Rabbits and responsibilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

The stuff of life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something new under the sun

Looks like folks back in the northern hemisphere are having a hellish winter at the moment and I guess we really shouldn't complain about the NZ summer, especially considering what's going on across the ditch (as they say here) with high summer and countless bushfires pushing temperatures up into the forties. Victoria is a real horror story right now, enough to make you want to spend the rest of your life on a freezing Hebridean island: nearly 200 dead and loads more injured, upwards of a thousand homes destroyed, half a million hectares reduced to fields of charcoal. We could have boiled our heads and still have been relatively well-off. At times though, boiled – or maybe steamed – is pretty much how your head feels in Auckland... I thought I'd lived in some hot places but this week's been an eye-opener.

When I checked the forecast last weekend it looked good – maximum 25 degrees, light nor'westerlies, dropping to 20 overnight... nice eh? Er, No. Not nice at all, in fact bloody awful, with humidity turning out to be more than "a bit on the high side" and actually reaching 100%. If you've never experienced 100% humidity, imagine going out on a hot summer's day wearing a black polythene bin liner, with just your head poking out the top (this is one of those drawstring bags, right, with the white cords tied in a nice bow at the neck, like you might be going somewhere posh for dinner. Only not, cos you'd wear, like, a nice dress or whatever, but you get the idea) then, just as it's getting good and sweaty in there, you take a deep breath through the tiny holes thoughtfully punched out of the bottom of the carrier bag you have over your head. You can breathe, but it's as if you've swapped your lungs for gills. Terminal humidity feels a bit like that, but without the public ridicule and sudden weight loss.

Tuesday was just insufferably hot, even though it was only 28º... I had to find out why. I was sweating so much I thought I would short out the keyboard, but I eventually Googled something called a heat index, which is (appropriately enough) sort of the opposite of your English wind chill factor; a way of expressing how hot it feels at a given level of humidity. It's really interesting, but if thermodynamics isn't your cuppa, you could skip this bit:

The higher the water content of the air (ie relative humidity), the hotter it seems to be to us humanoids, because we rely on the air to carry away our perspiration and thereby cool us down. Max out the relative humidity and no more water can enter the air, sweat will not be carried off, flapping your arms up and down like a pantomime seagull has no effect whatsoever, and it feels oppressively hot even when it isn't.

Geddit? No? Ok, look under the kitchen sink, you'll find some black bin liners... or, using a handy online heat index calculator, dial in 100% humidity and discover that 28ºC translates into a "feels like" temperature of 37ºC and when "normal" temperatures get up to 30º (as they surely will) our solidarity with the Aussies' 40+ will have been achieved, or at least it'll feel like it has...

I kind of remember some occasional very humid days in Spain but I'm sure it was never this oppressive. Apparently the Middle East is the worst, getting up to heat-stroke-inducing HIs of 55 and beyond. A few years back the Canadians, inventors of the wind chill factor, set up heat index thing called the humidex to give their citizens a meaningful forecast of the day's "feels like" temperatures. They also worked out that a humidex factor of 40 is enough to cause "great discomfort". I tell you what, they're not wrong either. Wednesday was almost unbearable. Going outside for some air was exactly like walking into a small bathroom after someone's had a really hot shower. No wind, no air, just a strength-sapping outdoor sauna. Eventually, as night drew in and the air cooled a little it started to, well, not rain as such, more break out into a wispy, directionless vapour, drifting about rather than falling, as if the air itself had broken into a sweat.

Niki spent the whole week trying to get cold, which will sound as bizarre to her friends up north as I'm sure it will to herself, come July. I know I keep harping on about it and I'm sure It'll all seem quite normal after a couple of years here, but it is a very odd thing to be feeling in February. Even Elly remembers seeing out our last winter in wind-battered Chester-le-Street, with the cold howling up the high street and straight through several layers of clothing. Tomorrow it'll be one year exactly since we moved there from Spain, steeled against it all, full of hope that we'd end up somewhere warmer before the year was out. Put like that, we really can't complain at all.

I just realised I've been moaning on about the weather so much I forgot to upload those pics. I'll get it done this weekend, somewhere between the beach and the barbie, I guess :)

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.

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.