being deliberately obtuse, designing it this way: little buttons mean bigger pics! I'm hoping to move the blog there soon too, but I'd like to link it all up with my other sites first. The idea is to get all that done in the next couple of weeks (term ends 3rd July) so that I can blog little and often, rather than this tediously long essay format that I frankly won't have time for anyway, should plans come to fruition. There's a feast of around 150 shots over five albums there at the moment, but updates will just be around 30 images long, hopefully once a week. Or so.

I'd value your feedback on the new gallery. It links up almost seamlessly with the software I use to edit and organise my photographs (I'm using a tweaked version of SildeshowPro in the Web module of Adobe Lightroom, should anyone be interested) which I'm hoping will drive everything through the same portal, rather than off in different, impossible-to-manage directions. A selection of the images will be transferred to an e-commerce site over at Photoshelter, making it easy for anyone wanting prints to order them online. Then a "best of" selection of that site gets ported to my portfolio site. Sounds good in theory :) but at least I've got phase one up & running. Anyway leave a comment here or drop me an email & tell me what you think.

There's loads more I should have mentioned but I'll leave it at that for now. That way, half the next one's already written :)

Postscript for grandparents: there's a new link to the photographs hidden in the text above. You can also click here or use the link at the top of the page marked losNemo.net Photo Gallery

(patronising, sarcastic old git... I don't know where I get it from...)

Waiting room only

I think it must be normal for the first part of a long wait to pretty much fly by, after which the middle bit drags a little and the last few days never actually end; they kind of stay with you forever, like a scar. Or a tattoo, depending how fond your memory of it turns out to be. Our recollection of the last three weeks will probably be of the inky, needly variety, cos apart from the cold and abiding feeling of being in limbo, it's been brill.

It could have been so much worse. Our reckless faith in providence saw us take the first offer of temporary accommodation that came along, despite the fact that Bed & Breakfast clearly isn't the regular self-contained accommodation most sane people in our situation would opt for. Most B&B's are fine for a couple of nights and bearable for a week, plus their typical set-up means you're basically there at night and out during the day so it's no problem. But for three weeks... the thing you often overlook is that a B&B is also someone's home.

I've already mentioned how accommodating Nicky and Joseph have been of our invasion of their home and Elly embracing them as "our new family" kind of sums up how we've all been dealing with it. Apart from mealtimes (this is self-catering, after all... the only precondition they had was that we make our own breakfast!) it's been a case of mucking in with the day-to-day stuff – feeding cats & chickens, chopping firewood, etc – and preparing the ground for moving into our new place.

We've got Elly into a fantastic school right next door, Oscar happily settled into a nursery (yay! at last!) right next door to that, got sorted with doctors, registered at the library, signed up for... well, you name it, we joined it. Having housemates who know the ropes is a massive plus, saved us hours of messing about and pointed us directly to the best walks, bike rides, shortcuts and daytrips, shops and bus routes, even got us an official welcome on the local radio station. Which was nice.

Yet when push comes to shove this is just another waiting room, one more departure lounge, hopefully the last in a long time but still a pain to have to endure. Despite being a great house with pretty much everything going for it – lovely views across the harbour, wild gardens, great neighbours, just a short walk into town – our growing familiarity with it has inevitably turned to contempt... slowly but surely, daft things like a lack of power points, lack of decent heating (we're still not toughened up to the cold yet) and the er, microwave being in the wrong place – lots of petty niggles begin to gang up and drive you nuts. You know it's time to move on when you find yourself sitting there, mentally pricing up double glazing and loft insulation...

It really is very cold here at times, which is fine, as long as you have a reasonably warm house and you're not soft as shite. Summing it up quite nicely right this moment is the incredibly loud hammering of a passing hailstorm on the corrugated tin roof above my head. Nothing unusual about that, pretty much every house here is a pretty, timber-framed shack with roofing my old shed would put to shame. Nor is it unheard-of that it's gone from balmy autumn to barmy winter in 24 hours (it can't be 2 degrees out there and it's not even dark yet) – nope, I'm beginning to realise it's definitely just us being soft. That's what you get for spending a whole year chasing summers.

The best thing about being here really is the never-ending list of distractions. The harbour is a beautiful, dramatic landscape, a chameleon that morphs into something different every time so much as a cloud passes. Lyttelton port never sleeps, or so you'd think, as container ships the size of a small town roll in at all hours, stacked so high with those huge metal crates you can't comprehend the dynamics of it, how they don't just topple over, how the hell they manage to float at all... meanwhile the town center buzzes gently to itself, terraced up the mountainside like an amphitheatre built to applaud it all.

Just like this blog entry, it never ends... until you look up and realise, through all your interminable daydreaming, that it's time to get a move on. Tomorrow we break camp and climb the volcano... at last, we can move in, get our heads down and get on with our lives. We're all incredibly excited. There's still loads to tell – about the town, the amazing people we've met, our work prospects and all the weird synchronicity that seems to spring up in everything we do here – but it'll have to wait til next time.

I'll try to make that soon (like next week) keep it short and (as I also keep promising) get some pics together as well.

Lyttelton at last

Wow, it feels great to finally be here! A bit weird not being in our new house yet, and we completely buggered up the packing logistics, and Sally's still cooped up in her cage, and it's absolutely bloody freezing... but we're all high as kites.

The remainder of our journey down was pretty easy. A very pleasant drive down to Wellington left us time enough to visit the Te Papa museum, if not enough to see everything in it. It's a superb, ultra-modern, multi-storey space stuffed with far too many amazing things for one visit, the current Monet exhibition included :( Still, we did manage to sneak the rabbit in past the motel concierge and the takeway from Masala was almost as brilliant as last time.

Although we had a pretty smooth crossing, Elly hadn't been too bright on the Wellington leg of the journey, had a bit of a temperature that night and looked decidedly peaky on the ferry. She waited until we hit the windy road up into the hills beyond Blenheim before regurgitating her breakfast of doughnut and chips. Oscar slept, watched vids, did colouring-in, got very annoyed when we didn't stop every 10 minutes for a wee, and was generally very funny and entertaining. Sally and Elly slept and looked sick as chips, but all in all we had a nice, relaxed, fun-filled journey south.

We've been here four days and it already feels like home. It's actually Nicky & Joseph's home that they run as a B&B, just down the street from our new place. Apart from their beautiful house they have two top tomcats, Angus and Gordon, two cute girly chickens who answer to Vivien and Sally and I guess one more lop-eared bunny is neither here nor there. N & J are lovely people, very tolerant of our boistrous troupe and very generously offering to put us up for the same rent that we'll be paying when we finally move up the street. E & O have really taken to them, especially Elly, who refers to them as "our family".. bless 'er :)

It was just getting to be a problem, having stuff strewn about several corners of New Zealand, when the phone rang this afternoon to say our lorry-load was to be delivered tomorrow at eight. Pete and Lois (our new landlords) own Lyttelton's longest-running bar/restaurant, the Volcano Cafe and Lava Bar on London Street, and were delighted to be informed they'd be dragged from their beds at the crack of dawn to receive us, our two jacks-in-the-box, one large removals van and several burly mister shiftas. Thank god they have a sense of humour. They're doing a kind of business swap with a French pal of theirs who has a B&B just north of Provence near the famous Alpe D'Huez, for the coming year-to-eighteen months, and are in the process of packing all their worldly goods in readiness, so it should be a right laugh...

At least I'll get my missing camera gear, the plug adaptors and whatnot that we forgot to pack, along with the wooly jumpers and long pants we were quite certain we'd easily manage without til the lorry-load arrived. One pair of long pants between us and it's been utterly brass monkeys since we landed; thick cloud and leaden skies at first, followed by a stiff sou'westerly for the last 48 hours blowing so hard out of Antarctica you could actually smell the penguin farts, as if preserved in little frozen gas bubbles. The truth is, of course, we're all soft as shite due to 12 months of non-stop summer, so anything remotely close to single figures Celsius has us back under the duvet faster than you can say "thermal underpants".

The pic at the top gives you some idea of the lie of the land. It's a bit hilly. We're going to be living halfway up the crater edge (did I mention the whole harbour is an extinct volcano? Well it is..) a leisurely 30 minute stroll from the top. You can just see our place between the legs of the second pylon. That township out on the other side of the harbour, beyond the reclaimed flatlands of white storage tanks, is Diamond Harbour; beyond that, the Banks Peninsula. We've yet to see either of them but they're supposed to be stunning. It certianly looks very pretty from up here. It's like a whole new world laid out in front of you, something we've been hoping to feel since we left Spain and something that finally, hopefully, feels like it's happening.

There's a load of new pics on the accursed Picassa. If it's as jerky for you as it is for me, try the slideshow but pause it and use the arrows to manually move from pic to pic. I promise to get a better viewer sorted for next time.

Hasta la proxima!

Taupo again

Hm. On my phone, this pic of our Taupo cabin was accompanied by reams of lyrical prose and it's all been conveniently lost in the upload. Exactly how that feels in the pit of my stomach I'll spare you; instead, the main points in brief.

• Lovely autumnal colours on the road south


• Lovely log cabin next to deep, swift moving, crystal-clear river


• First proper outing with Sally rabbit a partial success, no big car probs and only slightly freaking out while on the leash


• The north island is full of Christian policemen and Steptford wives. Our hopes for the south grow ever greater


• The iPhone implementation of the Blogger interface is utter Shite

Wow, that was easy. I should blog this way more often.
Next up: Wellington again.

Last night in Auckland

Elly's pre-birthday goodbye party last week

This is a long, long overdue update but I do have a whole month of good excuses to explain it. At very least, leaving the blogging til now means I've spared you a handful of very lame Easter-related puns, quite apart from the usual eggs-related ones, like rising from the dead, having our Last Supper, eggs-citing happenings (see?) and so on. Then there's the fact that we didn't really know what was happening until Easter weekend anyway. Right up until last Thursday it felt like anything could happen, even though nothing was happening at all, until eventually (as so often happens) everything happened at once. Allow me to explain.

Going back exactly one week today, I was on the phone to a borderline hysterical landlord doing her nut because we had no-one to take over our lease. Five weeks of advertising had brought exactly zero responses. In case I wasn't fully aware of the consequences, I was repeatedly reminded of the massive sacrifices she was making, having to think about maybe storing her furniture (furnished places being very hard to let here) and possibly having her cat shipped out to her holiday home in Australia (as it was quite clear that no-one was interested in a house complete with a sociopathic feline) and oh, the stress and worry etc etc. Never mind the comforting knowledge that, should we leave without finding a new tenant, under Kiwi law we were liable to pay the $16,500 rent for the remainder of the original term. Or that, should the rent be reduced to attract a new tenant, we were obliged to make up the difference.

Which is precisely what happened, although we ended up no worse off. We worked out that if we paid (as already promised) until the end of April, it would cost us around $1100, as we were moving out two weeks earlier on the 15th. If, on the other hand, we found a tenant by the time we moved out, we would save that $1100 and be off the hook. Brains now fully engaged for once, we then worked out that we advertised the place for $40 a week less we'd stand a better chance of finding someone and not be any more out of pocket, even if we did have to pay that amount to the landlord for the remaining 26 weeks of our contract. That's what I was on the phone to negotiate, as well as to suggest removing the furniture and the cat. Suffice to say she went with the rent reduction.

For some reason, before the revised ads were posted up, the phone never stopped ringing. By pure fluke, we found our new tenants within 3 days, and by sheer coincidence they are in need of a furnished place and positively love cats, especially ones with personality disorders. It really couldn't have come any later in the eleventh hour without it all turning into a pumpkin. We move out tomorrow and the new tenant's deposit, which seals the deal, is due to hit the landlord's account at more or less the exact same time our keys hit the doormat.

We Are Relieved.

We're also packed, ready for the removal guys arriving in the morning. It's been a fraught day of tearful goodbyes and frantic last-minute repairs. I'm not quite sure why, but it's at these exact times that you elect to fix the broken hi-fi, choose to reverse the car into the garage wall, change bank accounts, do a week's shopping, take the dented car to a mechanic and have all the tyres swapped around, write blogs, and so on. Moving house isn't stressful enough, clearly. Or maybe it's a bit like riding the Wall of Death: no-one really understands why you do it, but it does make for heart-stopping entertainment.

Somehow in all of this I've flown down to Christchurch to meet up with our lovely new landlords, who, it turns out, are minor celebrities in their lovely little town of Lyttelton. A working port south of the city, once (before international flights) the main landing point for European immigrants and still a popular cruise ship stop, this is the place we fell in love with on our summer holidays. The house is wonderful, full of character, on a steep hill overlooking the port, old but modernised, a garden bursting with huge trees, overgrown herbs, berries and all manner of fascinating plants. There's even a ready-made run for Sally rabbit. It's not vacant til May, but our hosts found us a great B&B just down the street for the same rent and offered to store our stuff in their garage until they leave on their European adventures. It all just fell into place over the space of a week.

Tomorrow we drive to Taupo and stay the night at Rainbow Cottage. Then on to Wellington on Thursday, the Picton ferry on Friday morning and Lyttelton by teatime. It's hard to express, especially after all these tales of woe and havoc, exactly how exciting and positive this move feels. I'll try and keep you updated as we go, along with more details of the new place. Right now I need to get to bed before I think of anything else to do...

Packing it all in

The kids are quite keen to leave...

Wow, three weeks since my last post. Notice I say my last post; Niki hasn't blogged for so long I've pretty much taken over sole responsibility for the thing, so it's maybe not surprising that it never gets done. A bit like the housework I should be doing instead of typing this, it's a question of priorities and there's a definite pecking order, ie, if the housework needs doing, there's always something more important to be getting on with.

We haven't been ridiculously busy, really. There's been more to do than usual – I've been working (or attempting to, during the 5-hour slot I get, four days a week) and for some reason Niki's job seems to be taking up loads more of her time this term – but that's not why I've not been blogging. Ironically, there's been loads to blog about, just for one reason or another it hasn't been worth saying until now.

It all started out with a pain in the arse. To be more precise, it was several pains in the arse at once, both figurative and real, which turned out to be loosely interconnected and centering on our Niki. She came home from school one day with a shooting pain down one leg. If you've ever had a shooting pain but never actually been shot, you'll know exactly what I mean. If you've been unfortunate enough to have been shot but never so unlucky to have had sciatica at the time, maybe you won't. Anyway, that was one pain, the other was more of an intense suffering, brought on by being obliged to teach in what we now know to be (unofficially, but fairly unanimously) the worst Primary school* in the country.

The third is the figurative pain in the arse that runs the place. Actually she only figuratively runs the place nowadays, having been usurped by a Ministry lackey with functional people skills and a brief to pull the place into shape. The reality is, she's been sent to treat a decapitation with a Band-Aid. A rubbish school and disrespectful Principal not only feed off each other, they produce rubbish, disrespectful kids. Leaving aside the entire generation of failed pre-teens the place is turning out, it turns over teachers at a shocking rate. Niki was her class' fourth teacher last year and she won't be their last one this year: the fact is, she's leaving at the end of the term and we're all heading south to Christchurch.

There's only so much abuse you can take, I guess, a limit to the number of times you can come home in tears of sheer frustration and anger at the hopelessness of teaching at a broken school. The time comes when you wake up one morning and realise the pain in your arse isn't down to your crap bed, and the nauseous feeling in your guts has nowt to do with the prawns you had for supper. If your occupation is making you feel physically ill, you're probably in the wrong job. Wor lass has nothing to be ashamed of, having made great strides with the kids and managing to set up a whole-school behavioural reward system in the short time she's been there. My work has been painfully slow in taking off and it's largely down to the fact it all seems so temporary here. The long and short is, Auckland's just not working for either of us and it's time to move on.

I've left a few threads hanging there... I'll come back to them later cos this is turning into one of those epics I promised I'd stop turning out. The first, most immediate thing is Niki's back. It got much, much worse than shooting pains when she came in from yoga the other night bent double, having tackled the Warrior and come off worst. She's currently getting physiotherapy, including acupuncture, and is banned from yoga for the foreseeable. The physio is taking about a herniated disk. She should really be resting, not feeling obliged to go into work, but aside from a few days off where she's just been unable to move, she's been in every day. More about that as it develops. Hasn't stopped her going out on the razz tonight, so there's definitely hope :)

The other one is the casual announcement that we're moving on, again. In order to get to our chosen destination in time for next term, we need to be out of here within 5 weeks, hopefully straight into a new home on the South Island, and even more hopefully, having found someone suitable to take on the remainder of our 12-month lease... we'd hoped that some friends might be interested but it's a lot of upheaval if you're not blessed with itchy feet and incredibly compliant kids. E &O are just awesome, shooting away under the sun of a second consecutive summer (Oscar's grown over 7cm in under five months...) and absolutely full-on up for another move. E has a big pre-birthday party planned for the week before we leave. O has no idea what's going on, really. Daft as a brush, just like his dad.

So you can see there are plenty of things to be getting on with. Besides work, we have boxes to pack, barely six weeks since we unpacked them. Actively looking for new work in the Christchurch area. We need to find tenants. And a new house.. our broadband connection is shredded... oh, almost forgot to mention: our residency has come through too! Good news for registering with doctors etc. It's all go, and out of adversity and despair, a whole new horizon, full of hope and almost unbearable excitement and anticipation, is rising out of the gloom.

We shall keep you posted. Or at least I will...

This week I have been mostly listening to: Jim White's Transnormal Skiperoo, so now we all want to live in a turquoise house :)

*I'm mentioning no names, but if you're a teacher thinking of moving here, happen to read this and would like to know the name of the school, leave a comment with your contact details. Suffice to say, be wary of agencies recruiting in the UK for NZ schools ...

The stuff of life

I did remember to post up those pics. I just forgot to mention it on the blog :) As there are (I'm told) some issues with finding the link among those relatively new to following blogs (Hi Dad!) you need to click here to see the gallery or click here to go stright to the slideshow.

I don't know about you, but the Picasa server seems to be getting slower and slower, making the images change before they've properly loaded. I'm moving the show to something more slick, I think, it would be a sham eto make them smaller files just to suit Mr Google. These days, I have to admit, things like that just have to be Flash-based, such that the whole show loads up before you view it, and your viewer isn't left wondering whether the strange and tediously developing image is supposed to be part of the presentation. Bro' Mark has finally launched himself webward with a fun showcase of his lovely work, nice and clean, simple and Flash. His other page is my favourite, so it's going on the favourite links sidebar :)

Scorching hot again here today, mercifully only 91% humidity so it was only really bad when you went out into the sun. The atmosphere's ultra-clear so you get full-on UV rays, not filtered the way they are back in Spain, and I swear you can actually feel it penetrating right though your hat. In other news, we finally got the growth charts up again and while Elly has achieved a very respectable three centimeters since September, Oscar has managed almost six. Saved us a fortune in summer clothes, as his previously long pants are now cool-looking three-quarter cutoffs.

Niki's term started off really hard, having lost her bessie mate teacher to the posh school Elly goes to, losing our kids after such lovely long holidays and gaining only another classful of incredibly rude and insubordinate ones. It's a real uphill struggle but she seems to be making headway against all the odds and is even starting to push through some changes to the hapless school regime. They don't deserve her, basically, and I've no doubt they'll miss her when we bog off and find somewhere that does. Doing really well on the bike though, being one of those nutters you see out on training rides before it gets light most mornings a week. We'll have her doing that Taupo Ironman yet :))

Me, I'm another uphill struggle. Motivation isn't a problem but direction definitely is. I feel I could do just about anything here at least as well as the best of them, but there's precious little calling or obvious demand for any of it. I see "gaps" everwhere, from reportage wedding photography to wacky patio installations, and whereas the Kiwis seem (on the face of it) to be progessive, up-for-anything types, they're colllectively very conservative, happy with the way they do things and not really up for anything new. Maybe it's just Auckland, in fact we're both convinced it is just Auckland. Our next trip south will be with bags full of very loaded questions and unreasonably high expectations.

I drove out to North Shore tonight to pick up some speakers I won on TradeMe (eBay here is a joke, try it!) They're great, apart from the huge big dent I put in one of them when I dropped it on it's way into the house :-/ It was one of those journeys that typifies living here in a very literal sense: I stopped off for some speaker cable at Dick Smiths (a kind of NZ version of Tandy) over in Sylvia Park, which for me is the worst kind of shopping mall. Not your big out of town mall – nothing in Auckland is out of town – just an ugly, sprawling, concrete carbuncle flanked by motorway flyovers. If it didn't sound like a cross between open greenbelt and a Swedish porn star I'd probably be more forgiving. The traffic was shocking into the city and I crawled along under leaden skies in the sticky heat for what seemed like hours.

Then suddenly I was cruising over the harbour bridge, five lanes of open sea views, volcanic islands to the right, rolling hills to the left. The sun comes out. My seller is a typical Kiwi; affable, honest, vague, a bit odd... but all is in order, the drive back is smooth and clear, and I inevitably think, "why isn't it like this all the time?"

That's just it though, you can't ever pin it down. It changes like the weather and leaves you none the wiser. One thing's for sure: tomorrow, it'll be exactly the same.