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.

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 :-)

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.

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!

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 ...

Time flies

It's the last weekend of the summer holidays for our two ruffians. Work and school will recommence in earnest this week, giving all of us a much-needed break from the relentless routine (beach, lunch, play, sleep) and endless, task-oriented time management ("what are we going to do now?", "are we nearly there yet?", etc) – it'll be great to get back to the 9 to 3 for five days of the week. They've had a spectacularly good holiday, the evidence of which shines out of them both. Amazing how much they've changed in such a short time.

New things during January:

Elly now tells the time (just about), reads really fluently, rides a bike without stabilisers (again, just about), constructs and delivers an a priori argument from a distinctly Kantian perspective, still has a near-pathological inclination to spill any drink within arm's reach and hence learned to shower herself clean of Ribena. Repeats everything Oscar says.

Oscar can really "talk" now, having discovered sentences if not quite up to speed with punctuation, has accidentally learned forward rolls while practicing his handstands, can draw proper faces, complete with eyes, nose and mouth, and has generally become a fully-fledged Little Boy, right in front of our eyes: he's even out of nappies. Repeats everything Elly says.

They both love to watch movies. Lots of movies. Current faves are High School Musical 2, Toy Story, Mary Poppins and Bee Movie. We just got back from seeing Bolt at the cinema. Brilliantly done but a bit disappointing, I thought, it was Oscar's first ever big-screen experience, unfortunately coinciding with his afternoon nap time so he was unconcho for the second half of it. This love of movies was the only reason we even dared think of taking a vocally exuberant two-year-old to the flicks, and he did us proud right up to the point where he realised Elly had eaten all the popcorn.

Elly's unspoken excuse was that she was completely absorbed from start to finish. It's a lovely thing, despite the odd Hollywood-inspired side-effects: Elly (and therefore Oscar) is prone to saying "Awww, meaaaann!" at the drop of a hat and Oscar likes to insult people by calling them "hockey puck", after Mr Potato Head in Toy Story. He also likes to wear his underpants on his head, though I'm not quite sure which movie that's from...

I'm sure I'll find the time to post some more pics up this week. This one of Oscar sofa diving kind of sums up the mood of the holls, they've had such good fun, at times you're not sure if they're jumping for joy or levitating with excitement. Roll on the next ones.

The long road to Welly

A motorway-style roadsign on the main route south from lake Taupo warned of "high winds on Desert Road", which was odd on two fronts: first, it's nowt like a motorway, second, this is the last place on earth you'd describe as "desert". It's so unbelievably verdant and well, wet, basically. Apparently the layers of volcanic soil are so permeable, rainwater just drains away as soon as it lands; the greenery is all heathers and tufts of wiry grasses clinging on for dear life in the gale-force winds. Fantastic scenery, must try & get some shots on the way back, when there might be a reasonable chance of staying upright.

A fairly epic leg completed, we had the good sense to stop off at the ferry terminal on the way in. That 5.25am sailing we booked sailed on the 1st.Yesterday. Don't ask how, I have no idea. Fortunately, the nice boy at the ticket office took a shine to us and all we had to pay was $35 to book the Sunday morning crossing instead. Force 6 gales forecast for the Cook Straits tonight and tomorrow, I think fate has smiled on us today :)

The sprogs have been superb today too, here's hoping it lasts another week...

The kids are alright

It's normal to be concerned about kids, I mean they're a worry aren't they? One of the hardest things about being a dad (or a mam) is accepting that your son (or daughter) is actually doing fine at school (or nursery), plays nicely with the other kids and is generally, as far as there can be a definitive standard, behaving "normally". Even leaving aside the fact that you the parent are being progressively relieved of any responsibility for your child's behaviour (it's all down to your child's birth weight, not your being a selfish, lazy, chain-smoking binge drinker, etc etc) there's a feeling of helplessness that stems directly from not being around for best part of your lad's (or lasses) (sorry, I'll stop that now) working day, or even more wishfully, wondering what on earth is going thorough their heads. Ok, now fold that mixture into this whole big disruption thing (cf previous blog posts) and we wouldn't be normal ourselves if we weren't extra concerned, a bit over-watchful and occasionally verging on neurotic about their well-being. Well, after a shaky start and in realising all of the above, I think we can finally rest in the knowledge that both E and O are properly grounded at last, even if we are none the wiser in the child development stakes.

We were just agreeing today that Elly seems happier than we've ever seen her; fabulously five, classically blonde and yet not completely dizzy, full of life and about as self-centered as she'll ever be. I hope. She seems to be charging ahead with schoolwork and friendships and has that brash, me-first, super-critical, cry-at-the-drop-of-a hat first-grader thing off to a fine art. If anything, she's very mature for her age and seems to be well in with the alpha females in her class. She likes swimming (every day in the school pool) scooters, gourmet food (ahem) Pixar movies, trampolines and arguing.

I may have already mentioned that Oscar is two. There isn't really anything more to say.

Oh, alright then.

He can be as infuriating as any kid his age, but he's mostly gorgeous. He spends two days a week at nursery, which has been his biggest challenge by far since we got here. It would have been much easier with even one more day but nurseries are so busy here, regulations (children per tutor) are strict and there's just not been the space for him. This week, at last, he seems to have settled in there and we can actually mention the place by name without him crying... in fact he gets quite chirpy about it. Please may he not learn to speak properly just yet; Oggis-speak is so meltingly cute and totally hilarious. He's moved on, at last, from vocabulary building to sentences, thanks to liberal use of the indefinite article – "a want a go a play a bings a park a pees daddy" (bings = swings) – which has opened up a whole world of communication for him. And occasionally for us.

Oscar likes everything that Elly likes plus soil and raisins.

There's a bunch of other kids that have been the source of some anguish and they're more or less the same as they were when we got here, according to Niki. Her school is still in turmoil, and although the eye of the storm seems to have passed, there's still a lot of negativity among the upper management in the wake of it and the going remains tough. As you'd expect, her class of 10-year-olds have meanwhile learned the hard way that there's Nik's way or the highway, and they're pretty much on-side now. They're clearly going to be a challenge but that's the stuff of teaching as far as she's concerned. You'd have to ask her yourself, but I get the impression that they've got under her skin a bit and she under theirs, which is all they need to start turning themselves around. They're just kids, after all, young enough that every day can be a fresh start if they really want it to be.

I'm hoping you're never too old for that to hold true :) finding work was always going to be slow but I'm forging ahead with plans A B and C as & when the kids permit. All will be revealed shortly. Meanwhile, the last of the November "iPhone moments" are up on picassa, hope you're enjoying them as much as I am.

Weekend recipes & stuff

Cucumber Raitha by François-Xavier at fxcuisine.com. I tip my hat and dip my naan :)

Just a quickie again: had to share these blogs and their fab recipes. To be honest, I've not tried the Spanish one yet but it all looks dreamily familiar... just looking at the index has me lusting after butifarra, arroz a la cubana and lashings of pimienton picante. The title, Las Recetas de Mama, says what it is: a homesick Cordobese is progressively posting all his mother's recipes for us all to enjoy. Check it out before she cottons on why he's on the phone so much these days and clips his ear for him.

The other one is a bit different, in fact it really is something else... I made this guy's cucumber raitha for a curry night last week and it was sublime. His photographs are very nice too. If you've ever tried to make raitha and come up with something you thought was pretty good, you'll hate him. If you've ever wished you had a ready way of photographing your better culinary creations, you'll want to track him down and kill him. His amazing blog is here. His utterly infuriating About page is here. I'm still trying to find his home address... ;) He merits a permanent place among the Canny Good Links, I think.

Finally, there are some more iPhone moments on the November Picasa page.

Bon profit!

Things not being what they seem

We're both missing the autumn like a weird form of late-onset jetlag. It's getting hotter, not cooler, and the trees are sprouting green rather than glowing red and orange. Christmas decs everywhere look waay out of place. This time next month, when you're all roasting chestnuts on an open fire, we'll be roasting our chestnuts on the open beach. A lovely thought, if not a particularly pleasant image :) It does have a disorienting effect, a sort of dream-like unreality where you're double-taking a lot more than usual.

Kids are good for making you look twice at the best of times but this week's been mad. Imagine your typical house husband's mid-week afternoon: you've done the washing-up and there's a nice half-hour window before you pick up the big one from school. Just enough to leaf through the news with a nice cuppa tea. By the time the kettle's boiled and you slowly become aware of the eery silence it's too late... it's not like you forgot about the little one, he just slipped under your radar long enough to wreak his revenge for not paying him attention. Even before you even raise your head, somehow you just know it's gonna be bad. Well, on this occasion it's the dreaded Felt Pens, today's favourite clearly being a nice big red one. "A tiger," he says, and for once I don't need the hint; I'm actually quite impressed. It's not a bad tiger at all, the stripes up the arms and legs are neatly spaced and his paws are coloured in black, just like a real big cat. As toddlers are naturally ambidextrous, the work is more-or-less symmetrical from a whole-body perspective and stops only where the clothes start. This is impressive toddling, and it's not even the end of the ruse.

I put off washing him cos it's time to get Elly, so I just shove him in the pushcair and leave. We return to afternoon snacks and he's sitting at the breakfast bar with a glass (I know, I know..) of milk when he leans over to reach something and the glass shatters under his hand. It must have been cracked or something. Milk and glass fly everywhere and I instinctively grab his arms above the elbow to staunch the blood from all the cuts... which... aren't... cuts... they're red marker pen! Unconvinced and still shocked, I yell to Elly to get some paper towels while I check again and again each of the hundreds of red stripes all over him, for way longer than it would take for real blood to flow, but due to some kind of miracle he's completely unharmed. The panic over, he finally takes a deep breath, looks up at me and lisps, "ooh, a thcary tiger!"

Once I fully realised his incredible good luck I did the sensible thing and got straight down the shops to get him to pick some Lotto numbers. Which was hopeless of course, as he can't hold a pen properly, and Elly picked them for him. She was pretty good and only spoiled one card, so I didn't have the heart to lecture her on the statistical probability of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 being drawn from the pot, largely because I wasn't sure it was any less likely than a random pick. Nevertheless I checked the results as soon as I got up this morning and guess what? We didn't win, of course, but I got another shock because at first glance I thought we had. The first five numbers, I kid you not, were 12, 23, 34 and 45.

Ok, it's not quite the Twilight Zone but it's enough to make your head spin, it really is.

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 ;)

Just a quickie...

I forgot to add a couple of links to the last post, most importantly to the latest pics (I get complaints if there's not lots of pics) and also to some odd terminology... "tramping" is NZ-speak for hiking or fellwalking. Walking, especially of the odd exaggerated-arm-swinging variety with optional wiggly hips and sticky-out bums, appears to be mega-popular, quite possibly as an antidote to driving absolutely everywhere. Like round the corner to drop the kids off, as a couple of Elly's schoolmates seem to do. There appears to be no activity in between, unless it involves water. Or gambling.

I dunno, it's really too easy to generalise and I'm probably way off the mark as far as actual facts go... I'm getting this blogging done during my daily caffeine fix at Esquires, who have free wireless access which actually works on occasion. Quite often it cuts out just as I'm posting something up, like yesterday... links are obviously the product of surfing, which is (obviously) at a premium these days. No matter, I just signed up today with NZ Telecom for a big fat broadband deal which will (they say) magically activate itself the day we move into our new place. Until then, you should probably take all my pontificating with the cruet set at hand.

Right. I've fixed the links, added more here and made feeble excuses. Hasta luego! x

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!

In transit

This was the hilarious state of play on arrival at Heathrow. We hired a nice car and bombed it down the M1 (actually M1 / M42 / M40, should there be any route nerds reading..) arrived bang on time and E & O were just fab the whole way. A good cry seemed to be therapeutic, cos they were just wonderful all through the enormous check-in queue too. We're in Changi airport now, overnighting airside at the Amabassador Transit Hotel. It's... well, it's got two beds, so it's a bloomin' godsend. The flight was no bother, although we're not going to see the best of the place from here.

From my centre aisle seat, straining an envious eye through the window seat headrests, following a 12-hour flight and probably due to having precisely one hours' sleep in the last 24, urban Singapore looks like one of those magic domino exhibitions. Hundreds of apartment blocks become white tiles, a certain distance apart, their dark windows spoiling it slightly by making up too many spots. As we're not going to get out of the airport this time round, that's the way it'll be remembered; a big climate-controlled, bizarrely-carpeted shopping mall surrounded by jumbo jets, with nearby suburbs ready to fall at the flick of a finger. Really must make more of an effort to get out next time ;)

We're all completely fried and need to get some kip, so I'll keep this short. Actually the kids slept quite well – flight took in their normal bedtime hours – and since they've had a bath and spoken to the grandparents on the Skype they're bouncing round the room like newborn lambs. It's one of those places, Changi airport, where a passing glance into the hollow eyes of fellow travellers sparks a vague recognition of yourself: everyone's six timezones the wrong side of zomboid. It's nine at night now, we've got this hotel room til 6am then an 8.30am, second-leg, 10 hour flight to Auckland. Excited beyond belief of course, but it won't be that keeping us awake, it'll be the kiddy bodyclock refusing to budge from UK time...

Next post from New Zealand!

So long, farewell...

What a great trip to Spain that was. From the moment we landed there was a strong feeling of being home at last, probably because we were there en famille, mixed with an awareness of it being the last time for a long time. It was a bit harder for Elly, as she's old enough to remember but too young to make sense of it, so she was a bit freaked out at first. The little 'un just dived on in, chatted away in Oggis-speak and cavorted about with his toy cars. They both ended up having a lovely time, staying up dead late, running wild and terrorising the high seas.

Whenever we've popped over during the last six months it's been without them, a solo mission for one thing or another so it felt very temporary; this time there was a curious permanence about everything, almost as if we were staying, alongside the fact that we're about to leave for NZ, as if it was for ever. Getting together with friends felt like we'd never been away, it was like putting on a favourite pair of jeans that fit so snug and comfortable, you quickly forget you're wearing them. It made the farewells more bearable, as I just told myself and anyone who'd listen that we'd be back again soon, but to finally leave is to step into a pair of cold, unworn, starched pants of our own design.

The mission this time was to ship our stuff from Maria's garage; to cut a long story short, it was accomplished with unnerving ease. We returned to the UK on Tuesday at almost the exact same time as my dad was allowed to go home (yay!), shipped the contents of the flat on the Wednesday, spent Thursday having medical checks and other wallet-slimming activities, we left the kids with Nik's mam & dad and spent a lovely, relaxed couple of nights in a nice sea-front hotel (Anne's treat, a real godsend..) and even found time today to get Nik a new passport. It's finally all organised, just the journey itself remains. Ok, we still need to sell the car (a very nice 8-year-old Megane Scenic Monaco 2.0 16v... anyone..?) and make a few things (a couple of phone calls, some sandwiches, the last of the goodbyes..) but for days we've been cases packed ready for the off, apart from a few pairs of shoes and the odd Disney-related pantomime outfit.

The truth is, we're both way more overwhelmed with the goodbyes than the packing and sorting. Logistics can be worked out beforehand and help drafted in easily enough, but you simply can't factor in the emotional energy you need to meet almost every one of your friends and family over the course a a few days, and bid them farewell. On the face of it, it's a great chance to catch up and we're so lucky to have had the time and opportunity to do it; really sad to have missed out a few buddies both here and in Spain, but really blown away by the realisation that so many people mean so much to us. Thanks, everyone, for all your support and love and encouragement; armed with that, we really are prepared for anything.