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.

When your boat comes in

Dance ti' thy daddy, sing ti' thy mammy,
Dance ti' thy daddy, ti' thy mammy sing;
Thou shall hev a fishy on a little dishy,
Thou shall hev a bloater when the boat comes in.
(trad. Northumbrian folksong)

Our boat's already in, we're just not sure what to expect. For all the old Geordie song pops into me head when I hear the phrase, in both verse and real life there's always a hint that it might not all be good news, as if your fishy might end up slapping you in the face rather than filling your belly. The way I remember it, most of the verses describe the kids of the house farting about with their mam, until the man of the house staggers in from the pub with their supper, stone cold and far from sober.

To be fair to respectable Northumbrian folk, this is quite possibly a bastardised version of a rather more quaint and tasteful seafaring ballad but then again, it's probably not ;) I mean it's not an unfamiliar scene. Not that my dad ever, y'know... well, not regularly. I remember the first & last time he rolled in late a bit worse for wear, clutching two bags of crisps and a Fry's Chocolate Creme. He certainly wasn't allowed to forget in a hurry ;)

The more conventional maritime meaning of your boat coming in evolved around the settling of a debt and the reaping of rewards, cos for centuries merchants have borrowed money to finance shipments from the other side of the world and paid off the loan once the lucrative cargo docked. Of course much depends on the quality of the merchandise and whether it's actually worth the initial investment, ie whether you end up lumbered with stuff no-one wants, worse off than you were before. It's in this sense that the phrase applies to us, as were equally unclear whether our boat coming in is a blessing or a curse, and the heartening fact that we've paid for it all upfront kind of fades when we recall what we've actually paid for.

And it wasn't cheap. (I have to get this down before the stuff clears quarantine and ends up in our garage: by then it'll be too late to think of it in abstract terms, cos we'll be up to our necks in it) If anyone reading this ever considers something as daft as moving their entire home and contents across the globe, please, don't. Just don't do it. Sell the lot.

Don't be fooled into thinking you have to buy Gizmo X cos they won't sell them where you're going: not only is that highly unlikely, when you get where you're going your needs will almost certainly shift enough to make X obsolete before it arrives.

Remember that the clothes you absolutely can't do without will fit into a standard suitcase. Anything and everything that ends up shoved into black bin liners clearly isn't going to be worth removing from them at the other end.

Books: sell them or give them away, you'll never read them any more than you'll miss them.

CDs, DVDs etc: rip them to your hard drive, then sell them.

Ornaments: looked great in your old place, so leave them there, or try eBay.

Electrical, soft furnishings, kitchenware: sell, sell, sell!

There's just no point shipping stuff when it costs $15 per cubic foot (once you've insured it) and your average washing machine is 12 cu ft. If it cost you $600 a year ago, by the time you ship it, battered and bruised, to your destination, it'll have cost you a another $180. Instead, just sell it, put the proceeds and savings – say $350 – towards a nice new one that'll actually work, or at least have a warranty that you could actually claim on, and save another $350 in repairs and prescription valium.

Yes, I'm looking forward to having my bikes, tools and er, well, bikes and tools, that's it. The rest could have been hijacked by Somalian pirates for all I care. In fact we should have paid the buggers to do just that. One forty-five grand insurance claim later, I think I could bear the loss. The two of us are almost indignant that it's all arrived at all, especially since all we're going to do is stack it in the garage and wonder what on earth possessed us to rent a furnished house.

It's due to be delivered on Tuesday, possibly even Christmas eve.

Bah.

On the bright side, the summer holidays started today, the weather's lovely and we have a new gas barbecue. Yes, that really is a barbecue in the pic (the house came with a ceramic hob [curse, spit] which is a complete and utter waste of perfectly good benchtop space. I won't let on how I came to buy a stainless steel six-burner with accessory ring, when all I wanted was an accessory ring... I have no doubt Nik'll relish telling the tale when she gets a minute) And the December iPhone pics are up. All that remains is to wish my reader (sic) a fabulous yule: hope you have a bloater, just like us.

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 ;)

Fear and clothing with Los Nemo

We're a week-and-a-bit into the venture and all that jet-lagged, paranoid head-spinning has finally given way to a more relaxed form of bewilderment, as we locate the majority of life's odd necessities & realise that it really is dead nice here and we're not just telling ourselves it is out of a kind of desperate obligation. A lot of things are as you'd expect: there's that typical Australasian blend of colonial and semi-modern building everywhere, although we also have some spanking-new shopping malls round here; it's very green, with a huge variety of flora and some very odd wildlife; the sea is jade green and stunning wherever you catch sight of it; people are super-friendly, mega-helpful, genuine and gregarious. Everything else is like something from another planet, or maybe a parallel universe. I'll get onto that another time, once I've had a chance to check stuff out properly.

The weather is probably the most bizarre thing of all. It can go from UK grey to tropical blue, via monsoon, hurricane and blizzard, all before lunchtime. Ok, maybe not blizzard – it hasn't snowed in Auckland in 70 years – but you get the idea. You can look out the window one minute and it's sunny and calm, look back again 5 minutes later and it's pissing down and blowing a gale. Rumours that it never stops raining in spring are way off the mark: it's stopped raining at least 35 times in the last week alone... I find myself walking along the street, zipping and unzipping my jacket as the temperature goes up and down. It's just weird. And very windy.

On balance, it's too cold for us at the moment, although that's more true of indoors than out, which is basically down to a lack of building insulation. These days it's illegal to build a house without double-glazing, foam-filled walls, etc, but for years they just didn't bother with it here, so if you live in a house over 10 years old the chances are it has none of these things. The little timber-framed, tin-roof cottage we've been staying in is good for keeping the wind and rain out but other than that it basically keeps things the same temperature inside as out. My campaign to wear shorts for 12 months solid, briefly suspended during the UK summer, has lapsed again here in the Kiwi spring – not when I go out but when we stay indoors. What I need here are long pants that retract above the knee when you pull a cord, concertina-style, whenever I go out.

We need to find a car this week, and it's far from obvious what we should be looking for. There's a whole island full of Japanese auto-transmission saloons (or sedans, as they're known here) with an average age of 10 years and a very strong second-hand market supporting them. Or at least, that's what a look at the small ads will tell you. Others tell me it's a collapsing market, due largely to the falling price of new cars; despite the new car market being slowed by the credit crunch (harder to get loans, etc) there's no denying the need for manufacturers to offload their overseas stock, given the state of the US market. Apparently things are so grim for Ford Motor Co. that they've even mortgaged their famous blue oval logo. It's all very confusing. One thing in our favour might be the effect this all has on the exchange rates. The NZ dollar crashed quite suddenly last week and might ever go lower next week... buying NZ$ at the right time could make buying a new car quite a bit more affordable than it was just a few days ago. Not to mention the deposit on our house, and that iPhone I was thinking of getting, and the many other ways of making sure it ends up costing us more than we save.

We ought to be more careful, cos the whole world seems to be in a scary predicament. All those central banks printing wheelbarrow-loads of money, you have to wonder where it will all end. I was just reading that the digital debt meter in Time Square in New York no longer has enough digits to record the ballooning level of US national debt. Although they've moved the dollar sign out to allow it to go from trillions to tens-of-trillions, there's apparently a move afoot to replace the whole thing with one containing three extra digits, allowing for quadrillions and er, even bigger amounts.

And as the poet said, if you think it might happen, it probably will.