No small change

The lava flow valley overlooking Pigeon Bay, Banks Peninsula

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waiting room only

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lyttelton at last

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hasta la proxima!

Taupo again

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

• Lovely autumnal colours on the road south


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


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


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


• The iPhone implementation of the Blogger interface is utter Shite

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

Last night in Auckland

Elly's pre-birthday goodbye party last week

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

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

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

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

We Are Relieved.

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

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

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

Packing it all in

The kids are quite keen to leave...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stuff of life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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