Happy New Era

Our new view

No-one in their right mind does New Year's resolutions anymore. They generally don't work out anyway, or the opposite thing happens, or worst of all, you realise it was a stupid idea in the first place, a wild promise made under duress at 11pm on the 31st, leaving you looking and feeling a right donkey by January 14th. I gave NYRs up ages ago (Clause B, Resolution #3, New Year's Eve 2005) and never looked back. Instead I do Old Year's resolutions. You make an OYR in November and get straight on with it, the idea being that if it's still going strong by the New Year you're off to a flying start; if it isn't, well, no-one in their right mind, etc. - dignity saved.

Normally I wouldn't confess the failed resolutions but just this once, by way of illustration, I'll list them all out.

1. Stop editing Wikipedia: this one had been looming for a while and was partly aimed at reclaiming the countless hours spent not actually writing and editing (that pretty much stopped last year) but squabbling about policy with self-righteous, self-serving, absurdly pompous dickheads like me. Our house move provided the opportunity, following which a fourtunate instance of having the last word allowed me to fully disengage over the xmas break. Result: Success

2. Stop being snappy with the kids: one of the hazards of working from home is the constant interruptions which, in the main, I've learned to deal with in a calm and rational way. Broken concentration can be mended, and with practice it can be limited to fractures, but the key is patience. Right, that's the theory... in practice you just end up being Grumpy Dad, harbouring a permanent low-level antipathy for all other lifeforms. Nonetheless I was doing well with this resolution until the house move swapped my upstairs sanctuary for a downstairs hallway annexe. This was prong one of a three-pronged assault on my resolve: the imposition of a 30-minute TV curfew was another and the killer blow came with the school holidays. After a rocky start with lots of fighting over toys and lashings of Daddy, Oscar looked at me like this! (pulling a ridiculous face) during which I completely lost the plot on several occasions, I've managed to claw back some semblance of patience. However this isn't down to some superhuman effort on my part, it's the fact that the kids are just fab now, play nicely 90% of the time and genuinely seem to have turned over a major good leaf. The full marks go to them, and I have to concede at least partial Failure on this one.

3. Get some bloody work in: as mentioned in blogs past, Niki's finally found a job she loves, working with SEN kids in a well-respected and successful Christchurch school, but it pays so badly it makes peanuts look like a banker's bonus. On the back of me getting a contract to do photographic work from a big real estate agency, I persuaded her to stay rather than find better-paid mainstream school work. When the contract turned out to be more of a vague promise of something in the new year it was a bit of a worry, to say the least. Kind of a combination of good timing and wild panic led to other work being found to fill the gap, including an editorial shoot for the Mail on Sunday's magazine, You. A nice lady I was doing some other work for turned out to be a published author whose new book has just been released, needed a local photographer for the article, one thing led to another and I got the job. It'll be in the Mail on 31st January, so dash out and grab a copy! Along with a bunch of other good local projects (I've even scored some work on our own place) I think it's fairly safe to call this one a tentative Success.

4. Get fit for the Festival of Cycling: We moved house, I caught a chesty cold, the dog ate my shoe, etc.. Failure. Next!

5. Get fit anyway: partial Success. More my mate Matt's resolution this, as he'd vowed to lose his I-work-in-IT belly, decided on cycling as the best way to do it, and I offered to take him out. He's possessed with a yearning to ride the toughest hills in the area (and they're pretty tough round here) but is – how shall I put this? – a little short of the fitness levels required... so we're out once a week on our old mountain bikes on the scary road climbs and offroad mountaintop trails of the Port Hills. As we live on opposite sides of the mountain, he rides up one side and I ride up the other, we meet at the top and ride the roads and some of the best single-track MTB trails in the country, or more accurately, I ride them and Matt pushes his bike along them... it could be a slightly faster pace for me but at least the rides are 3-4 hours long and owld lard-arse is not only getting better every week, he's talking about getting a road bike. And – AND – Niki's been out on the bike too, not just pootling along the quay either, up the Evans Pass no less. I'm incredibly proud of her. In fact we'll all do the Festival this year... how's that for an early resolution?

6. Do some gardening: we knew this would be an issue due to the move and were determined to get down & dirty like committed gardeners. The veggies are doing alright, thanks to a flurry of activity when we first moved in: Niki got posh new garden handtools for her birthday and does regular weeding, we have salad leaves, sort of, the herbs and strawberries we liberated from Voelas have taken root and seem ok, but everything else has pretty much failed to happen. I blame that Pete and Lois, uprooting everything in late spring means no potatoes, weedy lettuce and dead chillies and tomatoes. The lawn is a bed of dried clover and despite some enthusiastic shrub pruning and weeding the other weekend, the garden looks like it would if a bunch of students had moved in. We are in shame :( and mark this one a clear failure.

6. Do some basic dog training: Louie's been doing really well all on his own. He's really bright in that way dogs are, where they give you that empty-headed stare that makes you think they're sweet and innocent dullards, while all the time they're hatching a cunning plan to relieve the kids of their breakfast. Which he's done more than once. He can sit and stay and knows exactly what you mean when you tell him to fetch or come, he just decides not to do it. Not only does he know how to escape from the garden, he knows that if he sits in the middle of the road – the main road to Governor's Bay, not just some side-street – cars will stop and queue up and make that funny honking noise until we come out and get him. I've been meaning to spend a set time every day doing obedience training but work and stuff have got in the way, resulting in a resounding Failure. Proper classes are booked for next week; I'll report back on how that goes.

7. Write the blog more regularly: that's more reliably, not just 'more', I mean 'regular' doesn't necessarily have to mean 'frequent'; if you were trying to cure constipation you'd be aiming for the former, not the latter. And given that I seem to be averaging a blog a month of late I'm claiming Success on this one. As life settles down into some kind of routine it might be more of a note to say there are some pics up on the losNemo gallery than my customary monthly review. We're just not that interesting ;) but there are some new pics, two new albums which have, admittedly, been stuck in the old digital bowels a while, so click here and enjoy! There are a bunch more in the offing, including an update on Louie who'll be getting his own album soon.

So there they are, confessions of an inveterate procrastinator. Let's see how long the new leaf lasts.

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!

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.

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.

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...

News at Tin

Actually, it's jast gone siven-thirdy, but what the hick...

Top story: we're in our new place. It feels very, very good. It feels like we finally landed, albeit more like the way a ball lands than a plane... more a sort of bouncing to a halt. If you're a regular Ryanair flyer the analogy might be lost on you, but anyway.. our cases are unpacked, at last, into the wardrobes of our sixth home in as many months, so we can relax at least, even if we can't get too comfy just yet. As the vast majority of our junk is on a cargo ship somewhere off the coast of Somalia (with any luck) it feels airy and spacious in here, even minimalistic, with vast amounts of empty storage space and clean, open work surfaces. It feels good, more than anything, to have our feet on slightly more solid ground; a 12-month lease seems like ages in the light of recent exploits. The fact is though, it's a finite contract; the owners are only renting it out while they take a sabbatical in Adelaide. This time next year we'll be pulling the last of the strawberries and upping sticks once more, and despite what you might think, we both agree it already feels like the right thing to do. Howick is charming and convenient and all the rest of it but it's way too crowded and suburban for our liking. Their house, though, is wonderful.

I think it was built something like 20 years ago, in the garden of a very sweet, flower-bound cottage, a two-storey Dutch-style place with a kind of granny flat off the other side of two garages, leased to a guy who apparently spends around 3 months of the year in it. As this sits between the street-front cottage and our place it's very quiet and the joint garage driveway provides a big, safe courtyard for the kids to adorn with pavement chalk artworks. A narrow but beautifully manicured garden, fragrant with roses, jasmine, orange and honeysuckle, borders the living room at the front and the kitchen down the side. We have a cat that hates kids & hence we never see, but are contractually bound to feed. The interior is very tastefully modern and quite open-plan, making it devilishly hard for the cat to sneak in and eat. Our room looks out over neighbouring gardens, while the kids' has a sea view. It's no grand vista, just a triangular patch of sparkly water between the pitched roofs of the neighbouring holiday chalets, big enough to see if the the tide's in and watch the Auckland ferry cruise past Mount Wellington in the distance. As I quipped to the wife the other day, we should think of it as a downpayment on the proper view we'll have ourselves one day. Anyway, rather than try to describe the layout and whatnot, I made a slightly hamfisted video of it all & posted it on my iDisk. Apologies in advance for the quality, or lack of; like a lot of things in our current pre-shipment, chattels-free state, we're obliged to make use of some slightly unorthodox tools...

Other news: in a report out today scientists claimed the process of migrating from one side of the world to the other might prove quite unsettling to the under-fives... whereas we always assumed it would be hardest on Elly, as she's so much more aware of what's going on I'm beginning to think the last six months has been more upsetting for little Oscar. Daft things like becoming very home-oriented and placing a lot of value on what's "ours" – our house, our car, etc. – even though they've been changed as often as his teeshirts. Possibly because of it, and despite it, he has this amazing ability to pick out "owa car" in a crowded mall carpark, even differentiate between ours and nearby identical cars, which got me wondering if he was actually reading the license plates.

They're all really subtle "symptoms" and it's quite possible that we're looking for a syndrome that doesn't exist, but you have to wonder. He's sitting next to me now with a pencil in his fist, scribbling and singing away to himself, happy as the proverbial pig, not a care in the world. This morning he was a wreck. There are always a few tears starting kindie, plus I guess it's natural to be a little over-protective of your youngest, but leaving him with the lovely nursery teachers seems much tougher than it was with Elly and he's always quite positive he doesn't want to go, crying before we even get there. He wasn't so bad at Play Centre once he realised I wasn't leaving; stuck to me like glue for the first half-hour and then gradually got into it on his own. Groups of little kids don't faze him so much as perhaps represent the loss of his comfort zone.

I dunno. He's two. They're always a bit doolally at that age. Both he and Elly are amazing kids and all this will likely just make them stronger and more resilient. Elly got an award from the principal of her new school last week. I was there for the assembly; it was lovely. Along with a number of other kids she was called to the front, and then stood up on the stage holding a small certificate that commended a "kind and caring student", which, given the lecture I'd given her that very morning about sharing and not being selfish, goes to show exactly how little I know about my own offspring...

Sport and weather: mostly dull and very sunny, respectively. I really can not wait til my bikes arrive.

This just in: I got an iPhone for me birthday, a marvellous toy that happens to have a half-decent camera built in and makes it much easier to spontaneously snap the kids and their zany antics.. a new album on Picassa will catalogue this low-resolution malarky as it unfolds. It was lovely to receive the cards and birthday greetings by the way, it's always nice to know I'm remembered as I embark on this, my forty-ninth year. A big "thankyou" and virtual hug to you both ;)

Over the rainbow

The kids have been heavily into the Wizard of Oz for a good while now. I've no idea how many times we've watched it since Elly first saw it at school – 50? 100? – nor how long it will take before the "Ding, dong, the witch is dead" earworm will leave our heads. Years, probably. We naturally brought the DVD with us and they're watching it for the second time today as I type. I always loved it but never really scrutinised its "message" before. This morning – very, very early this morning, thanks to the little one's body clock still being on Singapore time – I watched it with them again and it suddenly occurred to me that the pertinence of the film to our current carry-on might run much deeper than its title.

The "Oz" thing lost most of it's relevance when we decided to move here instead (although, as Nik pointed out, it's so very nearly the Wizard of Nz... yeah, ok, it was dead funny at 5 this morning..) and even the no-place-like-home, grass-is-always-greener theme is a bit on the thin side. No, it was the stuff the main characters are seeking that seemed to ring true to my heavily jet-lagged noggin, and the realisation that my head, heart and courage really are all present and correct, despite my faith in them waning at times. Some of the stuff we've seen and done since we got here has tested them all, the last two days.

Nothing serious, just a few incidences of, "o god, what have we done..", starting with the Airport Garden Hotel. What a dump. I mean it was clean and everything, just in the middle of an industrial estate and totally run down, with a sad, derelict ex-water feature at the entrance, weird, dated decor and cheesy cane furniture in the lobby. Big framed posters hang crookedly on every wall, their colours bleached out to an almost monochrome blue. It's all summed up by two big, brass & glass display cabinets in the lounge, both spotlessly clean, one empty, the other neatly laid out with five Mars bars, fifteen packs of Kleenex and a roll of Sellotape. Classy.

Still, that was just a temporary stopover until we got our little holiday let, which is a complete contrast. It's just a timber two-room bungalow set in the owner's grounds but it's gorgeous, like something out of Homes & Gardens. Big, mature plants and trees are set against towering virgin forest, the first blooms of Spring are all around, the long driveway lined with huge wild lillies. At the end, you go over the bridge to the turquoise waters of the bay. This is a stunning country, moreso than we ever imagined, and we've still not even left the suburbs of Auckland. We're actually in the Botany Downs, just on the outskirts of the south-eastern 'burbs, where the landscape goes from flattish to very hilly around the coast. Still very difficult to navigate, never mind describe, so I'll leave it for now...

There's a hell of a lot to take in of course. We had another OMG moment when we visited Niki's new school. It's in Otara, one of the poorest districts, and although it's very low-rise, with broad avenues and gardens, the housing is clearly really basic and there's a real ghetto feel to the place. You can almost see why gang culture is so big there, but I also got a sense of civic pride and community I've not felt since I lived in Sudan. First impressions, nothing more, are a mixture of intimidation and awe. NZ has a famously high crime rate that seems to be heavily concentrated in these urban areas. You get out into the sticks and it's all sheep and seabirds. One more reason we'll be heading out there...

Got to end here and get this posted up – our lovely landlady Lorraine has offered us use of her computer. More news soon from the yellow brick road!