4kiwiwannabes

What Happens to Old Wannabes?

2009-02-12T19:14:00.001+13:00

Maybe they turn into New Hasbeens?

On the Same Note...

2009-02-09T19:40:00.002+13:00

"Adventures are a logical and reliable result - and have been since at least the time of Odysseus - of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventure happens in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels and regret."

-Michael Chabon, 'Gentlemen of the Road'

That's my favorite "adventure" quote and one I've been saving for a long while to put on the blog. I kept waiting for the perfect moment because it was such the perfect sentiment to me. I agree with everything Steve said in his beautiful post previous to this one. I look forward to seeing you, friends and family, very, very soon.

At Adventure's End

2009-02-09T14:38:00.007+13:00

Insert pithy quote:

“A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.”

---Bertrand Russell; English Logician and Philosopher 1872-1970

So our adventure in New Zealand is at its end. We've all but actually flown back home, having tied up our affairs here in Wellington. We're essentially just waiting for the last few loose ends to get strapped down and we'll be setting foot on a plane with enough baggage accompanying us to let us persist back in Marin until the Big Crate arrives.

The quote above works for me, because this experience has been potentially the second (or third) best thing I've ever done (next to having Zoe and Haley and marrying my wife Joanne.) I've never felt more American or been more aware of what I'm made of than I am right now. How can you really see it without putting it first into contrast with your surroundings? Thanks to having the guts to step outside of our comfort zone, we've learned where we end and our environment begins. And that environment is peopled with loving family members, dear friends, and a culture that we took for granted for many decades.

It's also time to call it and head back home. Duty (familial and otherwise) calls us back to our brown and familiar land. I have nothing but gratitude for the country and company that took me in and let me see this side of the world---not as a tourist or traveler coming through for a look at arms' length---as a native sees it. We drew our livelihood from the same springs as the natives, lived shoulder to shoulder in the drafty old houses with the natives, and enjoyed the natural beauty of this green and sodden land as the natives do. And that is the biggest gift of all.

“It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves.”

---Andre Gide; French writer, humanist and moralist, 1947 nobel prize for literature, 1869-1951

There's no coincidence that our trip corresponded with the year of my 40th birthday. I'd never felt so uncertain and ill at ease with the comfortable suburban lifestyle that I'd fought so hard to put in place.

“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.”

---Nelson Mandela; 1994 South African Statesman, 1993 Nobel Prize for Peace, 1918-

So that's probably enough of the extremely fitting but incredibly pretentious quotes. I was actually just hunting around on the web looking for observations people have made about leaving home, going off and doing something to the chagrin of their community and then returning home again. There are tons. We're not the first people to try this. We're not the first people to learn something significant in the process. It makes me feel a little warm and fuzzy to know that we made it through and that most of our community still accept us.

There are a ton of things we're going to miss about Wellington life---A list so long as to be innumerable. But as we bring to a close the "Four Kiwi Wannabes" and start up the "Four Kiwi Hasbeens" it's worth drawing up a big list in no particular order to help us remember and to call out what we appreciated the most.

Kebabs - in the manner they're prepared here
Roti - where has this stuff been all my life?
EFTPOS - accepted everywhere, including places without electricity and running water?
km's instead of miles - everything here in Wellington is close and convenient
Public Transport - Wellington has shown me the way. I'm a believer. I love it.
Slow down - the pace of life here is slower, more relaxed, less riddled with compulsive urgency and impatience---yet things get done
People - friendly, helpful, open, interested, agreeable, trustworthy
Safe - the kids can play outside the restaurant on Cuba Mall unsupervised and we trust they'll be safe. Women walk home from bars at night unaccompanied.
Green - god it's lush here... you can't swing a dead cat without hitting some of the lushest and greenest wilderness
Lamb - delicious here. Ask for ewe. Better than aged beef steaks here. Seriously.
Cadbury Milk Chocolate - deserves its own level on the Food Pyramid... preferably close to the bottom
more to come...

We'll add to that as more occurs to us and keep posting what we come up with. I just wanted to get started.

We'll also probably start listing what we DON'T appreciate too, as part of due diligence and fair warning.

Thanks for reading. It's been great blogging during this past year. Hopefully it's something we'll continue to d0 in the much less adventurous but surely just as satisfying years to come.

Staglander 2: The Chickening

2008-12-26T19:54:00.002+13:00

From Staglands

Yesterday we visited the Staglands Wildlife Reserve

And it was extremely extremely cool. As cool as holding a chicken up to your face. Actually, cooler than that.

Basically Staglands is the biggest most beautiful and lush and well-kept and healthy-looking petting zoo you've ever seen. It's about an hour north of Wellington proper out in the Akatarawa Valley (pronounced Akaratawa Valley) nestled in a dense and green valley amongst steeply sloping hills. To get there required turning off of the main highway in Upper Hutt and following an extremely winding one lane road around many completely blind turns best negotiated witha kind of furtive terror. There were two single-lane bridges over a stream and a riverbed, two blueberry farms (one of which doubled as a emu farm,) and a handful of art galleries and/or sculpture gardens.

On the way out there we found a place called "Efil Doog" which advertised 11 acres of gardens, sculptures, galleries and riperian beauty and which we took to be some British-Isles-sounding Gaelic or Welsh phrase meaning "art gardens" until Zoe pointed out that it's just "Good Life" spelled backwards.

Staglands itself charges admission. It cost us $40 for a family admission to the Reserve, which seems pretty steep for a nature reserve and set my teeth on a skeptical edge until later when a few very tame Kea (native alpine parrots) completely won me over and I warmed up entirely to the whole experience. By the end, the admission price hardly seemed like enough for the sort of experience we had and I really can't recommend it enough as a day-long family outing.

The whole idea is that the park arranges animals so that people can get right up to them and interact. The creator/owner/maintainer asserts that intimate and personal interactions with animals can be life changing. From the web page:

Aims of the Reserve

"It is my belief that an enormously rewarding and lifelong appreciation of wildlife can be kindled by a brief, intense encounter with an animal or a bird. Ideally this will be in the wilds of our beautiful bush, maybe on a farm or even at home with grandma's budgie. Few children or adults have such an opportunity nowadays.

Staglands is my attempt to provide that encounter in an environment that is as good as I can possibly make it.

Native animals, birds and plants need our help. Many are unlikely to survive without our willingness to provide huge ongoing funding in the form of donations, taxes and physical effort. That willingness to provide help, I believe, is more likely if an interest has been kindled by an enjoyable, first hand experience, as can be obtained at Staglands."

John Simister.

And I'd have to say he achieves his goals in spades.

Here's a slideshow of us interacting with well-hand-tamed and lovingly-reared animals of all varieties (many "wild" animals raised in captivity.) There are a lot of conservation efforts underway at Staglands as well. It's not JUST the Coolest Petting Zoo Ever Conceived.

Goodbye, Zaida

2008-12-17T20:57:00.006+13:00

Our family is sad tonight. Goodbye, Ed. Goodbye, Zaida. We love you.

Ha-Makom y'nachem et'khem b'tokh sh'ar avelei Tziyon viyrushalayim

For Zaida...

2008-12-14T15:12:00.003+13:00

How to Speak New Zillund

2008-12-11T21:05:00.003+13:00

After almost 10 months I feel secure in saying the Kiwis and I finally understand each other. I no longer get the glassy-eyed stares and a long pause after I finish my sentences, during which the Kiwi I'm speaking to replays what I have just said in their head, so that they can decipher and make sense of my heavy, staccato-ed, American-accented words. I understand, and am comfortable using, the local slang, so that I'm not having to break the flow of a lively conversation with sidebar explanations of the meanings and etymologies of every other word or expression.

Working with children all day, it has been necessary to amend my words to be understood. It became a matter of needing to speak "correctly" to them. Considering that for half my day I am teaching very young students which letters make what sounds, and how to sound out words with them, it would do no good to teach them using my American English pronunciations.

Lately Steve has been very amused with me when he catches me using the Kiwi pronunciations at home. In all honesty, it's just pure laziness on my part. Take the word "chance" for example. Or take the word, "example" even. Take any word with the "a like apple" sound, and replace it with the "o like octopus" sound. Now try to say it. See? It's just ~~lazier~~ easier to say.

And for a short lesson in the real Kiwi pronunciations, I give you the following. Unfortunately, this was one of those viral email things so I don't know where this first appeared or who to give credit for it. My friend Brandie was the first to bring it to my attention. Thanks, Brandie! Click on the image to enlarge it.

The Many Faces of Haley

2008-12-10T11:46:00.009+13:00

I was surprised that several of you expressed concern for our Haley after viewing the family elf dance a couple posts ago. The truth is, we have a bit of ham on our hands, and it verges on impossible to get a nice, Christmas-card-photo-esque picture of her these days. She's constantly pulling faces, or laughing with her mouth wide open or otherwise being an utter goofball. I've tried explaining to her that some day when she's older she might wish she had smiled pretty for the camera, but folks, she's just not that girl and we wouldn't have her any other way.

So, to put your minds at ease, (I'm talking to you, The Grandmas) I present to you "The Many Faces of Haley" including the original photo that she chose to use for her elf. Enjoy!

Magical Elves!

2008-12-09T21:14:00.006+13:00

The best part of celebrating the holidays while living in a foreign land is being able to partake of the local customs and traditions...oh, who am I kidding? It's all about the chocolate, folks.

As I may have mentioned in previous posts, Cadbury is huge here. There is a big ol' factory in Dunedin with a tourist attraction called "Cadbury World". I'm conjuring up images of Willy Wonka, but I think in actuality it is just a factory tour. Cadbury may have originally been a Brit company, but to Kiwis it is their own. Soon after we got here I read a statistic about how much chocolate the average Kiwi eats in a year, and it's a lot. I'm too lazy to dig up that factoid but it's a good one.

Recently the stores have become jam-packed with huge displays of Christmas assortments of Cadbury chocolates. On our weekend on the South Island, which I will try to post about soon, our family consumed more of this stuff than I am comfortable admitting.

By far the very most awesomest discovery of the many Christmas-themed candies we sampled were the Magical Elves. What chocolate-making genius thought of these and why don't we have them in the States?! They're little elf-shaped chocolates, each named for a gem, and given a puckish description. The one I ate this morning read, "Aquamarine is a talented musician who plays to inspire the elves to enjoy themselves and work harder, but is a bit of a farty pants."

But the best part, the magic part, is that they're not just plain old delicious Cadbury Dairy Milk. They have pop rocks in them! Don't tell them, but I'm sending some of these home to my niece and nephew who I just know will get a huge kick out of them. Below is the official "Story of the Magical Elves" from the Cadbury NZ website.

The Story of the Magical Elves®

Many, many moons ago, Santa heard about some magical elves from the South Pole who were mischievous, but oh so very clever. These crafty creatures had magic dust that made amazing cogs in one zap! But how could Santa get them to come and work for him? …A-HA!! Santa had an idea. Elves adore chocolate. So, in return for making toys, Santa would treat them to a delicious year’s supply! The elves jumped for joy! Each Christmas since then, Santa chooses eight hopeful elves who are sucked through a secret tunnel up the Earth’s centre to his workshop where they merrily make toys for all the world’s girls and boys. But, there was just one small problem. The elves kept sneaking off to eat chocolate before they’d finished their work! Thankfully, Santa had a little plan…he put magical popping dust in the chocolate so a naughty elf could be heard and promptly popped back to work! Now all the presents are finished on time. So next time you’re nibbling a Cadbury magical elf, remember those rascally elves are too! Can you hear them? They can hear you!

ed note: Did anyone notice that this is the second, actually third, post about elves on this blog? I'm thinking of switching us over to an all-elf format, what do you think?

Updated Dancing Elf Family

2008-12-04T13:22:00.002+13:00

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-04T08:50:00.001+13:00

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Happy Thanksgiving!

2008-11-28T08:18:00.001+13:00

New Zealand Birds

2008-11-23T10:43:00.005+13:00

From Paintings

Something very unique to our adopted country is its fauna. Or lack thereof. There are no native land mammals in this green and soggy land, which made for some avian anomalies as other species rushed to fill the niches that little critters would normally occupy.

That gives you birds like the Kiwi or the (now extinct) Moa and a whole bunch of really interesting and unique (and quite common) birds like the Kereru, Tui, and Pukeko.

Our family periodically paints together on little 5 inch by 5 inch canvases by picking a theme and doing our own individual interpretations. The first time we did this was back in the States when we did variations on a picture of a coffee mug that Joanne picked out. Just yesterday we did a "birds of New Zealand" session and came up with the pictures you see above.

The artists are (from left to right) Joanne, Haley, Steve, Zoe.

The top row are (from left to right) Morepork, Kiwi, Pukeko, Tui.

Wellington Santa Parade

2008-11-16T18:56:00.004+13:00

Today we took the train into town for the Wellington Santa Parade. Tranz Metro was offering free fares for children coming into town for the parade-a nice surprise. We walked from the station the few blocks to the start of the parade route and found our spots with a few moments to spare. Nothing like enjoying a beautiful train ride instead of driving around hunting for parking.

After the parade we had a coffee and a cookie and lazed around Midland Park on Lambton Quay where the City Council has their Christmas tree on display. The girls chased the pigeons and I snapped some pictures of the girls, in their new Christmas sun dresses, with the tree for a potential Christmas card photo. We walked over to the library to pick up some books, and then strolled down to Cuba Mall to eat "meal" at our favorite noodle house (we frequently have a late lunch/early dinner on Sundays and just call it "meal". Perhaps "linner" is preferable? How about "dunch"?)

We popped into a couple more shoe stores (third weekend in a row)hoping to find Merrell shoes or another dual purpose trainer/hiker for the kids. No luck still and we've tried pretty much every shoe/athletic/outdoor apparel store in the area. We're having really weird luck trying to find quality children's shoes here. On the couple of occasions that we have found a workable shoe, they are out of stock of the girls' sizes. I guess I'll have to order those from home. Grrr..

The sun was out, the breeze was enjoyable for a change, and we meandered back to the train station, looking in store windows and enjoying the empty streets that just hours before were packed with people. I love that feeling of walking in a deserted city late on a Sunday afternoon.

Da Vinci Machines

2008-11-10T08:00:00.000+13:00

Hail!

2008-11-08T09:05:00.002+13:00

Wellington had some crazy hail yesterday! I was standing in the window in a spot of afternoon sunlight one moment, and scraping ice off the windshield so that I could go pick up the girls from school the next. Crazy! The DomPost wrote about it here

Yes We Can! (and we did!)

2008-11-05T19:10:00.002+13:00

Well??? Can you believe it? History just happened! Thoughts??

It's Finally Here!

2008-11-05T06:30:00.004+13:00

Election Day! This is excruciating! How am I supposed to concentrate today? The anticipation is killing me! Let's hope this will all be over soon, and not a big dragged out mess.

How was your election day? Did you go to the polls or vote early? Was there tension in the air? Were people distracted and glued to CNN? I wanna know!

Birthday Party Sleepover

2008-11-03T19:26:00.002+13:00

I've put captions on the pictures to explain what you're looking at. I chose to do that in lieu of a post, but I thought I should explain to folks who don't know that you can control the slideshow if you need more time to read the captions. Hover your mouse over the slideshow and a menu pops up so you can go back, forward, etc. I think if you click on it you may even have the option of enlarging it. Enjoy!

Hallo-wasn't

2008-11-01T07:09:00.003+13:00

Yesterday was Halloween for us here in the Southern Hemisphere. It was the first year that Zoe made her costume 100% by herself. She went as Artemis, the Greek goddess of the Hunt. Haley, after many deliberations and changes of mind, finally decided on a classic black cat with face-paint whiskers, ears and a tail. We did our best to celebrate it, but in the end we couldn't help but feel a little let-down.

When talking to Kiwis about Halloween, I was surprised to hear them describe it as an American holiday. I'd always been taught of it's Irish and Scottish origins and there are many immigrants from both countries in NZ. (Although I'm sure it was the Americans who commercialized it to it's current level) Whatever, it is a very recent phenomenon and I can't help but feel that there is a question on how exactly to go about it. We felt this keenly as we attempted to take the girls out trick or treating. I'd asked around and been told of one particular street where the residents really get into it. But when we arrived, we saw a few small groups of kids, some in costume, some not, tentatively standing around in front of houses, wondering whether or not to knock, and goading eachother into being the one to do it. There was no way of knowing which houses would participate and which would not as there were no decorations, and certainly no jack-o-lanterns. It is not only the wrong season for them, but the pumpkins here are small, incredibly heavy, blue squashes that you either have to open with an axe, or cook for a bit first before you can slice them. You absolutely cannot carve a face into them if you tried! And as the sun doesn't go down until 8pm, the usual leaving the porch light on wasn't a possible clue either. Despite the challenges presented to us, we did manage to hit three houses, and the girls received some nice unwrapped caramels at one, and some nice unwrapped licorice at another. (Note to Kiwis: in the US, parents look through children's candy at the end of the evening and take out the suspicious looking bits including anything not in a wrapper as we fear people may be poisoning our children. Lovely holiday, isn't it?)

Though the trick or treating was a bit of a bust, we did enjoy the 'Twisted Circus'-themed carnival put on at Capital E! on the Civic Square. While it didn't really have that Halloween "flavor" for us, we did enjoy ourselves and appreciated the effort put out to entertain kids and families.

I will admit to getting teary and feeling profoundly homesick when I realized I was not going to get anywhere near my Halloween "fix" this year. In a last ditch effort to make up for it, we went home and gorged ourselves on Butterfingers, Reese's peanut butter cups and Almond Joys sent to us by Aunt Sharon (thanks, Aunt Sharon!) The best part of the night, for me, anyway, was snuggling up before bed and reading our favorite Halloween books-The Littlest Pumpkin, Rattlebone Rock, Grimericks, and Possum's Harvest Moon to name a few. More than anything, they gave me that Halloween-ness I'd been craving, and felt as much a part of our traditions as any of the rest.

So Happy Halloween to all those back home who are looking forward to a spooky evening of tricks and treats tonight! Be safe and have fun! Happy Haunting!

Happy Birthday 10 Year Old!

2008-10-29T13:09:00.008+13:00

Weta Cave

2008-10-18T18:06:00.004+13:00

Jake works at Weta, the visual effects outfit founded by Peter Jackson years ago which created pretty much every ring of chainmail, every sword, every prop---digital or physical---for the Lord of the Rings movies. They have two major branches: Weta Workshop which handles sculptures, costumes, masks, animatronics, puppets, etc. and Weta Digital which handles the all-CG equivalents for fully computer generated characters (such as Gollum:)

From Weta Cave

The Weta Cave is a combination gift shop and gallery inside which Weta showcases its past work on movies. I took a ton of pictures for our LotR loving family members back home. The miniatures sold there are the miniatures made by the Weta artists who worked on the films.

Stuff

2008-10-12T18:45:00.002+13:00

Today was the last day of school holidays. Tomorrow it's back to the grindstone for the girls and I for one last term before the end of the school year. Wellington took pity on us and gave us four whole days of (mostly) sunshine in a row! We enjoyed getting out and about and letting the sun shine on our faces.

Steve took the day off on Friday and we did a 4 mile round-trip hike out to Sinclair Head starting at the Taputeranga Marine Reserve at Owhiro Bay. The rock formations along the coast there are stunning reds, blues, and purples and play host to New Zealand fur seals and little blue penguins at certain times of the year. Unfortunately, there were none to be seen this day, but the schlep was definitely worth it. We were treated to awe-inspiring views of the snow-capped mountains of the South Island, tide pools full of life, and blue-green ocean as far as the eye could see. Steve and I marveled at how well our girls could amuse themselves with some sticks, some long strands of seaweed and a bunch of rocks. Our family is all about perfecting the art of doing nothing.

Yesterday we took the girls to Te Papa in the morning then walked around Wellington ending up at Frank Kitts park along the waterfront. The girls did some jumping on the Big Air Bungy jumping attraction (what would you call it exactly? It's not a ride per se..).

In this album you'll also see a couple pictures of Etta the Weta who has been living in our mailbox of late. We've been leaving the door open thinking she may be stuck in there, but it seems she comes and goes just fine so we're happy to share.

At the end of the pictures you'll see today's outing. We visited Kaitoke Regional Park along the Hutt and Pakuratahi Rivers north of us. It's a lovely recreation area of hiking trails with lots of bridges to cross the lazy rivers below. The girls were even brave enough to go for a dip despite the chilly water. Goofballs. We did the Pakuratahi River Walk trail through podocarp-broadleaf forest and let Haley go nuts taking picture after picture of the ferns.

Oh, and just for my nephew 'Xandre, we made sure to take the girls' picture in front of the sign for Rivendell, where they used the river gorge as the backdrop for the Elven village in the first 'Lord of the Rings' movie.

I'm Tired

2008-10-07T08:15:00.002+13:00

Wanna know why? The wind. Which, in the same way that rain is not a big enough word to describe the way it rains here, wind is so inadequate and paints so vague a picture as to be utterly useless to describe what we've got going on here. Perhaps gale would be more descriptive? What about hurricane? The forecast is warning of severe gales up to 150kmh-that's 93mph (!) for you metric-impaired Yanks. At what point do we stop messing around and call this what it feels like?

By the way, as I sat here typing that Steve walked in and said to me, "it's raining up right now, I just wanted to mention that."

Togs or Undies?

2008-10-04T09:32:00.003+13:00

My friend Lisa, an ex-pat herself hailing from Chicago, posted this hilarious video on her blog a couple weeks ago. It's a summertime commercial for an ice cream treat called Trumpets, a Kiwi version of what we would call a "drumstick" at home. I ~~ripped her off~~ asked her permission to copy her so that I could share it with you good folks who read 4kiwiwannabes. Thanks Lisa! Enjoy the clip!

VOTE!

2008-10-02T11:50:00.004+13:00

We just did. Will you?

Funny As

2008-09-27T12:23:00.012+13:00

The guys at work find this video absolutely hilarious. I have to admit that I've lived here long enough to find it pretty damn funny as well.

It might be hard to understand back home. It might seem weird or even nonsense to someone who hasn't spent some real time here in NZ.

I thought I'd put it up on the blog to offer possible insights into either the Kiwi sense of humor, an example of how far I've integrated into Kiwi culture or both. The origins of the "as" expression is "sweet as" as far as I know. I believe this is from "that's sweet as anything" but shortened to simply "sweet as." I've heard "cool as" as well. It may be from blue collar British slang too, as I heard a tradesman fixing a door on the show "Peep Show" using "sweet as."

WARNING: Contains light profanity. It's the "S" word which is just at the edge between casual slang and profanity here. At school, the teachers might use words like "damn" and "hell" and even "crap" in front of the kids, but probably not the S-word. If one of them dropped something on their foot and said the S-word in front of their class it wouldn't be a big deal past a little tittering, I suspect.

Given a few more years the S-word will probably leap across the gap between casual slang and profanity and join "damn," "hell" and "crap" in the ranks of expletives that are discouraged but not necessarily unacceptable in public schools.

Joanne doesn't and wouldn't speak this way at school though. Our American sensibilities prevent us from being comfortable relaxing our language this way in public.

School Holidays!

2008-09-27T10:04:00.002+13:00

Term 3 just ended at school and the girls and I are off for the next two weeks. Nice! Although we have no real plans I'm looking forward to some down time and (crossing fingers, touching wood) some better weather for exploring the out-of-doors. The girls have both been sick with the dreaded lurgy this past week and I'm hoping they'll perk up over the weekend so we can have some fun.

I'm also looking forward to some time to sit on my butt and read a book or two. At the moment I'm 1/3 of the way through 'Absalom, Absalom!' (this is probably my 10th attempt at this book and this is the furthest I've gotten, alas) but I need a second, fluffier book to make me laugh and that when I lose my spot doesn't require me to start two pages back at the beginning of the sentence. Anyone have any suggestions? And if you're about to suggest some great book that Oprah just recommended about a woman overcoming adversity, save it. I'm not a fan of the Oprah picks. I need a good laugh, people!

Spring Forward

2008-09-26T00:47:00.003+13:00

FYI, Daylight Savings time starts here at 2am, Sunday 28, September. For my friends and family on the West Coast of the U.S. that means we'll only be 4 hours behind you. Well, to be accurate, it's 20 hours ahead. And, come 2, November when you end your Daylight Savings Time, there will only be 3 hours difference, or more accurately we'll be 21 hours ahead. That makes sense, right? Hopefully the time changes should make finding mutually agreeable times to Skype much easier.

p.s. To my friends and family in the Central Standard Time Zone, we'll only be 5 hours difference. Mom, what about you guys in the wacky Mountain Time Zone? You guys don't budge, right?

How to Make Friends

2008-09-19T08:25:00.002+13:00

This video was made by Haley as part of a school-wide project. Each child chose a piece of their writing to read and record on their ibooks, then send to their parents via email. I've been watching the children at school practice these over the last couple weeks anticipating what Zoe and Haley would send home. Well done, Haley!

Plantar fasciitis

2008-09-15T20:47:00.002+13:00

Last week we had our introduction to the Kiwi health care system. Haley had conjunctivitis and needed some eye drops and Zoe needed to be seen for a pain in her foot that she had been experiencing off and on. Getting appointments was easy and speedy and I really liked our Scot doctor who made a point of talking to each of the girls about their issues and not just talking to me about them, in front of the girls. It was $30NZD per appointment for each girl, and $10 for Haley's eye drops. Nice!

As for Zoe, turns out she has a case of plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of the fibrous tissue running along the sole of the foot, which has been causing her pain in the heel and top of her foot. Like to venture a guess as to what caused it? Remember awhile ago how we told you about the Kiwis and their inclination towards barefooted-ness? Turns out our little Zoe's soft American feet weren't up to the rigorous demands put upon them by this Kiwi kid habit. So, for now, much to her chagrin, it's ibuprofen and no more going barefoot at school.

Flowers for Dad

2008-09-14T07:48:00.003+13:00

My Dad is in the hospital at the moment. This is the second family member to have an emergent health episode in the sixth months since we've been here. I don't need to describe what that's like, I'm sure your imaginations can fill in the blanks.

My Dad loves to take pictures of nature. We used to tease him that our family photos were more of the pretty flowers than the pretty daughters. Since I can't be there, I took these pics of the flowers in our garden just for him. Love you, Dad. Get well soon.

More Teef!

2008-09-06T19:11:00.007+13:00

I couldn't decide which one of these pics of Haley's new, holier smile was the cutest so enjoy four.

Kebabblin'

2008-09-01T20:44:00.003+13:00

I'm going to look past the fact that the weather completely sucks and has for the last four months and that everything is twice as expensive to buy and the pay is half as much as we're used to and get straight to kebabs.

Kebabs are not the shish-kebabs, the "kebab" is something completely unto itself. And it's pronounced "keh-BAB" which rhymes with "slab" or "stab." To pronounce it correctly, speak like you're from New Jersey and a little annoyed.

It's a little bit gyro, a little bit burrito, made right in front of you and squeezed full of up to six sauces of your choosing. There's a big rotating column of meat (lamb or chicken) and a specially designed meat shaving device that looks like big industrial hair clipper with the head on backwards that they use to shave it.

Strips of meat are put on a pita-like rounds that are thinner than pita bread and burrito-tortilla in size. Then, according to your tastes, one of six squeeze bottles is mobilized and a swirl of sauce the consistency of ketchup is squirted onto the meat. The sauces are most commonly: yogurt, watery hummus, tomato, mild chilli (note spelling of "chili",) hot chilli, and barbeque. Some places offer yogurt or garlic-yogurt. Some don't offer barbeque (which is somewhere between K.C. Masterpiece and hand lotion.)

Then, atop your heavily-sauced meats go shredded lettuce, sliced onions, sliced tomatoes, parsley, shredded carrots, or shredded cheese.

The whole thing gets rolled up burrito-style inside aluminium foil (note spelling of "aluminum") and slipped into a paper sleeve. Some of them stick the rolled burrito---paper, foil and all---into a panini grill and give it a little toasting, but many don't.

This is a "kebab" and you can't swing a dead stoat in Wellington CBD without hitting one or two of these shops. I go to Kebab Queen which is down the road and under the bank building at the underground food court. Also down there is a place called Jimbom which also offers kebabs. Up the street is "Abrakebabra" (seriously) which has (in my humble opinion) the best kebabs in the area. Down the cross street is "Cuba Kebab" which offers the only beef meat pole in the area. There's another kebab place the other direction from Abrakebabra that's down Courtenay Place. And another farther up Cuba street called King Kebab.

And it's pretty much the same formula:

Meat pole with meat of your choice.
Meat shaved into strips and put on big round rollable bread.
Up to six bottles of sauce squirted onto meat.
Lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, onions, parsley, cheese.
Rolled up for your pleasure.

This is a "kebab." And DAMN they're tasty.

My Kiwis by Haley

2008-08-31T10:14:00.007+13:00

These are my kiwis. One of them I got from a store. The other my Dad gave to me. Kiwis are important because they're the country bird of New Zealand. There aren't very many of them alive in the wild. They eat grubs and bugs. They are flightless birds. Kiwis only live in New Zealand.

My kiwi keychain's name is Rua. Rua means "two" in Maori. I named it Rua because it is the second kiwi that I've got. The other Kiwi's name is Fuzz. Both of the stuffed kiwis squeak.

There's also a kind of fruit called the kiwi fruit. The people in New Zealand call everybody kiwis. I like it.

A change of tune!!!

2008-08-28T17:26:00.003+13:00

I joined the school choir this term. Luckily, I don't have to memorize the lyrics. ( They play them on an over-head projector!!!) Any way, there's only one way to stop from sticking out from the rest of the Kiwis, and that's to speak their language. (The accent!) So, every Friday, after lunch I go and sing in a non-American way. When we get to the word "S-T-A-R" I sing " staaa". For "air" I sing "a-ya"for "danger" "dan-ja" and on and on.I'm getting used to it, but yet I still find it tricky, especially numbers. Well, I'll pick it up.

Earthquake Shmearthquake

2008-08-26T09:11:00.005+13:00

A 5.9 earthquake struck Hawke's Bay last night. (Don't worry, that's about 300km's from us.) 5.9!! That's like, huge! So what do you think ensued? Panic? Mayhem? Death and destruction? Nope. Not here. In fact, not a single emergency call was made despite power outages in some areas . GNS Science duty seismologist Warwick Smith commented to the NZ Herald that, "New Zealand generally got a quake measuring about 6.0 once a year and Hawke's Bay residents would be as hardened as anyone to quakes, being on the country's main earthquake belt."

And, ladies and gentlemen, that pretty much sums up the Kiwi attitude toward hardship. Harden the *&$%# up! There's a comedy sketch show from Australia that does a bit about this and it applies equally, perhaps more so, to Kiwis. Enjoy, but know this is not for the easily offended or perhaps the workplace due to language.

Winter in Wellington

2008-08-20T20:58:00.018+13:00

Said Haley the other day as we walked to school, "Mom, this rain is really weird. It's just coming straight down not sideways."

update: more rain/storms forecasted for this weekend. Today's forecast, however, reads, "Fine. Northerlies freshening in the afternoon." I get the "fine" part. That means clear and sunny here. But what the *&#@ is "freshening"??

Teef!

2008-08-18T18:19:00.006+13:00

In case you were wondering, the Tooth Fairy does make visits to the Southern Hemisphere. The neighbor girl told me so. Haley lost her third tooth just now, her first in NZ. On our walk home from school-it was still intact at this point, hanging by a gooey pink thread- she told me she was going to lose it and we wondered out loud if they have the Tooth Fairy in New Zealand. I made sure to ask it loudly enough for the neighbor girl to hear as she was walking several paces ahead of us. I'd been watching this girl's two front teeth slowly grow in over the past couple months, and thought she was a likely expert. She took the cue and quickly turned around, smiling with her too-big-for-her-smile white teeth and said to Haley, "Don't worry, the Tooth Fairy comes to New Zealand." And just for the record, upon further probing she informed me that she usually leaves a $2 coin.

American Pie

2008-08-12T14:25:00.003+13:00

I partook in a very interesting conversation in the staff room during morning tea yesterday. One of the classrooms is doing a tour of foods around the world and the teacher was consulting with another on what would be typical American fare. I walked in on them as they were trying out their worst American accents and they both blushed deeply, as I could hear in their voices how unmelodious our accent must be to the Kiwi ear. Busted!

As I've noted before, the flip side of living in another culture is that you end up with a better definition of your own, so I was curious to hear what they thought of as American. Burgers and fries were unanimously considered quintessential American, as were pancakes and maple syrup, popcorn, hot dogs, and roast turkey. I groaned in horror when they all enthusiastically sited McDonald's as being uber-American. Oddly enough, it took me a beat or two to think of anything (not true, I immediately thought of Mexican food but quickly realized how stupid that would sound), but I put forth apple pie and pumpkin pie. I think in the end it was decided pancakes and maple syrup would be the easiest for the class to cook together, even if the maple syrup would be Canadian, which I guess is what they can get here.

I continued the conversation with one of the relievers (substitute teacher) who had once driven across the states in a Mustang convertible (which she only realized had no heat when she reached the Canadian border, but I digress.) She said she thought of barbecued spare ribs, and said she ate them every time she had the chance during that trip. I thought barbecue was an excellent suggestion of a true American food, and since our conversation I've been making a mental list of what could be considered uniquely American foods, not an easy list to make when you think of how many cultures we've absorbed and integrated in our short history. What do you think of? I'd be curious to know from both Kiwis, U.S. dwellers and anyone else, what, to you, is true Americana cuisine?

I like my morning ride.

2008-08-06T11:45:00.008+13:00

Presented for your inspection: two months of fully-punched bus tickets representing probably about two and a half months of riding buses due to the occasional cash fare. I switched to the plastic-credit-card method where you buy a month's worth of fare for $95 and just flash the card when you get on. It's got the month written on it in big easy-for-bus-drivers-to-read letters and I just have to show the right month name and I'm in. I can ride as much as I want now, which is as little as I have to.

Actually it just amounts to my daily commute. My entire commute expenses are $95 NZD a month. That's pretty good, I think. No wear and tear on a car, no gas, no carbon molecules drifting about in the troposphere making hippies choke on their muesli, and no messy paper tickets to clutter up my wallet towards an eventual George Costanza Fat Wallet.

Things are still the same on the morning bus, more or less. Ozzy and Ozzy Mom still ride almost every day, though The Vicar isn't seen as frequently on the 8:25. He might be catching the bus earlier or later, though I still see him from time to time. The hypoxia twins (the two College girls who talk a blue streak in a back bench) have been discussing prom, prom dresses, hotels, who's going to drink when and where and how much and the general sort of cute teenage prom-related madness that is probably singular in the whole secondary school experience for the intensity with which you magnify its importance beforehand and the puzzlement with which you discard its importance afterwards.

A few other characters have emerged as interesting regulars. There's a mid-height slightly porcine man with small-framed but thick-lensed glasses who sits near the front. He's always in a sportscoat and looking very neat and clean. I call him "The Engineer."

Then there's Good Scarlett. She's in her late teens, I'm guessing, looking a bit like Scarlett Johansson but a little more cherubic and not as pouty. I figure Scarlett Johansson is the "bad" Scarlett to her "good" Scarlett. She recently dyed her hair red, which makes her sort of pale cherubic qualities more pronounced but doesn't really suit her, I think. The nickname's also a play on Good Charlotte, which is a tedious American "screamo"/emo post-goth musical irritant. It seemed to fit, I dunno.

There's a woman who's probably in her mid 50's who dresses to the nines and carries herself like someone who grew up with privilege. She stands out because she's beautiful in a "I'm not trying to look 19 my whole life" sort of way. In fact, her clothes are pretty down-scale. She just wears it all with a sort of dignified composure that up-scales everything for her. Her purses are vinyl, shoes are worn, jewelry is scuffed and sunglasses are knock-offs. I don't have a name for her yet, but she's on the bus almost every morning---I'll think of something.

And finally there's a couple that rides together almost every morning. They're polite but not friendly as I see them waiting at my stop when I get out there. I give them the quickly raised and lowered eyebrows of "hello there, I see you there, and since we're going to be standing near each other I'll pass along an indication that I've noticed you and that I'm here and that I make eye contact and won't be likely to stab you and take your stuff" and get a half-smile or a nod. They're an interesting couple in that she looks a bit like a barn owl and he's way out of her league.

I still like my morning ride. I play video games on my Nintendo DS, use my Playstation Portable to either play video pinball or read programming textbook PDF files, or just look out the window or watch the curious New Zealand people.

Now, if it's not raining---which it usually isn't these days (not raining, I mean)---I get off a few stops early and walk through the city to work. I like getting the legs moving and the blood pumping before I sit down at my desk for the next nine hours. If it's a sunny morning, I sometimes get off at the train station and walk the rest of the way in.

Fire bad? Fire good!

2008-07-31T22:23:00.006+13:00

I built a fire tonight.

It doesn't sound like much, but as I sit here writing this and the fire is roaring in the woodburner I can't help but feel a huge sense of pride and not a little amount of relief. I'm a suburban kid, mostly. Starting a fire wasn't something that was done often---at least not intentionally.

We're finding that having a fire burning in the woodburner downstairs does a pretty good job at heating the entire living room and our bedroom to a nice toasty "I can feel my legs!" temperature that's preferable to the feet-in-ice-blocks sort of temperature that things seem to settle into naturally. As a consequence, we're going through a lot of wood. So far it's been the occasional bag of logs from Warehouse when they have them but more often than not it's been bags of pine blocks picked up at any one of a half dozen places that sell them. Woolworth's, Countdown, Warehouse, New World, several nearby dairies---it's all the same. A big bag of pine blocks that look like ends and scraps from construction jobs where odd bits of rough wood from building house frames were swept into a heap and scooped into bags.

Joanne just put in our first order for a wood delivery from a local woodery. I'm not sure that's a real word. A bunch of companies will deliver wood in various forms and types and combinations to suit your wood needs. Our order is going to be pine and gum. Pine being the fast-burning easy-to-light stuff and gum (eucalyptus, for those in the States) being the slow-burning hard-to-light variety that keeps the fire burning longer. Presumably this wood will be more of the rustic split-logs type and not urban-sprawl-scraps.

Joanne builds the fires. She puts some newspaper and kindling in, lights it and POOF! There's a fire. Periodically she has to open the glass door of the woodburner and blow gently at it to coax it to burn hotter and it usually responds with a FOOM! and a beautiful blaze emerges from the wood like it really wanted to get out all along and she was just clearing the way. She's done this a bit before, and she knows a thing or two about a thing or two.

Joanne is out tonight with some girl friends, and I'm here with the sleeping kids "holding down the fort." I like the phrase because it implies that I'm doing some kind of crucial and official sentry duty that requires a grown man to sit on a couch in his underwear with a computer on his lap.

So knowing how much she likes the fires and knowing how much she hates the feet-in-ice-blocks feeling, I thought it might be nice to whip up a fire and let it blaze away while I settle into a good fort down-holding scenario in slippers and with or without pants. I spent a good hour plying the pine blocks with every fire-building trick I had---rearranging them, tucking newspaper under them, around them, on top of them. I built teepees of kindling, card-houses of two-by-four chunks. I shoveled ashes, I cleared airflow pathways. I went through probably a Sunday edition of the newspaper. In the end, I'm pretty sure it was the swearing at the charred pile of blocks that eventually turned the tide of battle and got a self-sustaining fire going.

When the fire finally caught, it was thanks to a teepee of kindling under which I'd in turn sacrificed three separate wadded up newspaper pages, letting each one have ample time to burn down. This tepee sat in a mire of half-burned newspaper ash, clumps of charcoal from failed kindling attempts and tightly-wadded and only partially singed sausages of newspaper from a doomed strategy that was discarded pretty early on in the process.

As of right this minute, it appears that the sausages eventually went up, as did the sort of tossed salad of weekend news magazine pages that burned slowly but colorfully before unwadding themselves somehow and going out cold against the floor of the fire tiles.

It was about the time that I'd given up on the magazine pages that I think my dad would have slammed the woodburner shut in a cloud of profanity. He'd have then emerged from the garage a minute later wild-eyed and with gas can in hand commending himself for his ingenuity in a tone loud enough for everyone to hear and in a way that preempted any skeptical comments from the onlookers. I was determined to see my smoldering pile of carbon past this point and not give in to chemistry so easily as the previous generation of mostly-suburban fire-building wannabes.

And it was worth it. I'm very proud of my fire, and I'm feeding it, tending it and cooing over it like I would a cranky infant placed under my care. At times it fixes my gaze and I stare dreamily into it. And I'm just starting to feel my legs again.

Rain, rain and more rain. Oy.

2008-07-29T17:58:00.002+13:00

I know you summer sunbathers back home will find it very hard to believe, but it's winter down here. And if any of you remember that crazy New Years' storm from a couple of years ago, you may have at least a small idea of what we're dealing with here.

It is winter in Wellington. And that means rain. Lots and lots of it. Big huge deluges with some hail and high winds thrown in just for fun. The ground is completely saturated. Heading out to the backyard to clip some rosemary for the evening meal yesterday, my feet squooshed and splashed with every step across the lawn and I felt like I was walking on a very wet sponge.

Just to recall, this is our second winter in a row. When we left in March, the last of the Northern California winter rains had just ceased, and things were slowly starting to wake up. And then when we arrived here, we had a few days of Indian summer (I know they have a name for that here, hmmm) before winter hit us and settled in for a stay.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm definitely feeling seasonally-affected. When the sun finally shone for a few hours today, it was all I could do not to stretch out on a rock and sun myself like a lizard. But now the sun has gone, and, alas, the wind is blowing in another storm. I've put my wool sweater back on and I've got my hot cup of tea next to me. Time to close the drapes, light a fire in the woodburner and settle in for some more winter.

The Big 4-0

2008-07-24T20:57:00.002+13:00

Happy Birthday, Steve!

Just for Fun...

2008-07-23T19:14:00.011+13:00

To Sheep Perchance To Dream

2008-07-20T20:49:00.014+13:00

It was in a tiny little rural Hamlet (sorry, sorry) that we spent our scrimped-and-saved vacation pennies. We eschewed more obvious winter vacation spots (I've got to start using the word "holiday" for "vacation" one of these days) such as Rotorua and its hot springs or Whakapapa and its powdery ski slopes. Both are drivable North Island destinations that could have fit in our budget but were likely to be infested with tourists. Neither of us wanted a "tourist," um, holiday at all. What we really wanted to was to time travel a bit to earlier more formative days and try to understand what makes this place what it is. Turns out that it's sheep.

Well, at least in part.

Here I'll quote some statistics just to put a few things in perspective. Sheep outnumber humans in New Zealand 12-to-1. I was originally told "there are more sheep than people in New Zealand" by a few New Zealand savvy individuals before we left, but that doesn't quite put a fine enough point on it. A dozen for every bloke and blokette in the place.

Sheep arrived with Captain Cook (who, I still imagine, looks a bit like Captain Crunch) in 1773---only a scant few years before our own Founding Fathers signed our Declaration of Independence and gave the big middle finger to the Queen. It was for the Queen that the honorable Captain originally landed on these shores putting it on European maps and guaranteeing future boatloads of Britons, sheep, pigs, guns and infectious diseases which were met with varying levels of enthusiasm by the already well-established Maori population. Cook gained world renown for the incredible skill with which he explored, charted and recorded previously unknown parts of Australasia and the Pacific Islands for which he was eventually boiled and roasted in our own US state of Hawaii some years later.

But back to sheep.

The first sheep here were Merino sheep which are prized for their very fine wool. Today Romney and Perendale sheep are the most numerous. New Zealand is the largest exporter of "strong" wool in the world. And meat has supplanted wool as the largest reason to raise sheep in the first place. Yummy, yummy meat.

Where we stayed, at Sharika Farm, they had flocks of sheep with Romney, Perendale and Suffolk blood. The black-faced sheep in the pictures are of Suffolk lineage--originally from Wales--and the white-faced sheep are Romney from Kent in Southeast England where they've been raised since the Middle Ages.

Perendales are Romneys mixed with another breed, Cheviot, at New Zealand's own Massey University by a man named Peren. Sir Geoffrey Peren selectively bred them over many generations as hardy sheep that could handle the steep hills and produce favorable wool. Massey U is in Palmerston North---a pretty sizable and modern town we drove through on our way back home.

You can ignore the goat in the above picture. She thinks she's a sheep and she's really really convinced. Her name is Nina. See how confidently she strides alongside her fellow sheep?

About every six months the wool gets long enough to shear and the sheep get rounded up for a morning haircut. We were lucky that we were there when a few dozen ready to go and Andrew loaded them into a sort of corral/barn/shearing building, donned his leather shearing slippers (they help grip the ground and help him keep his balance when shearing and look a bit like high top moccasins) and let 'er rip.

The shears were a sturdy mechanical device. Not at all like my electric beard trimmer. They connected to a driveshaft with a flexible elbow joint which itself connected via an elbow joint to a rotating steel spindle dangling from the roof of the shearing shed. I'm guessing some kind of electric motor was responsible for spinning the shaft which drove the shears, but it was hidden out of sight and was only heard from--not seen. A rope dangled from the ceiling as well, and it was used to turn the shearing device on and off between sheep.

Andrew would wade into the pen, select one of the young rams seemingly at random and grab it around the midsection and drag it backwards through a sort of anti-sheep airlock that separated the pen from the shearing platform. Once he had the sheep assuming the position, he'd pick up the shears, yank the rope and get down to business.

Sheep shearing is an incredibly physical undertaking. I never really gave much thought to how the whole thing went down, really. I kind of assumed it'd be like a veterinarian's examination of a sick pet. You put the sheep up on the table, pull out the shears and bzzzzt bzzzzt bzzzzt, done. I figured the shearing part was where all the technique was... the speed and angle of the shears, the order of wooly strips to remove and so forth. It's not. It's in maintaining a firm and unyielding command of the sheep and manipulating its body in the right ways at the right times to position it where it needs to be.

Here Andrew had the head secured between his knees, the haunches pinched between his heels, his left hand in the crook of the rear leg pressing down to force the knee to extend and the shears buzzing quickly along the inside of the leg. He took command of the sheep in such a way that the sheep had no option but to relax. It knew in its tiny walnut-sized sheep brain that struggling was futile and that while it was scared, it was at least feeling somewhat supported and stable if not completely comfortable.

This is where the skill is. This is where the learn-by-doing and the years of experience come in. This is the reason Andrew is able to live in Italy or Wales or Scotland for months at a time on the dime of the company that hires expert shearers from overseas.

Sheryl stood next to Andrew with a large paddle and pushed wool into piles. It was this job that Zoe took over for a half dozen sheep and that Sheryl took back when the girls had left to talk through the fence to the horses towards the end of the shearing. I'd distracted Sheryl from her job by talking to her about horseback riding and some of the wool began to pile up. I had several seconds to snap this picture before she pushed the wool into the pile. The morning sun had risen and was streaming in through the shed.

You can see one sheep's worth of wool, ready for lifting into the bin and my Blunnie peeking in from the lower left corner of the frame as I sat on a large bale of already-processed wool.

As the wool piled up it'd get lifted into the bin for compression and baling. The girls were very handy with the compression part.

It was a tremendous privilege to be included in this whole ritual. It was a very intimate look at something that's been occurring in New Zealand for hundreds of years in much the same way as we witnessed it. It was just another morning down on the farm, but one with four outsiders feeling very much on the inside that day.

Farmstay Holiday

2008-07-17T09:32:00.005+13:00

(if you're wanting to take the time to read the captions and get a better look at the pics you can click on the slideshow)

If you read Steve's last post, you'll know that over the weekend we visited the home farm of Andrew and Sheryl Hulena from Sharika Farm. They own a sheep and cattle farm near Porangahau, situated on beautiful Hawke's Bay. We stayed Saturday and Sunday nights and had what felt like a very authentic farm experience.

We were the first guests to visit under their new endeavor appealing to holiday-goers and tourists. Until this point it was a working holiday scheme, where people, usually young backpackers, exchanged farmwork for room and board. Andrew said he considered taking out a mortgage on the farm and fixing up the accomodations to be more "flash" but ultimately decided to leave it as is for now. I was glad for that decision, as it made us feel more like we were actually living there and not just tourists. We had a simple but comfortable room in what was once probably a shed or a garage, adjacent to the house.

The girls were in heaven from the start. When we arrived, the sun was setting and Sheryl was holding and preparing to bottle feed an abandoned baby goat she found in the pasture while riding her horse. The girls were in awe. They got to watch its first clumsy bottle feeding as Sheryl squeezed the milk from the bottle and coaxed it to swallow. By the time we left, it had gotten the hang of it and was greedily sucking and gulping and practically pulling the bottle from their hands.

Each morning began with the feeding of the animals. There was grain for the chooks, kitchen scraps for Sally Bacon, the newly aquired young pig, hay for the cows in the field, a concoction Sheryl worked up for her horses, and, breakfast cereals, tea and toast for the four extra animals visiting that weekend.

Andrew, an experienced sheep shearer, had recently returned from three months in Italy making the rounds as a sheep-shearing gun-for-hire. We were lucky enough to get to see the expert in action, as he had rounded up 30 male lambs that needed shearing. We even got to help a little, with Zoe working the paddle that swept away the wool from the tummy and the rump into one pile, a lower grade of wool, and the bulk of the wool, a higher grade, into another pile. It was fluffy and soft and to our delight, still warm from the sheep. Then Haley gathered it up in her arms and lifted it into a large wooden crate lined with a bag that would be compressed and eventually stitched up to form a huge rectangular bale of wool. Both girls had fits of giggles standing in the bag pressing down the wool with their feet.

Around 10:30am things stopped for morning tea. Sheryl made delicious scones served with thick slabs of butter and Arataki honey that they receive each year as a thank you for allowing the bee hives to be placed in their pastures. The weather was perfect and we sat in the sun in back of the house listening to the sounds of birds and sheep.

Some of the activities that you will see if you look at the photo album include: at trip to one of the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen, just half a mile and within view of the farm; the girls collecting beautiful brown eggs which we would ultimately enjoy for our breakfast; long walks out into the pasture to check on the progress of a large group of very pregnant ewes and one tiny lamb born that morning; watching Tasha the sheepdog expertly round-up and move herds of sheep from one pasture to another; walking in the thick mud along the river and skipping rocks; riding the back of the four-wheeler out to the pasture to bring hay to the cows; grooming and riding horses for the girls; hearty farm suppers of venison pie, roasted lamb, silverbeets, parsleyed carrots, and homemade mash with gravy; and lots of conversation on everything from farming practices to world politics and the differences and commonalities between U.S. and Kiwi culture.

Nothing had been sanitized or dressed-up for our benefit. We experienced mud and poop and animals behaving like animals. The girls experienced the whole circle of life from the newly born lamb in the field to the meat on our plates. The weather was perfect, our hosts were friendly and accommodating, and we left feeling like we'd had a truly unique experience in a very beautiful place.

Holiday Roads

2008-07-15T23:00:00.011+13:00

We had to laugh when the road ended at a barn. But it wasn't the giddy pink-cheeked laughter of rollicking fun. It wasn't the forced nervous laughter of polite embarassment. It lay somewhere between a laugh of exasperation and a wild-eyed laugh of madness.

Our road surface had downgraded twice already and what we were driving on when we reached Annedale was not really even a road---just mud-ruts covered with gravel and neglect. Annedale was, for what we were able to tell, pretty much just a collection of several farm houses along a winding dirt road slung over some very green and in most other situations no doubt extremely lovely hills.

Google tells me that the road is called "Te Mai Road" though there were no markers or signs indicating this. I found on this map here where I think we ended up.

We found ourselves there after a series of missed turns while heading down Route 52 out of Wellington towards our weekend accomodations at Sharika Farmstay. It was our first time outside of Wellington since arriving in NZ, and a trip we'd been saving up for since we got here. Like many trips out into the unknown, we departed with songs in our hearts and a buzz of excitement in the car and we arrived with near-total exhaustion and a sense of profound relief.

I was navigator during our trip. Though I think Joanne may disagree.

Our first mistake was to miss Route 52 entirely the first time we went through Masterton. By "our" here I mean "my" since I was the one with the fanciful bit of terrestrial illustration called the AA 2008 Taranaki, Lower North Island & Wellington Visitor Guide open on my lap. We entered Masterton on SH 2, blew past our turn off and continued on SH 2 until we were overcome by the creeping sense that "...this doesn't look right." It took us a good five minutes for it to build to the point that one of us said something. I think it was Joanne.

We back-tracked to Masterton, answering a barrage of questions from the back seat about why we were turning the car around in the middle of the country and, mindful of the poorly marked turnoff and scrutinizing every sign, turned down a completely new completely wrong road and charged forth with confidence.

We'd been so successful at Carterton, the previous small town, in sidetracking out to Stonehenge Aotearoa to have a look at the curious rural reconstruction of the famous druidic astrological timekeeping monument or sacrifical virgin amphitheatre or whatever it was that the proto-Britons had laboriously constructed near Salisbury thousands and thousands of years ago. We had strayed off the highway, failed to actually visit the monument (it has hours) and returned to our path with such simple ease that I was feeling pretty confident in our ability to bush-whack our way through the NZ countryside by the time we'd reached Masterton.

Our second missed turn took us to Tinui, a small, charming out-of-the-way place that we were actually very happy to have discovered. After only two missed turns it was still pretty early in the day and Tinui fell into the category of "happy accident" when we rolled up on sort of makeshift gift-shop and museum and borrowed their skeleton key to open the old schoolhouse which had been converted into an outbuilding bathroom. We took lots of pictures. They had tons of artifacts from earlier times---the war, the running of telephone lines, early farmsteads and sheep stations. It was all fascinating stuff and Tinui deserves at least a post of its own some day.

The third, and biggest mistake, and one which I have to take the most responsibility for since it was a plan which I'd not only suggested in the first place but also lobbied for strongly, was that rather than back-track to Masterton and The Known World and try again to reach Route 52 (the third time is, after all, the charm) I proposed we push on through Tinui and meet up with Route 52 a little farther along at Alfredton. The road to get from Tinui to Alfredton didn't seem much different on the map than other roads around the area, so how bad could it be? I just hated the idea of backtracking again---heading in the generally desireable direction of north and east seemed preferable to me and after some discussion we headed out.

Now, to the credit of the AA 2008 Taranaki, Lower North Island & Wellington Visitor Guide the nice fat highway that we had originally been driving on--SH 2--was demarcated with a thick red line and the two lane road that we'd turned down to mistakenly head towards Tinui was a thinner orange line. They were definitely different types of roads. The road that I'd lobbied successfully to take from Tinui to Alfredton was mostly of this thin orange type except for a segment that was thinner yet, and yellow. We discovered later when I actually looked at the map key that this meant "unsealed road." What was lacking, however, in this description was a parenthetical indication following it saying "(never under any circumstances try to go here)" or "(WARNING: max speed 10 kph)" or "(traversal may vibrate your eyeballs loose)" or "(takes 5 years off your car.)" Unfortunately we had to discover these things ourselves.

So that brings us back to the Barn at the End of the Road. I can tell you that the bags of road trip candy were out and sweets were being distributed as we crept back up the muddy gravel looking for the turnoff we'd missed. We eventually found a sign "Annedale - No Exit" that seemingly hadn't been there before and made a right on a road that indicated Alfredton. It wasn't for at least ten minutes on that road that anyone was comfortable that the "...I don't think this looks right" feeling was going to subside completely. We took the increasing prevalence of road signs to be an indication that we were on the right track but it wasn't until the unsealed road gave way to actual blacktop that anyone felt much relief.

When the sound of tires crunching on gravel at 15 kph was replaced by the sound of tires singing on asphalt at 100 kph we were still not ready to talk about the experience of the previous hour and a half, though coils of tension were starting to unwind a little. By the time we rolled into the farm we'd resigned ourselves to our generalized road-weariness and felt tremendous relief that things were where they were supposed to be and all was right in the world.

Scattered Bits on Thursday Night

2008-07-10T18:56:00.007+13:00

1. Marmite: not a fan.

I'm not sure if it was deliberately invented or discovered at the bottom of a jar as the remains of evaporation, but trust me: this is not food.

2. There's a "look" among young women in New Zealand that Joanne and I have identified. We see it with fair regularity. I mean this in the fashion sense of a "look" as in "five hot new looks for the spring season!" A "look" as something that women deliberately shoot for by careful wardrobe selection and makeup application. This look is probably best described as post-Laugh-In-era Goldie Hawn after accidentally receiving a basketball to the face.

3. "Epic" is epic. Use "epic" for "awesome" or "cool" in your sentences and you'll fit right in.

4. When refilling a prescription, going up to the counter and saying, "I need to refill my prescription" will throw the druggist for a loop. You'll get a puzzled look, a pause, and "Do you mean you need a repeat?"

5. When buying deodorant at the chemist today, I asked the young lady "can you tell me where the deodorant is?" and when she asked "for you?" and I responded "yes, but it's not that I don't smell good already." She didn't laugh. I have no idea if I crossed a line somewhere with that. Maybe she was still bitter about the whole "refill/repeat" thing.

6. The deodorant scent is called "Marine." I think back home this would be "ocean breeze" or "seafoam" or something like that, but "Marine" for me conjures up images of hull waterproofing paint, kelp at low tide and nose-broken drill sergeants in olive drab. None of these images are what the manufacturer is hoping for, I'm certain. There's some kind of ocean-related non-nautical-influenced, non-military interpretation that my mind doesn't alight upon as readily as the marketers had hoped.

Meat Golems

2008-07-07T21:30:00.006+13:00

This weekend we got a weekly dose of Netball thanks to Zoe's Ngaio Sapphires and our first full dose of the New Zealand All Blacks thanks to a time-delayed television broadcast of their Tri-Nations opener Test Match with the Springboks of South Africa---the number one ranked Rugby Union team. The All Blacks are USUALLY the number one ranked Rugby League team. It was a home game here in Wellington.

I can't pretend to understand Rugby yet.

The All Blacks were as successful in their contest as the Ngaio Sapphires weren't. Zoe's team, coming fresh from two back to back victories (a winning streak in the sense that a streak is more than one consecutive victories,) ran headlong into an unyielding Johnsonville Year 5 team.

My wish from the previous week---that Zoe see more action at Goal Keep---was granted, and the J-ville girls kept the ball inside the Ngaio half court more or less the whole game. I didn't catch the score, but I distinctly remember Haley stomping her foot and screaming "Aaaahhh!!!" in exasperation at least three times.

Zoe eventually started to see that preventing the other team's Goal Shoot from getting the ball and knocking it away, plucking it from the air or smacking it towards her teammates were all working to the Sapphires' benefit. Towards the end of the game we were proud to see Zoe sending the ball out of the Ngaio goal area with confidence.

In the end the Sapphires lost, but Zoe got some good hands-on time as Goal Keep that included actual play and not shivering and wiggling her legs in the cold while all the action happened at the other end of the court.

The All Blacks, however, trounced the number one ranked Springboks. It was fun to watch. They're an impressive array of thick men who mete out and absorb tremendous physical punishment in nearly equal measures. It was the first time Joanne and I watched a whole game, and I found it to be absolutely captivating---because of its newness but also its intensity.

At one point Joanne turned to me and said "it's like they formed them out of minced meat" and I agreed.

"They're like Meat Golems."

I'm pretty sure any one of them could crush my skull between opposing palms, though they're not monsters with Human-Growth-Hormone-induced gaps between maxillary central incisors and Lyle Alzado-like brow ridges and hints of gorilla-like parietal crests. They're attractive men who look healthy and strong. And---towards the end of the game---covered in blood. Both their own and others'.

Watching a game is a little like watching a soccer game where the participants lost patience with the whole "don't touch the ball" concept and just said, "dammit, just give me that thing" and started passing it around. It's pretty much ninety minutes of continuous activity punctuated with a periodic scrum. At the point the official says "engage" when calling the "touch... touch... ...engage!" of the scrum you can see a shockwave move across the backs and shoulders of the web of interlocked bodies. The sense of power is enormous.

I can see why the sport is popular here. It's brutal, but it's extremely honest. It's just a bunch of guys and a ball on the grass for an hour and a half.

First Weekend of Winter Break

2008-07-06T17:39:00.013+13:00

The School Calendar here is very different than I'm used to.

As a school kid growing up in Michigan and Ohio, life had a yearly heartbeat. There was a big heart-muscle contraction in September when the school doors opened for business, welcoming us all back into our new classrooms with our tanned faces and skinned knees, and the corresponding heart-muscle relaxation as the doors burst open in late May or early June disgorging us again, squirrelly and ebullient with the plans and possibilities of three full months of nearly unfettered freedom.

The school year had two phases for me.

There was the Christmas-Is-Coming phase, dotted with happy family holidays amid progressively decreasing ambient temperatures and culminating in the New Year's celebration which meant a lot of merry glass tinkling and hopeful wishes and plenty of time sliding around in the snowy outside on probably-dangerous metal devices recently freed from their festive paper wrappings or discovered in the garage wrapped in a big red bow.

Then there was the Slow-Thawing-Into-Summer phase with less numerous, less regular and less festive holidays and breaks (Valentine's Day? Easter?) during which anticipation of the next summer's break would begin to crest. Memorial Day would hit at around the time when I'd pretty much given up all intention to study and had fully taken to longing stares out open windows at the gorgeous sunny weather outside. The Memorial Day Family Trip would be a kind of dry run for Summer Fun. It was gratifying to get a taste of what was to come, but knowing that we'd be returning to school after the long weekend tended to hang overhead like ominous dark clouds.

Down here in the Down Under the Down Under, they arrange things much differently. Term 1 starts the school year at the start of the new year, and Term 4 ends the school year, at the end of the year.

School starts on Feb 4th. At the end of summer break.

Term 1 starts on February 4th and goes to April 18th.
Followed by 16 days of vacation.
Term 2 starts on May 5th and goes to July 4th.
Followed by 16 days of vacation.
Term 3 starts on July 21st and goes to September 26th.
Followed by 16 days of vacation.
Term 4 starts on October 13th and goes to December 19th.
Followed by 56 days of vacation.

We're just at the end of Term 2, on the two-weeks-and-change before Term 3.

Gone is the three-months-of-freedom that I knew as a kid. Though in fairness, my girls have never had a full three months back in the States. The school year there ends later and begins earlier than it used to when I was a tot. This is probably because of the fashionable misapprehension that kids today have more to learn and should thus be at it longer every year.

Also of note here is that the "couple-days-here-couple-days-there" approach is gone. Where I took my school breaks scattershot through the year with a full week dedicated to "spring break," I only got a two week chunk at Christmastime (which seemed fitting given I needed some free time to lose, break, melt, and destroy many small plastic pieces and to sustain cuts and various abrasions from my year's haul of attic-bound child fantasy fodder---the ideas of which I'd clung to so tenaciously and about which I'd regaled my parents so mercilessly---from the previous year) here there are two week chunks occurring with regularity.

As a parent, I prefer this as it means that we can take our children out and see the country a bit and still have plenty of lazing-about "vacation from the vacation" time before school kicks into gear again for the next term.

Probably the biggest difference evident (and one not yet experienced first hand by any of us) is that Christmas Break and Summer Break are one and the same.

At 56 days, it's a long Christmas break, but a short summer break. And unwrapping a pair of Snow Skis that Santa brought makes much less sense than unwrapping a pair of Water Skis. And those long days indoors playing with a brand new slot car set in front of a roaring wood fire while watching big downy flakes through frosted windows are to be replaced by outdoorsy afternoons at the neighborhood pool sporting overly-colorful plastic guns with large tanks strapped to them at improbable places.

The actual winter break (what's just starting up now) is a very different beast for Zoe and Haley than it ever was for me. It's a couple weeks of trying to stay warm with no Christmas or holiday ritual of any kind before school resumes again.

I hope they have fun, and can make it all the way to the years' end when they get the Big Payoff. I hope it's worth waiting all year for.

Happy Independence Day

2008-07-04T10:18:00.008+13:00

Today is the 4th of July. On the way to school the girls and I recited the Pledge of Allegiance and sang America the Beautiful, which I have always preferred to the more somber National Anthem. I got choked up, of course, and teary. It feels weird to walk around, having a normal day, privately aware of what is a major holiday back home.

I've never felt more American than I do living abroad. It is one of my most defining characteristics here, and an inevitable part of every conversation I have when I meet someone. In experiencing New Zealand culture and attempting to define it, I am simultaneously defining what it is for me to be American.

When I first got here, I felt very apologetic about being American. I felt the need to apologize for the way the world seems to be going down the tubes, in large part because of decisions Americans have made. But slowly creeping in is a sense of pride.

For all the criticisms that can be made of America, people are also in awe of it. There is so much America right here in little New Zealand, but I don't think people even know how much of is borrowed. American culture, because it is so vast and prolific, has seeped in to every nook and cranny from the movies and music, to the magazines (Obama was on the cover of the TV Guide in the checkout lane the other day) and nightly tv shows and news. I get to watch the Daily Show and Lehrer Hour on a nightly basis if I choose.

While so much of popular culture, at least, I find to be rubbish, and makes me cringe to think that my home country is being judged by it, there must be something to it if it can survive in translation across borders and cultures. There is something universal in the American experience that everyone can appreciate and relate to.

So I'm getting used to saying I'm American without cringing and not hoping to get by as a Canuck, like we used to joke about doing. In part it's because I know it's just one part of me, and in part because I think people, if only on a subconscious level, know that for all it's faults, and despite the George Bush(s), Americans are well-meaning. We are hard-working, we stand up for justice, and we don't take "no" for an answer. So Happy Birthday, America, from sea to shining sea!

Land of the Long Pink Cloud

2008-07-02T20:14:00.005+13:00

Today after school the girls and I watched a storm come moving in in long, foggy, white shafts against the mountain the other side of the Ngaio gorge from us. Like idiots, we stood there and watched it blowing towards us instead of running for cover like the more sensible people around us were doing. We were awestruck. And wet.

It rained violently (I wish I had another word for rain here-this was so much wetter than rain) for the next hour and a half. Then, just as the sun was setting, the clouds broke. A strip of brilliant blue streaked the horizon and we were treated to one of the most spectacular sunsets I've ever seen. I tried really hard to capture it, but alas, this sky required a much better picture-taker with a much wider lens.

The Maori name for New Zealand is Aoteroa, which means "Land of the Long White Cloud." It is skies like this one that demonstrate why those people so long ago named it as such. What a beautiful sky it is.

School

2008-07-01T12:02:00.004+13:00

Friday marks the end of Term 2 at the girls' school. Reports (report cards) will be sent home. Then we will enjoy a full two weeks off (school holidays) before the beginning of Term 3 on July 21st. Having a full term of the Kiwi education system under our belts, it made me reflect and appreciate the many differences between the two school systems, both for the girls and for myself.

For starters, the school day begins at 9am here. It started at 8:30 at home, and you wouldn't think that 30 minutes would make such a huge difference, but it does. I used to do morning playground supervision at our old school, so we had to be there at 8:10. To drive to school in morning traffic, park, and walk in it took us 20-25 minutes. Getting ready for school used to be a scramble, where I often felt like I was yelling at my kids to hurry up all morning, then trying to make it up to them by listening to music or being silly in the car all the while driving as fast as I could to get there in time.

Now, we have a leisurely 10 minute walk to school. Sometimes we freeze. Sometimes we get rained on. But we always get good exercise, fresh air, and 10 peaceful minutes to be together before we go our separate ways and begin our days. Our walks to and from school are my favorite times of my day and when it's just too wet out (think horizontal sheets of rain and hurricane winds) and I have to drive us, my mornings just don't feel the same.

Once inside school, there are even more differences. For one, back at home much of my girls' work was done in workbooks. They had several colorful workbooks for the various subjects, and the girls did a lot of filling in the blanks. Here, at the beginning of the year, we went school supply shopping and purchased several blank notebooks of varying layouts, as proscribed to us by their teachers.

At my conference with Haley's teacher, we purused these notebooks, viewing page after page of Haley's writing, both words and numbers. I don't think I have ever seen this much of my children's writing all in one place. Her teacher said she asked Haley early on if it was done this way at school and Haley said no, they had workbooks. She seemed very surprised at this, and put the question to me as if surely Haley had been mistaken.

I like this way of doing things. For one, I think it's less wasteful of resources. Don't get me wrong, I don't think they do it this way because it's cheaper and they couldn't afford to make workbooks for each child. As Haley's teacher pointed out, having the children write out the problems for themselves gives them further opportunity to practice their writing. Another benefit is that it is not standardized, so the work can easily be adjusted to the needs of the individual child, or small groups of children. Haley's class is a mix of ages and levels, as young as age 7, and as old as 9 and ranging in levels.

Something else that has changed our lives indubitably, has to be the homework. If you know me at all, you know my on-going frustration and discontent for the way we did this at our old school. Like I've said before, I love our old school, and miss it very much. But this is an area where education in America is really getting it wrong. The homework here is technically non-compulsive. That said, the expectation is that the student will read at home daily, and memorize their hand-picked, personalized list of spelling words. And unlike at home, if you spell a word incorrectly at the end of the week, guess what? It's going on your list for the week after. This is something so simple that has boggled my mind for years. In all my girls' years at school in the States, only one teacher ever did any retraining after the test to make sure that the student ultimately learned to spell ALL the words on their list.

The homework situation here has completely changed our lives. Homework is not a drudgery. The girls have a variety of games and puzzles to choose from to learn their spelling words or practice their maths. They don't feel defeated or crushed under the weight of a mountain of work they have to do at the end of an already long day at school. And amazingly, my girls seem to be doing much harder maths and spelling than at home and performing better on their tests. The whole system here has made for a much more harmonious home. The girls have time to cook with me every night, or do artwork or read. And at the end of our meals, we all do the dishes together, a chore I never would have dreamed of having them do at home because I felt so sorry for them and they needed a much deserved break after all the homework they had done.

I just looked back and realized this has become a monster post, and I haven't even gotten to what the changes in school have meant for me. Very quickly, I'll let you know that they do not need all the volunteers here that we needed at home. Teachers get aides if they need them, and there is actually funding for this. When I've volunteered for things here, I've actually been turned down because there were so many offers! This means I have way too much time on my hands. So, for this next term, I will start as a teacher's aide at the school, assisting a 7-year old boy in the classroom next to Haley's. This job will fit into our lives perfectly as I will work during the school day and be off for school holidays. It should be a challenging new experience for me. Wish me luck!

Sound Trouncing

2008-06-29T12:40:00.003+13:00

Yesterday's netball game was the Ngaio Sapphires' second victory in a row. They played well again, with lots of good coordinated passing and good careful shooting. They switched up positions (again) and our Zoe wound up as GK (Goal Keeper) this time. Ngaio played SO well, that the ball was almost never at our end of the court and our poor Goal Keeper and the opposing team's Goal Shoot stood there side by side inside the semi-circular goal line and froze in the frigid winter wind. Make no mistake, it's wet and cold here. We got a bit of a break in the drizzle for the game, but it sprinkled on the courts throughout.

I believe the score ended up being six-to-one, Ngaio, which was a nice solid victory, but I'll have to admit that towards the end of the game I was rooting a bit for the other team to get some goals, retain possession of the ball, or in general just have a little more fun. Partially, I think, it was so that the ball would make its way towards Zoe so she'd have a chance to get involved and maybe warm up a little, but it was also just sympathy. I think the average height of the Ngaio players was probably a good head higher than the average height of their opponents, and when the little girls with their short arms were able to pass the ball around the large stilty Ngaio girls with their long wing spans, I couldn't help but feel a little impressed and sympathetic.

They were both Year 5 teams, so presumably the match-up was all on the up and up, but I still felt a poignant little pang when I was told that the other team hadn't yet won a game this season.

Zoe even told me she felt like she needed to not try as hard because, "you know, they were kind of short, dad." Maybe she doesn't have the killer instinct necessary for professional sports. I tried to explain the fine line between fair but aggressive good-sportsmanship and vicious and bloodthirsty sports sadism, but having no real bearings in sports and the sporting world to draw on, soon got lost in the uncertainties and just agreed that it seemed hard to want to beat another team that was working at a disadvantage. After all, I was the dad who started rooting for the other team a little.

I think Zoe and I both felt essentially the same thing.

In the end, it was fun. I enjoy Netball more than any of the other extra-curricular sports Zoe has gone out for. Maybe it's because it doesn't feel like a "real" sport to me---it's just some fun-looking made-up team-based activity and doesn't seem to come with Sporty-Super-Dads projecting their own failed sporting careers on their children from the sidelines.

Winter Wonderland School Disco

2008-06-27T20:03:00.005+13:00

"The Snowman and the Blizzard"

How Zoe felt about the disco (above).
How Haley felt about the disco (below).

The girls had a really good time. Haley spent a bit of allowance money on a flashing light necklace and a juice box. Little material girl that she is, that was the peak of the evening as far as she was concerned and she was ready to go. Between the lateness of the hour (it started at her usual bedtime) and the sensory overload, she lasted about 45 minutes. Luckily Steve got there right about then and took her home to bed.

Zoe, on the other hand, shook her little booty and danced the night away. She didn't sit out a single song, including doing her best fist-in-the-air jumping up and down during Foo Fighters' "The Pretender" (yes, those of you who know me, I DID ask the dj to play that "for my kids", and not just because I wanted to hear it played really, really, loudly, I swear) and straight on until the last song of the evening, a 2 minute 47 second long knees-up-as-high-as-you-can-get-'em, cancan. How long can you cancan?? Whew!

The room was crowded, it was hot, it was humid and the music was blaring. Everyone danced, even the boys. The dj hauled out all the old favorites, including the Macarena, the Chicken Dance, and a couple other Kiwi traditions. Everyone knew all the moves and all the words. I saw some genuine break dancing by some very talented young girls. The winter costumes were fabulous. A good time was had by all.

This last picture of Zoe I snapped on our way out, as I aimed the camera at her and asked, "Hey Zoe, how was your first disco in New Zealand?" Her look says it all...

Here's the rest of the album for a look inside the disco.

Happy My-Birthday To YOU

2008-06-27T15:07:00.007+13:00

We have an interesting ritual here at work. When it's your birthday, you buy a bunch of candy (lollies), cookies (biscuits) and other snacks and you put them on a table in the common area of the office. After that, you send an "It's My Birthday, Snacks At The Regular Place" email to the whole company who then stampedes over and loots the table of goodies. If they pass by you, they'll wish you Happy Birthday. Maybe they'll send you a "thanks" email too.

My first impression was that this seemed incredibly backwards and very odd.

Then it was explained to me like this: "If everyone bought someone candy on their birthday, they'd have too much candy and it'd be too big of an expense for everyone to constantly be buying candy for everyone all year long. Plus most people wouldn't remember your birthday, anyways. If you buy it for everyone on your own birthday, then over the course of a year it all evens out."

It kind of makes sense!

I'm wondering if this provides a keen insight into the Kiwi mentality, or if it's just one policy at one company and reflects the utilitarian philosophy of a specific group of people.

I like the policy, though. It downplays the individual in favor of the group while still offering recognition and celebration of a happy event (survival of life's dangers and miseries for yet another year.)

It's the notion "what goes around comes around" in a very real and tangible form.

Wha?

2008-06-26T12:42:00.007+13:00

Tuesday night was a special treat for the girls. We took them to see the movie Speed Racer (yeah, yeah...) which is due to open here in New Zealand tomorrow (Friday the 27th.) My company had a private screening (and nearly filled the auditorium) a few days early since we developed the Speed Racer videogame for Warner Brothers.

So it was a highly exclusive affair filled with my coworkers and their friends and partners (the general term used here for wives/girlfriends/mistresses/gimp-slaves/whatever) where we got to "break the street date" and have a little weeknight fun. Families were in attendance, and Zoe and Haley got to see some of the girls they hadn't seen since our second day in the country.

If you remember, Brett and his family invited us to a big family barbeque in Petone where we met his brother and sister-in-law and friends and their families. We sat on the back deck and watched the sun go down and drank wine and ate sausages and talked about how we'd only been in New Zealand for a couple days. Once we'd all eaten, Mike (Brett's brother) stood up and gave a long blessing in Maori followed by an english translation and ending with "Kia ora!" Our girls were playing with their girls and running this way and that, climbing trees, and playing the sorts of games kids play in the waning days of summer.

Tuesday this week, they saw some of those kids for the first time since that day. Haley immediately went over there and started talking to Brett's daughter and his brother's daughter to say hello and how-you-do. When she came back over, she stunned both Joanne and me by telling us, "Deonte said that I'm losing my American accent."

Wow!

If that's true, it's happening without any of us noticing and right under our noses. We've noticed a few new affectations that the girls have adopted. Mainly a little end-of-sentence lilt where the tone of voice rises sharply, falls sharply, and then rises just a bit at the end of the word. It's usually most obvious when they're being emphatic with the last word of a sentence. We've also noticed a few turns of phrase such as "but dad, it's meant to be for kids" instead of "supposed to be."

What's even more interesting than Haley losing the old accent or aquiring the new accent is that Joanne and I aren't really noticing it happening.

School Disco

2008-06-24T13:40:00.006+13:00

Friday night the girls have their first school "disco." Haley immediately began practicing her finger-in-the-air John Travolta-esque moves. I assured her that the term "disco" just means dance, in this case, and there would be no mirrored globes hanging from the ceiling or platform shoes. In fact, it is a winter-themed dance with a prize for best winter costume.

(Those of you back in the states will undoubtedly enjoy letting us know that it was 92 degrees there yesterday and that you had a lovely soak in the pool at my house that is sitting there empty, just dying for a barbecue pool party. Save it. Enduring winter number two with no break for spring, much less summer, has me seasonally-affected and thus, not in the mood. Enjoy the pool. I hope you get a horrible sunburn that peels for days.)

Back to the winter-themed dance. I need to come up with two simple, but clever outfits for the girls to wear, so I thought I would turn to you, our readers, for help. The costumes must be comfortable, original, easy to construct, and above all, CHEAP. I can't wait to see what you come up with! Thanks for your help! And no peeing in my pool!

Glow Worm Encounters

2008-06-22T08:41:00.008+13:00

Friday night the girls and I headed into the city for an outing with the Kiwi Conservation Club, a nature club for kids sponsored by the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society. We got our Friday night fish 'n chips from our favorite takeaways place in the city, and met the group at the band shell of the Botanic Gardens for a nighttime picnic and hike in the dark.

After we ate, the kids ran around the big lawn with their glow-in-the-dark face paint and torches (flashlights, for those of you back home. See? I'm assimiliating!). Then we were treated to a very informative talk by Dr. George Gibbs, author and professor of entomology at Victoria University. Turns out that the Wellington Botanic Gardens are where glow worms were originally studied and eventually classified as Arachnocampa luminosa or "glowing spider-bug," in the late 1880's. This particular variety is found only in Australia and New Zealand.

After the talk, we went for a walk in the gardens. As we got deeper into the trail, where the trees came together over the path and we could have been in some remote bush rather than smack dab in the heart of the capital city, we turned off our torches. Slowly, out of the dark, tiny little points of yellow-green light started to develop along the banks over-hanging the path on one side, and along the ravine where a creek ran through on the other. It looked like someone had sprinkled the woods with pixie dust!

It was a truly magical sight. I tried to convince the girls that they were the glowing lights from tiny fairy houses, but, alas, they are too old to believe in fairies (insert sound of Tinkerbell hitting the floor). It brought to my mind the fireflies of summer and my childhood in Northern Wisconsin, and I remarked to myself on how vastly different my own childhood was from that of my children's. I never would have guessed that I would be sharing the wonder of bioluminescence with my children in some far off country at the bottom of the world.

Zoe Got Linked From Make!

2008-06-16T20:27:00.006+13:00

UPDATE! See below.

-----

To perpetuate the endless recursion that is the Internets, here's a link to a link back to here.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/06/bunk_bed_night_stand.html

Zoe's first Make link! I couldn't be any more proud.

UPDATE!

We've also been linked by Wired magazine blog "GeekDad". Good on ya, GeekDad!

http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/06/the-flying-nigh.html

And more interest in the Flying Night Stand over here at Shakadoo:

http://www.shakhammer.com/2008/06/flying-bunk-bed.html

Here at 4kiwiwannabes we're addressing the world's bunk bed night stand needs, one bunk bed night stand at a time.

Odell Reserve

2008-06-15T19:35:00.005+13:00

Odell Reserve is the crest of "our hill" here.

I spun around on my heel snapping pictures in all directions when we reached the top and used the software that came with my camera ("PhotoStitch") to stitch it all together into a panorama. It's more impressive when it's not broken up into chunks, but it was too wide of an image to upload as a big strip.

We had a great hike out there, there's a narrow winding path set into the hill running down to Old Porirua Road.

There's a water reservoir at the hilltop and right next to it, with sheer drops in all directions is... ...a mountain bike ramp?

The City of Wellington even endorses the idea.

Why waste a great hilltop with dangerous looming drops in all directions by NOT setting up a mountain bike ramp near the edge? That's my thinking.

Behold the "Flying Night Stand"

2008-06-14T21:44:00.007+13:00

The Proud Inventor with the Flying Night Stand

Zoe named this the "Flying Night Stand." At bedtime one night she said that she wished she had a place to put her water glass and book like she used to when she had a night stand. She suggested that we could build a special shelf for the purpose and she could use that. I loved this idea, and so we brainstormed a bit before I kissed her good night and she turned off the light.

I alluded to it a while back when we were in the midst of gathering the first of the materials. It's taken about three weeks of weekends to put it all together from parts purchased, found, and modified to end up with the very satisfying (if not necessarily aesthetically flawless) final result.

Here's another view:

I asked her if she wanted to sand it down and paint it and she does, but she wants to use it first so we'll save that part for another weekend project.

The Materials

Below you can see the materials that went into construction. Some of it was purchased, some of it was reused scraps and odds and ends.

Parts:
1 piece of shelf wood 400mm by 240mm
1 long piece of wood for the edging (440mm x 80mm x 20mm)
2 short pieces of wood for the edging (220mm x 80mm x 20mm)
2 steel angle brackets
2 screw-in storage hooks
2 same-sized pieces of re-used scrap wood blocks
A bunch of wood screws from the junk box

The long and short pieces of edging wood were glued and screwed to the outside of the shelf with wood screws. We drilled pilot holes to prevent cracking while screwing things together. The wood blocks were attached to the top of the shelf with the angle brackets so that we could screw the storage hooks into the tops of the blocks at the appropriate angle.

This allowed us to make small adjustments to the angle of the storage hooks so that they held the shelf flat and level against the side of the bunk bed railing.

Here's some detail on how the angle brackets were attached on the bottom. These were screwed all the way through the shelf into the wood block to provide extra stability

To attach it to the bed, just hang it on the railing of the upper bunk (in these beds there's no LOWER bunk, just a desk and some open space down there.)

This was a really fun project to do together.

Zoe got to see that not only is it fun to dream up something but you can actually go and MAKE that thing yourself using tools and materials that are handy and with a minimum of fuss and trouble if you just think carefully about it and stay on it until it's done.

And now she gets to use it at bedtime every night to keep her glass of water nearby (no more stumbling down the ladder in the dark if she's thirsty) and hold her books so they're handy when she gets all tucked in for the night's reading.

And she can feel good that it's totally hers, from conception to creation to utilization.

Hizz Ormine?

2008-06-13T12:33:00.002+13:00

For the last few days I've been speaking normally when speaking to people.

For the first few months I've been using what I believe to be a subset dialect of Kiwi and American English and speaking clearly and deliberately to enhance communication. I've recently stopped doing that just for fun. I've returned to speaking normally as if I'd speak to my North American friends.

I was picking up my prescription at the chemist across the street from work and told the girl "Hi, I'm here to pick up my prescription that was called in."

"Do you mean faxed in?" she asked me, kind of pedantically I thought. I took the question to mean that they don't allow calling-in of prescriptions here.

"Oh, yeah, faxed in from my doctor this morning."

"What name?" she asked.

I paused for a beat wondering if she meant his name---the doctor who faxed it---or my name, the guy who was picking it up. "His or mine?"

Now she paused a second. "Hizz Ormine?" she repeated unsteadily and then turned to go look it up, presumably under "O."

"No, no, I mean, I'm asking: do you need his name or my name?" I was feeling a little foolish at this point, thinking that I should have assumed she was asking for MY name. The question "What name?" kind of threw me off though.

It was a little awkward, but kind of funny. And it wouldn't have happened if I'd been more deliberate in speaking with only the subset of Kiwi and American English, but I've stopped doing that now... at least for a while.

And it IS kind of fun.

The Simple Life

2008-06-12T10:01:00.011+13:00

Life here is harder than in the states.

I don't mean "hard" in the sense of "difficult" so much as "hard" as in Mohr's Scale of mineral hardness. With mineral hardness, the "hardness" is defined as the resistance to being scratched by a harder material and the ability to scratch a softer material.

In that way, life here is harder than in the states.

Culture Shock

There are several well-designated stages of cultural assimilation that most people go through. They call it "culture shock" akin to the way World War I vets suffered from "shell shock" but through political correctness and the gentrification of language is now referred to as "Post -Traumatic Stress Disorder."

As a recent immigrant to New Zealand, let's say I'm going through "Post-Acculturation Disorientation Syndrome."

As a teenager I was convinced that I was different than everyone else and that none of the things that "normal" people go through would necessarily happen to me since I was, after all, Steve. I had the now-bewilderingly deep-seated belief that when I gave something a try, I wouldn't have to contend with the same laws of convention or even physics that those who came before me had so well documented and described. I'd say the lion's share of emotional growth that happens between the bulletproof teen years and doughy middle age is evinced by the gradual dawning of the notion that you're just a schmuck like everyone else.

A schmuck that's just as susceptible to Culture Shock as anyone else.

The stages of Culture Shock (or "Pre-Assimilatory Discombobulation Symptomology" if you like) are:

Honeymoon/Tourist Phase
Irritation and Hostility Phase
Adjustment Phase
Bi-Culturalism

Honeymoon Phase

This ought to be pretty self explanatory. When moving to an entirely new country, I imagine the Honeymoon Phase starts well before you've left your country of origin or you wouldn't have left in the first place. There's a certain blank stupidity required to uproot yourself from a completely comfortable and happy situation and seek out something completely unknown and possibly dangerous on the other side of the world. There's no better analogy for this than falling in love and what being in love eventually begets: a honeymoon.

They also call this the "tourist" phase where even tragedies of the human condition take on the rosy-hued tint of "local color." "Look, Bob, at the cute little potbellied malnourished local tribal boy, isn't he darling? He's trying to sell me some rocks to buy shoes, bless his heart."

I definitely drifted around for the first half dozen weeks in a honeymoon haze when we first got here, no question. It's unfortunate that you're in this state upon arrival since you need to make some pretty clear-headed long-term decisions for yourself or your family like getting phone service, internet service, finding a place to live and so on. But then, being head over heels in-love is a terrible time to make a decision on who your life partner should be too if you think about it.

Irritation and Hostility Phase

This is a very-real phase of adjustment that you slip into slowly. I've actually been bobbing in and out of this one for a while. This is the hard just-make-it-through phase. This phase is marked by:

From this page and this page:
Homesickness
Boredom
Withdrawal (i.e. spending excessive amounts of time reading, only seeing other Americans, avoiding contact with local people)
Need for excessive amounts of sleep
Compulsive eating or drinking
Irritability
Exaggerated cleanliness
Stereotyping of or hostility toward local people
Loss of ability to work effectively
Unexplainable fits of weeping
physical ailments (psychosomatic illness)
Sadness, loneliness, melancholy
Preoccupation with health
Aches, pains, and allergies
Insomnia, desire to sleep too much or too little
Changes in temperament, depression, feeling vulnerable, feeling powerless
Anger, irritability, resentment, unwillingness to interact with others
Identifying with the old culture or idealizing the old country
Loss of identity
Trying too hard to absorb everything in the new culture or country
Unable to solve simple problems
Lack of confidence
Feelings of inadequacy or insecurity
Developing stereotypes about the new culture
Developing obsessions such as over-cleanliness
Longing for family
Feelings of being lost, overlooked, exploited or abused
Doesn't sound like a sunlit stroll through the petunias, does it? It's not so great. I've felt all of these at one time or another, and sometimes in concert together.

Adjustment Phase

I'm bobbing in and out of this one too. Rather than these being distinct phases that occur in discrete intervals as if you'd move from one to the next at, say, Thursday at 7:31pm, there's a sort of muddled continuum of observations, thoughts and feelings running from Honeymoon to Adjustment.

When I make a joke that only Kiwis would get, I feel adjusted---if only for a little while. When I know how and where to buy a bus pass and catch a bus or which shop to go to for such-and-such specific specialty item, I feel adjusted.

It's coming slowly---fraught with setbacks and sidetracks---but it's coming.

Bi-Culturalism

This is the final phase of the so-called "Culture Shock" process and is really the endpoint or the phase that continues into perpetuity. It's being able to navigate local and birth cultures with equal aplomb and a state that I sorely anticipate. I can't see reaching this sort of cultural equilibrium any time real soon now, but I can definitely see it crowning over the horizon.

Hard Like a Diamond

So back to life being hard.

When I got here, I was soft. Now, after months of living in Wellington I can say I'm not as soft as I was when I was fresh-off-the-boat. There are hard walls that confine our behavior and define our finanicial degrees of freedom. To be surrounded by hardness requires some hardness.

We live more economically here---out of necessity---in both the financial and non-financial senses of the word. Economy and living sparingly have replaced convenience and expense. Everything costs more here, but if you need less of it then it's a zero sum. Effort and cleverness have become a sort of secondary currency. And we feel improved for it---ruddy-cheeked from the involuntary moral exercise of deprivation.

But then we were ready to live more sparingly and without a lot of unnecessary material trappings and without leaving a huge swath of half-consumed half-discarded garbage in our wake. It's why we came here in the first place.

Sensing Societal Assimilations

2008-06-10T10:39:00.007+13:00

I was trying for alliteration in that title, can anyone suggest how I could pack more sibilance in that?

At the Storylines Family Day they had some big padded bed-like areas for kids to flop down and watch Kiwi Moon on the big-screen TV. Since Haley can smell TV screens the way that wolves can smell fear, she took off ahead of us as we were leaving the main hall of the venue and entered a side room where a storyteller was plying the crowd on one end and a Capital E production of Kiwi Moon was playing at low volume on the other.

We rounded the corner into the room and I was craning my head and looking around a little when Joanne nudged me and pointed at Haley who had, without any prompting or even an example to follow from other kids, removed her shoes and left them neatly by the side of the big padded bed-like couch and flopped down on her belly with her sock-feet dangling comfortably in the air.

Leaving your shoes behind and moving about in a relaxed and informal manner is clearly a hallmark of not just Kiwi schoolkids but of the people as a whole. I continue to be amazed at the shoelessness at work, especially in what would normally be considered semi-formal work situations. At the gym, half the people leave their rather expensive leather shoes under the changing room bench rather than in the lockers themselves where they'd be safe from burgling under the lock-and-key that the gym staff give you as you check in at the front desk. It's as if to say, "Yeah, but no one would take your SHOES."

Discovering Haley so voluntarily and comfortably relaxing into this shoe protocol was truly touching and a feeling I'll never forget.

Wood Pigeon Sighting

2008-06-08T19:15:00.014+13:00

We were in Ngaio Gorge, hiking in Trelissick Park and we were coming down a hill and ran smack-dab into this:

Wood Pigeon, standing improbably on a thin branch.

It's a Kererū, an indigenous wood pigeon and a big, big boy. You'll notice what looks like an ordinary city pigeon head attached to an enormous body. That's what it looks like. In the above picture he looks a bit like a pigeon body-builder in a white tank top.

We took another handful of pictures and this one turned out to be a nice side view where you can see a little of the coloration. We were in shadow in late afternoon and the colors are a bit washed out.

It's hard to get a sense of scale, but it's big. Like a small turkey in a tree. We were standing there agog while people passed us on the track: first a woman with a brown dog who paused when she saw us gathered in a little arc looking silently and reverently up at it who affirmed Joanne's question of "Is it a wood pigeon?" with just a nodding "kereru..." and then marched on past it without another look. Right about then two others came tramping up the hill from the other direction and just sort of trudged on past without even stopping.

I guess it'd be kind of like coming up on a group in Muir Woods watching a squirrel in amazement and reassuring them that yes, indeed that's a squirrel. How very nice for you all, now please stand aside so I can continue my walk here on planet earth.

But that's fine. We were impressed and delighted by our first up-close encounter with this other-worldly body-builder pigeon in its natural environs on our hike through Ngaio Gorge and it was extremely satisfying.

Other Fun Sunday Festivities

And finally, a slideshow of our Sunday activities in and around Wellington. These involved checking out the Storylines Family Day, a "sausage sizzle" as Haley referred to it in our backyard with home-made lemonade with lemons from our tree and the hike along Kaiwharawhara stream.

My Boss Was Really Chuffed

2008-06-06T12:01:00.005+13:00

At work, we do "sprints" to get from milestone to milestone. There's a software methodology that's been making the rounds in the last decade or two that companies adopt or adapt depending on how it fits their way of thinking. A sprint is really just the time between milestones or fixed dates where certain parts of the program are completed.

After our third sprint, when the whole team (now grown to a dozen people) were all gathered around, my boss told us that he was "really chuffed about how the sprint turned out."

He then went on to talk about something else, but I stopped him and asked him to back up a little bit. Chuffed? Chuffed doesn't sound good. With the word "huff" in there and some resemblance to "chufe" or "choof" (collegiate terminology for losing control of the last several hours worth of beer in a violent, spectacular and messy display of no doubt deeply seated personal problems as yet untended) the word "chuffed" sounds decidedly double-plus-un-good.

"Um, pumped. Pleased. Excited." was the definition I got back from a room full of Kiwis amused by my poor grasp of distinctly local colloquialisms. Every time I stumble on nomenclature or idiomatic expressions ("he was definitely taking the Mickey out of him") that I'm not familiar with, the people around me are amused but also seem to take a certain pride in the terminologies that are so distinctly un-American.

I also had a problem with "knackered" which is pronounced something close to "naked" which made for an interesting lunch time conversation about a co-worker's impending trip to London, New York and then Vancouver.

"You'll be pretty naked when you get back, I'll bet."

"What?"

World Environment Day

2008-06-05T10:26:00.014+13:00

Happy World Environment Day! Not sure how it is different than Earth Day, but you can go ahead and click on those links and let me know. Wellington, NZ is the host city this year and the school and community are abuzz with activities to commemorate the day.

As part of Zoe's homework this week, she was to visit treepeople.co.nz. There the children can make pledges to reduce their carbon footprint to fight climate change. The pledges are things like "I will check my car tyres are the right pressure," and "I will recycle all my paper for 30 days," or "I will use reusable shopping bags instead of plastic ones for 30 days." Excellent ideas, all! There are some less practical and perhaps somewhat questionable ones, as well, such as, "We will unplug the computer for [x-amount] of days" (impractical), "I will not open the fridge for [x-amount] of days" (huh?) and "I will use reusable nappies for [x-amount] of days," for which I could find no takers at our house, seeing as we've all chosen to be toilet-users for quite some time now.

While going over the list, Zoe encountered a problem she has had many times before with this sort of thing. (warning: here comes the part where I smugly pat myself on the back) Our family is already very green. We walk to school, we own a very infrequently used, small, petrol-efficient, car, we compost, we recycle, we hang the wash on the line to dry (washed in an energy-efficient front-loader in cold water, I may add), we use both sides of our paper (they call this GOOSe paper at Zoe's school, for "good on one side"), Steve takes the bus to work, we drink tap water, I use reusable grocery bags, we use reusable containers for the girls lunches, I buy locally grown produce and buy meat from the local butcher, we buy our power from the most green of the power companies, and on and on. Short of wearing recycled hemp clothing and washing it in baking powder (is that done?) there are very few changes we can easily make as a family.

That said, we have all made pledges to further reduce our carbon footprints. Steve has agreed to cut his shower time, I have agreed to not buy takeaway coffee in paper cups, and the girls are going to put 5 cm less water in their baths. I tried to convince the girls to pledge to "go to bed an hour earlier than normal for [x-amount] of days," but they weren't buying it.

I love that my almost 10-year-old has so wholeheartedly gotten into the spirit of environmentalism. I love that she goes around turning off all the switches on the outlets (for those of you back in the U.S., the outlets here all look like this and have switches on them). I love it even when I discover I have no internet access because the router has been shut-off from it's power source, or when my laptop shuts down because it was disconnected while the battery was charging. I remind myself to laugh when I come into the house, arms full of groceries, to discover she has turned out the stairway light on me. These little inconveniences are reminders to me of how earnestly she has received and interpreted the messages of conservation. I'm very proud of my little Earth girl.

Happy Birthday, um, Queen?

2008-06-02T21:28:00.015+13:00

Today was The Queen's Birthday, a public holiday in New Zealand and not actually the birthday of the Queen of the Commonwealth at all. Queen Elizabeth II was actually born on April 21st---more than a month ago---and the public holiday honoring her (or him, in the case that there's a king at the top of the monarchy at the time) is celebrated on various days in various countries. The Queen of the Commonweath is also Queen of Antigua and Barbuda, Queen of Australia, Queen of the Bahamas, Queen of Barbados, Queen of Belize, Queen of Canada, Queen of Grenada, Queen of Jamaica, Queen of New Zealand, Queen of Papua New Guinea, Queen of Saint Kitts and Nevis, Queen of Saint Lucia, Queen of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Queen of the Solomon Islands, Queen of Tuvalu, and, of course the Queen of the United Kingdom. But no longer Queen of Hong Kong.

What the Queen's Birthday (or, officially, "The Queen's Official Birthday" which you may recall is not actually her REAL birthday) seems to be from the perspective of the uninitiated man-on-the-street a public holiday (no work or school.) We noticed TV spots for Queen's Birthday sales at retail outlets. We also seemed to see people here or there on the move with a bouquet of cut flowers. No idea. Apparently a list of honors is published in which various New Zealanders, living and dead, are honored for their accomplishments and achievements and given titles like Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit and medals like The New Zealand Antarctic Medal which I assume is given to anyone who goes to Antarctica and returns alive.

It's also the first official day of ski season.

Te Papa!

We went to Te Papa. I ate a fish pie which later reasserted itself in various uncomfortable ways throughout the day.

We walked in on the New Zealand Army in the midst of an ostentatious display of Kiwi military might---the Army band was set up in a public area of the museum playing a Doobie Brothers song with a full brass ensemble. They looked snappy in their red band uniforms and did a pretty decent rendition of "Listen to the Music" before handing the microphone to a prim and reserved young woman with her hair pulled neatly into a tight bun on the back of her head whose stiff interpretation of Eva Cassidy's sultry song "Fever" was performed without any eye contact with the audience.

Black Smoker Chimney

A black smoker chimney is an extremely rare (in captivity) chunk of crusty buildup surrounding an undersea geothermal vent. Zoe has a classmate whose father is a specialist minerals geologist who was given "one of the biggest and best preserved ever recovered" after a remotely controlled submersible vehicle named ALVIN accidentally knocked one over at a depth of 2.6km (over 8530 feet below.) That's pretty deep. The water pressure down there is like 3800 pounds per square inch. That's skull-crushingly deep.

ALVIN was working off the coast of Chile at the behest of US Navy, the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute based out of Massachusetts.

The chimney was halved with a diamond saw and half was donated to the National Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa---which is Maori for "Our Place") and the other half was retained for research.

This particular chimney is named after Zoe's classmate, and Zoe's whole class attended a special unveiling ceremony at Te Papa last week where the display was unveiled. The pedestal on which it sits is covered with fun facts about hydrothermal vents and the creatures that live in the 350 to 400 degree Celsius (!!) water that comes gushing out of them. This mineral-rich water that's superheated below the earth's crust precipitates as soon as it hits the colder ocean water causing the clouds of black "smoke" you see in pictures.

Scientists are fascinated with these for a number of biological and geologic reasons, not the least of which is the ability of organisms and bacteria to live in possibly the least hospitable conditions on the planet. Conditions like these were thought to exist ages and ages ago when life rose Frankenstein-like from the ooze.

Pied Piper of Ducks

We had a light snack at the cafeteria (Fish Pie For the Win!) and walked around in the courtyard outside the seating area. Haley demonstrated her ability to silently charm a flock of ducks into following her around.

We've noticed that Haley has an uncanny ability to somehow get animals to come to her. Joanne has it too. I call it "the Kavorka... the lure of the animal" as a tribute to a Seinfeld episode. We've noticed at zoo's---petting and proper---that the animals usually come check Haley out. Even skittish animals and cranky birds seem lulled by her presence. I offer some photographic proof of this in action.

She seems clearly pleased with it.

Rainbow Dragon

Shortly after this, we followed a rainbow-colored dragon that appeared in the crowd which led us all around the museum (at a fairly blistering pace I might add) and stopped in a story area near the cafe where a sort of art celebration and ceremony was taking place.

They packed four or five dozen out of breath people into a tiny well-lit and overly warm area to speak, sing, tell stories and suck all of the oxygen out of the air. We finally sought life-bringing oxygen out of doors after about thirty minutes of it. Be careful which dragons you follow and when, that's all I'm saying.

That was Monday. We still have yet to write about Saturday and Sunday. Sunday we met the Stephens family for brunch and a little beach time. Visits with them are nutritive on some not entirely obvious level and afterwards we always feel slightly better adjusted... like an off-level picture above the fireplace that you right and inwardly cluck your tongue and think "ah, that's much better."

Kiwi Kids Are Rockin' It

2008-05-30T17:07:00.004+13:00

Kiwi Kids (R Rockin It) - The Starbugs

Haley came home from school today singin' this song. I love that Kiwi kids have their own anthem! I looked and couldn't find much information about this band, the Starbugs. From what I can tell they were a kid band in the 90's and their music was played primarily in NZ primary schools. Pretty cute to hear Hales singing it. I've got to get that on camera if she'll let me. And from my own observations, I can confirm that Kiwi kids definitely ARE rockin' it. :)

Here are the inspiring lyrics should you not care to/not be able to listen:

Kiwi Kids (r Rockin' it)

Now the game begins
As the spotlight beams upon us you can see us centre stage
We're your kids, your hope. We're the heroes of the future
We're the new, unwritten page
The time has come around at last for us to show the world that...

Chorus
Kiwi kids are rockin' it, rockin' it
Kiwi kids are tops
Kiwi kids are living it, living it
Look what we've got
Kids can do anything, anything
Give it a try
Kiwi kids are rockin' it, rockin' it
Just watch us fly!

Now the game begins
You can see us from the sidelines, we are in the winning team
We're the best there is, we can take it to the limit
We can live our wildest dreams!
The time has come around at last for us to show the world that...
Repeat Chorus

Working Late Dinner Break

2008-05-29T19:01:00.010+13:00

Just a quick update as I temporarily duck away from my first work deadline since I've been working here. They're ordering-in... *drumroll* ...pizza! The more things change, the more they stay the same. It's the universal tech employee one-button feed-the-mob solution. I wonder if overtime employees in Japan get pizza ordered-in too.

Drugs

My family continues to get hammered by angry winter-time antipodean virii that have our carefully collected North American antibodies shrugging and turning out their pockets in resignation. While everyone back home was out enjoying Memorial Day Weekend in the heat and sun, we were holed up and sniffling with headaches and sinus pressure in the wet and cold. I felt (and continue to feel) like there's an ill-tempered monkey in my head boxing the backs of my eyeballs.

I was at the chemist (Drugstore) across the street poring over their selection of cold medication and came up with a few observations:

Codeine is available in over-the-counter pain medication. You can get your codeine with ibuprofen or with paracetamol (another name for acetaminophen) in non-trivial amounts.
They have real Sudafed here (I think I mentioned this once before) and not the speed-lab-safe kind they sell in the states.
Anything you buy---over the counter or from the pharmacist him or herself---eventually gets wrapped in a small paper bag which is taped shut with a piece of cello tape and thus becomes a "packet."
Just about nothing comes in bottles. The preferred keeping device is a blister-pack. This extends to just about everything in the store save adult undergarments.
I saw cough drops that offered an active ingredient called "flurbiprofen."

Flurbiprofen.

I picked it up and flipped it over, halfway expecting to see the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show, having doffed his chef's cap in favor of surgical scrubs.

Flur-dee-proo-dee takee doo-ee en callee de mornee bork bork bork.

Nuts

Anyways.

I just now had a piece of the ordered-in Hell pizza that had nuts on it. I think walnuts.

I hate walnuts.

Walnuts are covered with a mouth-dessicating brown film that, when bitten into, releases powerful neurotoxins that penetrate the blood-brain barrier instantly, lighting up the "yuck" section of my cortex like a huge roadway sign that says "last flavor for 500 miles." Maybe I'm overstating that a bit.

I've never had nuts on pizza before and frankly never considered that pizzas might want or need nuts. Having had a piece now, I can say with some astonishment that contrary to what I originally may have thought, it's actually pretty terrible.

Facelift

Before I get back to work again, I also wanted to mention the new look of the web site. Joanne and I were becoming more and more annoyed that the Blogger template we were using had the body text flowing into a narrow strip down the middle of the window. She changed it to something else, then I changed it something yet again, and then I carefully custom-edited the style sheet HTML until it was painstakingly tweaked into a highly refined state of very very green. Then I tried several times unsuccessfuly to revert it back to the way it was before this all started and just gave up and just left it the way it is now.

I don't know if it's better because I spent too much time looking at it to tell with any certainty, but at least it's no longer flowing down a narrow column in the middle of the window.

All to serve you better. And that's the kind of service you can expect here at 4kiwiwannabes... and I'm sure there's more where that came from.

As Seen in the Local Paper

2008-05-26T20:19:00.001+13:00

Sunday Night Nothings

2008-05-25T20:11:00.008+13:00

It's been a pretty nothing weekend. Except for Zoe's netball game (Go Sapphires! Go Ngaio!) and a trip to Mitre10 (sort of like a small Home Depot or large hardware store) to pick up a dryer vent duct and some cut wood for a project I'll mention later, we were house-bound all weekend by illness and lethargy in equal amounts.

Netball

The Netball game was great. Zoe's game is improving and she's doing very well for someone whose birthcountry has pretty much never heard of the game. In particular her ball handling and confidence on the court have doubled at least. I had fun playing with the other kids with the ball we brought and talking to the other parents a bit while the girls played. The rain gods parted the clouds for most of the afternoon game but it started drizzling during the second fifteen-minute half. By the game's end parents and kids were scrambling back to their cars at a jog as the precipitation ramped up in volume and ferocity.

Think Metric

So far the switch to the Metric system has done nothing but confuse me. The Metric system sounds like a great idea and in theory it is, but when it comes to actually using it for anything meaningful it requires two messy extra mental steps that produce results in which I have almost no real confidence. Usually I have to convert whatever measure I'm concerned with from the English system to the Metric system using a hazily-remembered ratio, do the math itself (which usually involves moving decimal points around) and then convert back to the English measurement using a complimentary and hazily-remembered ratio to get my result. Sometimes this simultaneously involves a money conversion rate such as describing to someone the cost of gas in US dollars per gallon when I'm working from NZ dollars per liter.

But Saturday at the Mitre10 I saw in simple lucid terms what the Metric system might have in store for me. When I needed to measure out the wood that the helpful store clerk was to cut for me, I laid out the tape measure and there it was. 400 "mils" (millimeters) by 240 mils for one piece. Then for the edging, 420 mils to leave 10 mils at each end for the 10 mil edge piece, and two pieces of 230 mils for the sides.

No "five-and-eleven-sixteenths minus two-and-three-eighths is, uh, let's see three eights is six sixteenths, so that's 5 sixteenths left over so it's three and five sixteenths."

Doing woodworking without having to find common denominators? Crazy. I need to go build a bookshelf to celebrate.

Not that I'm a great woodworker. The last thing I built of any complexity was a novel but largely unused treehouse platform out of plywood sheets and pieces of two-by-four. Not exactly knocking together a Queen Anne jewelry armoire, but still requires some woodworking math of the sort described above to avoid jagged eye-gouging protuberances and dangerous splinter-causing edges.

The Bunk Night Bed Stand or Night Bunk Stand Bed?

Saturday's quest for wood was for a project idea Zoe came up with, which is to make essentially a "bunk bed night stand" where she could put her cup of water and her book when it was lights-out time. I thought it was a brilliant idea. Both of the girls have what I used to call "lofts" which is a bunk bed with no bottom bed. Instead of a bottom bed, there's a desk down there with a little chair. In the tiny rooms of our NZ house, getting your bed up above your head frees up a lot of move-about space and elbow room.

Zoe and I discussed the general design of the bunk bed end table and arrived at a common understanding that it needed to fasten to the bed rail on the top bunk, hang down a bit below the railing on the outside of the bed and that it needed a lip running around the edge of what's effectively a shelf to keep the contents in place while groggy children grope for water in the dark.

We'll post the results of our construction. We bought materials for making two of these things, though we still have to work out the fasten-to-the-bed rail part. I have high hopes that we'll end up with some sturdy and attractive bunk bed night stands that hopefully lack eye-gougers and splinter-makers.

Made simple thanks to the Metric System.

All Punched Up

2008-05-22T22:08:00.008+13:00

My first fully-punched bus pass.

Ngaio to Downtown Wellington CBD is 3 zones, so $3.50 a pop each way unless you buy bulk. With a 10 trip bus pass, it's $2.80 each trip. 10 trips for $28.00, though if you look carefully there are 12 punches in my pass. Ooops!

You buy passes at just about any dairy, not from the bus drivers (as I originally thought) or the train station (which I didn't actually verify.)

There are lots of bus stops, and I travel almost door-to-door on my commute. It's crazy convenient and I'm actually a little disappointed I don't have to walk farther. I could get off a few stops early, but that's, like, stupid. Most days I futz around with my PSP and the 20-25 minute ride is over fast. So far I haven't missed a bus. Most times of day there's another bus along in half an hour, but thirty minutes of standing at a bus stop doesn't sound like a roaring good time.

There are no old people with fifty day stank on them. There aren't any between-fix crack addicts rocking rhythmically in the corner. No borderline-hookers thumbing their phones. It's a crowd of young people in their school-approved attire, businessmen and women in suits and coats, some have uniforms and/or nametags, and there's rabble like me. It occurred to me that if everyone else on earth were to mysteriously die while we were in the safety of that bus, the human race would probably still stand a chance.

Familiar Faces

I've started to recognize a few faces from along the line and been doling out nicknames to some.

There's a long-haired 11-ish boy with his mum who I call "Ozzy". He looks exactly like a young Ozzy Osbourne and also exactly like his mom---who looks exactly like a female Ozzy Osbourne.

There's "The Vicar" who's a very handsome older gentleman in his 60's with a big smile and lots of teeth. He sits with "Church Lady" who looks a little like Dana Carvey's SNL character but a little rounder and friendlier-looking and in knit gloves. The Vicar engages in lively and friendly conversation with people seated around him.

There are the two high school girls (called College here,) in uniform, who sit together and talk non-stop the whole way. Some days I sit near them to eavesdrop and try to pick words out here and there. They talk a blue streak punctuated with a little heartfelt profanity. When I say non-stop, I mean no period of silence between them has lasted more than three seconds so far---I've been counting it like I count popcorn in the microwave and I swear that bag's still in there... as it were.

"Thank you, driver."

It sounds more like "Thank you dry-vah!" If there are any questions when boarding, they're addressed to "driver." If someone's running for the bus but the driver's starting to pull away, you'll hear "Driver! One second!"

One out of every ten passengers thank the driver as they're exiting the bus. I got in the habit in college (here I mean University, not high school) and still do it. But I can't bring myself to call the driver "driver." I'm not sure why. He knows he's the driver---he took the job in the first place. There's really nothing insulting about being called "driver" by someone who doesn't know your name... especially if you're, in fact, the driver. I'm working on that. I'll probably be able to say "thank you, driver" with conviction right about the time I can order a "kebab" (rhymes with "slab" here) without wincing.

Prime Minister Helen Clark

2008-05-21T10:14:00.006+13:00

So either no one is reading our poor little blog, or no one was familiar with the mystery woman from yesterday's blog post. She is none other than the Prime Minister of New Zealand Helen Clark. And yes, it really was as casual and easy as it appears to meet and get a picture with her. I did not have to go through any sort of metal detector, there were no Matrix-esque secret service officers scanning the crowd behind their sunglasses (well, I did see one, but his name was probably Ollie and he looked like he still lived with his mum) . It was as easy as hovering near by her until her media relations person asked if I would like him to take my picture with her. She and I chatted for a moment, got a picture and that was that.

Karori Wildlife Sanctuary

2008-05-20T15:26:00.005+13:00

I attended the ground-breaking and blessing ceremony for the new visitors center at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary today. The ceremony included a beautiful Maori blessing, and call and response singing. I think we may have sung the national anthem, in Maori, as well, because everyone knew the words but me. It was a gorgeous day to be outside celebrating one of the treasures of Wellington. Oh, and I met a new friend, as you can see from the pictures. Anyone recognize her?

Weekend Update

2008-05-19T10:15:00.004+13:00

Whew! What a weekend! We managed to pack quite a lot in and had some really good times with friends. On Saturday, Zoe had her first netball game (go Ngaio Sapphires!). On our way home we stopped and bought a barbecue then grilled up some grub for Haley's birthday party. We hosted friends Jim and Leslie and their sons Skyler and Brook (who I must mention was a great sport having just flown in the night before from the States), as well as our friends Jacob and Brandie and their daughters Sophie and Josie. Haley got some awesome presents (thanks, guys!) and I'm pretty sure she felt celebrated.

Sunday I went to the Food Show at Westpac Stadium with Brandie and a new friend, Lisa. Talk about a small world, Lisa and her family moved her in September from Madison, WI! I enjoyed some much-needed girlfriend time as we laughed our way through the aisles of the Food Show sampling the various meats, cheeses, wines, beers, chocolates, breads-the list goes on and on. The Food Show itself was great, but even more I appreciated commiserating with two moms who have done this crazy move to the other side of the world themselves. Can't wait to do it again, guys!

While I was at the Food Show, Steve and the girls picked up then assembled a bunkbed for Zoe. The bunks are the type that have desks underneath instead of another bed. Now both girls have more space in their small rooms, and it gets the beds off the floor which is better for air circulation in damp Ngaio, and keeps them up high where all the warm air is. They're both thrilled.

After the Food Show, we met up at Jake and Brandie's house for dinner. They have a gorgeous home in Miramar. I look forward to more good times eating, drinking, and testing the limits of the springs on their trampoline, in the future!

Yabba Dabba Doo!

2008-05-16T11:47:00.007+13:00

Quittin' time is Quittin' Time here at Sidhe Interactive where I'm working down here down under the world.

I've never worked at a company where quittin' time was Quittin' Time like this. It's kind of amazing, in my experience. I've worked in Video Games for coming on 15 years now. I been t' four state fairs 'n two hog callin' contests and I shore ain't seen nuthin' like it!

The workday here runs from 9am to 6pm. At fifteen minutes to 9am, the offices are pretty much deserted and dark save a few early risers. At right around 9am, give or take a few minutes, there's a huge wave of people splashing through the doors and by fifteen minutes after 9am, the office is lit and humming with activity with people seated facing their monitors and reading and sending emails. A handful of them are crunching their way through a bowl of Milo.

At a quarter to 6pm, people are still intently focused on their screens, scrawling on paper or hunched over their desks working. At 6pm sharp, there's a flurry of jackets being zippered, chairs being pushed in, monitors and computers being shut down and shuffling of feet. By fifteen minutes after the hour the office is dark and deserted, with a few stragglers still finishing up a few things at their desks before heading out.

I've never seen anything like it.

To offset this rigorous punctuality is a sort of workday focus I also haven't seen in my industry. During the workday no one is reading and sending llots of emails, paying their bills, doing online shopping, reading news, posting in online forums, standing around and making chit-chat or the like. Everyone's focused on doing their work either at their desks or with their teams.

Sound restricting? It's not. And when 6 comes and you're expected to get the hell out and go do something else, you come to love it. And I do.

My Baby is Seven!

2008-05-16T07:32:00.005+13:00

Happy Birthday, Haley!

My Friend the Butcher

2008-05-14T15:20:00.012+13:00

Yesterday I made my first attempt at cooking NZ lamb. I had some good advisors. I read Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Donna Hay, Alton Brown and David Rosengarten to see what they had to say on the subject. In a favorite Julia Child cookbook Julia says, "...your butcher can advise you here. Get to know him. Make him your friend."

So that's what I did. I made a visit to the Willow Butchery, a tiny, clean and oh so quaint shop down the hill in our little village. It has a window full of gorgeous cuts of meats and sausages, all homemade. Inside, I was greeted by Bernie and Marcel, two of the friendliest faces I've encountered here so far. I told them Julia told me I was to make friends with my butcher, and they were tickled. I ordered my racks of lamb, and watched while Bernie cut them off a monster chunk of deep red meat, then slowly and precisely winnowed it away to two very delicate Frenched racks.

Meanwhile, Marcel explained to me what the various sausages and cuts of meat were and answered my questions about where the meat comes from, etc. Everything is local and much of it is organic. He was clearly proud to show off the homemade items. We got on the subject of NZ bacon, and when I compared it to pancetta, he gave me a sly grin. I explained that I was having trouble finding pancetta, and he held up a finger and disappeared to the back. A moment later, he came out with a 3 foot-long roll of brownish-pink meat, rustically bound with cotton twine. He explained that this was their first attempt at making their own pancetta, but they weren't sure it was coming out right. Six weeks into the process, they were concerned it wasn't dry enough, and would I mind taking a chunk and trying it and letting them know what I thought? Never one to say no to free pork, I enthusiastically obliged. Then, meat in hand, I headed back up the hill with my wrapped parcels tucked under my arm like a mad scientist heading back to the lab.

The recipe I chose for the lamb was a simple herb and olive oil gremolata. I found it in a Donna Hay (the Australian Martha Stewart, thank you, Rachel) cookbook and chose it because the parsley, mint and lemon were all readily available in our garden. The recipe was quick and simple, perfect for a weeknight dinner.

The pancetta was put to good use in the brussels sprouts I made to accompany the lamb. I had wanted to make a white bean puree, as well, but couldn't find dried white beans at any of the local stores, so I settled for a quick couscous made with chicken stock. The butchers gave me a couple tips on where to obtain white beans, so I will save that for another day and another chunk of pancetta.

The results were delicious. The lamb was tender and juicy and I was very happy with the gremolata I chose. The girls loved to eat the "lambsicles" with their fingers. Steve, who tends to be wary of lamb, went back for seconds, then thirds. I would definitely do this preparation again.

The pancetta was delicious. It was buttery and peppery with just enough fat to cook the shallots and flavor the brussels sprouts, and with plenty of salty little nuggets of meat. If people want to know how I get my kids to eat brussels sprouts, they should know that a little bacon-y goodness goes a long way. I'll be glad to report back to Bernie and Marcel that their great pancetta experiment was a success. And I can also happily report that my first attempt at the meat that makes NZ famous was a hit.

Happy Mothers Day

2008-05-11T21:03:00.003+13:00

My mom asked for a video for Mother's Day, so we made this.

This goes out to ALL the mommies and their mommies from the 4kiwiwannabes.

Nothingday

2008-05-10T20:28:00.003+13:00

Zoe's netball game was canceled due to rain, something that's got to make outdoor sporting events around these parts (the Wellington region?) either pretty touch-and-go-play-it-by-ear or, um, wet.

Joanne and I were looking forward to meeting the parents of our kids' schoolmates today.

We sort of barricaded ourselves into the house and bundled up against the weather and had a very idle and nothing day. There were two sorties during the day---one for fish and chips at Tan's Takeaways here in Ngaio---and one for snacks and supplies to go along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom's broadcast on TV3 at 7:30pm tonight.

Joanne had a nap. We played a little Super Mario Galaxy. I believe the girls watched Mary Poppins at some point... I read National Geographic.

It was actually pretty great.

No Shoes, No Problem

2008-05-09T10:20:00.008+13:00

At first I thought it was just Peter Jackson being weird. Eccentric people who produce multi-million-dollar worldwide blockbuster film series are generally tolerated. He famously wore no shoes when collecting awards and attending gala events.

From "11 Things You Must Know About Peter Jackson"

He is best known for wearing shorts to the shoot and going barefoot. In fact, his going barefoot is so legendary that Oscars host Billy Crystal took one look at Jackson's feet and declared, 'he's wearing shoes.' 'I always dress formal to formal events,' Jackson told Rolling Stone in a recent profile.

But I don't think it's Peter, it's Peter's birthplace---this place. Here. Where I'm standing right now.

As Joanne bemusedly pointed out earlier, the kids leave their backpacks AND shoes outside the classrooms and run around their schools in stocking feet. That struck us as both strange and cool.

But... I also see people on the street in downtown Wellington without shoes on, about half of my coworkers kick their shoes off under their desks and walk around the office barefoot or in socks, and yesterday I saw the bit of this barefootedness that drove me to write a blog entry about it: a computer science professor from Victoria University Wellington was meeting with the tech director at my company and about five other people and he came into the office barefoot.

He was toting a backpack with his bike helmet in it, and his bike and presumably his shoes were out in the entryway to the offices. There was no "oh, hey, look you're barefooted." or "Look, it's Dr. No Shoes On" or any kind of comment made about it at all---it was just totally normal. It's a shoes-optional society and people of stature meeting with local businessmen about job recruiting fairs in the central business district of the capital city need not adorn their feet with anything at all.

Am I living in The Shire after all?

Netball

2008-05-08T16:55:00.004+13:00

Isn't she adorable in her uniform?! Zoe and her netball team, the Ngaio Sapphires, had their first practice after school yesterday. There are 8 girls on the team, and all except one are new to the game. A local college (high school) student is coaching them. We'll all need to take a crash course in the rules because her first game is on Saturday!

Shhhh! It's a Surprise!

2008-05-07T07:59:00.002+13:00

Our container of "stuff" will be delivered today. I've chosen not to tell the girls, so that it will be a total surprise. Zoe has her first netball practice immediately after school, so they won't be home until late this afternoon. They're gonna flip!

Sha'ken Not Stirred

2008-05-06T11:37:00.010+13:00

Those of you playing along with the home version of the game may notice that the Kiwification Process indicator on the right bar has been updated to include both the School for the Girls and Car. Moving to Ngaio has convinced us that we need a car to adequately attend to the needs of our family and home. We were game to give it a go without---for a while---and if we stayed in the city we'd have probably done without one for a while longer even. But life in the suburbs requires a car, no doubt about it.

Jim (a repeat character on this blog) alerted us to a car dealer that deals in used Japanese cars exclusively. They sell low cost high volume cars that they get from Japan, clean up both cosmetically and mechanically, and then pass on to Kiwis who want used Japanese cars. There's a whole industry here in NZ to deal with taking Japanese used cars and preparing them for New Zealand streets. And there are some interesting reasons why that is so.

Sha'Ken (車検)

Shaken is basically Japanese car inspection.

But where car inspection is relatively straightforward in the US (yearly safety and/or two-year emissions standards inspections,) in Japan it's more involved and expensive. In California you pay $47 for a "smog check" emissions inspection. If you need a full safety inspection you'd pay somewhere around $100 or so. In Japan, fees associated with Sha'ken on a 5 year old vehicle may be as high as $1500 USD or more!

New cars must submit to Shaken after the first three years, and then every two years after that (in most cases.) Aside from the aforementioned fees, the vehicle owner also has to pay for all repairs to return the car to legal driveable state or they get a big red sticker on the back indicating that the car is fuseikaizousha! Mechanics there apparently charge an arm and a leg as Japanese cars are generally very reliable. Things are definitely structured to encourage car owners to get rid of their cars before having to submit to Shaken too many times.

The costs and rigors of the Shaken have given rise to a very large used vehicle export industry in Japan, and Japan's loss is very literally New Zealand's gain.

In Japan, they drive on the left-hand side of the road with the steering wheel on the right-hand side of the cabin. Just like here in NZ and in the UK and Australia. Unlike the UK and Australia, New Zealand has no domestic auto industry to protect and does not have high tariffs on import cars. These used Japanese cars are super-cheap here!

Our new car is a 2000 Honda Civic 5-door hatchback. It's light blue/gray-blue in color. It's very clean and in excellent mechanical condition. We bought it from Shackel Motors over on Kent Terrance in Wellington. They specialize in the used Japanese car trade and keep a constant flow of overseas cars coming through. Many of their cars cost less than $10,000 NZD, or around $7,000 USD for cars between 5 and 10 years old. Most of these cars are very low mileage and very lightly used (Japan isn't exactly a huge country and the Japanese don't eat in their cars like we do... the interiors are extremely clean.) Our Civic has about 64k kms on it. That's kilometers. That's less than 40k miles. For an 8 year old car. Crazy.

So cheap! And so many to choose from. What an unexpected but happy thing to discover about global automotive market dynamics!

Our little 1500cc engine won't suck down the gas, either. At $1.80 for a liter of petrol (somewhere around $7/gallon) we're not keen to use too much of the stuff.

You'd expect cars like the Toyota Prius to be popular here, but we don't see very many of them at all. The green-thinking angle coupled with the low petrol use makes it a shoo-in for NZ drivers, but I'm guessing when the Prius turns 6 or 7 years old we'll start seeing used ones showing up on boats from Japan as owners sell them instead of submitting to a Sha'ken on a hybrid car over there.

Hooray for School!

2008-05-06T10:57:00.002+13:00

The girls had a great first day yesterday. They came out of school happy and energetic and chatty. The homework was light and fun, some maths (it's "maths" here, like mathematics) games via a website for Zoe, a bit of spelling, and reading for both girls which is part of our nightly ritual already.

Zoe has expressed an interest in the school netball team after hearing about it from a new friend. I think it could be really good for her. I'm curious to learn about netball which I had never heard of until we came here. I saw a bit of a televised game recently and it looks a bit like basketball without the dribbling.

Haley was still a little nervous about going this morning. I stopped in to chat with her teacher to ask some questions about the homework. I was confused because there is nothing to turn in, just a sort of checklist saying you have done it, which you turn in at the end of the week. Nice! Her teacher is young and sweet and very understanding of what Haley is going through, having moved to NZ from England when she was Haley's same age. It was such comfort to me to learn that.

Zoe begins her Maori education today. The students are taught the kapa haka. Not sure what is in store for Haley's day, but I look forward to the walk home to hear all about it. Stay tuned!

First Day of School

2008-05-05T10:24:00.004+13:00

Did you hear about the woman who just left her children with complete strangers in a foreign country? That gets close to what it felt like to leave the girls at school today. And yes, I got teary, of course, because I am me, but only after I turned away from saying goodbye.

Wearing their school shirts from home like armor (we had all their friends and classmates sign them on their last day of school), they marched down the hill to a day certain to be full of confusion and apprehension. But they're kids, so it will also be filled with giggling and goofing and running around school halls in their socks, and best of all, making friends.

I will be very relieved to gather my brood at the end of this day. It's going to be all I can do to not wring every juicy detail out of them. I'm picturing the walk home, climbing the stairs up to our house on the hill, and hoping that they will choose to share the many new and amazing things they did with their day. And I will breathe a sigh of relief and smile.

Timing the Walk

2008-05-04T18:44:00.005+13:00

10 minutes down the hill to Ngaio school.

Tomorrow is the girls' first day. Monday the 5th, the start of the second term and our introduction to the New Zealand school system.

I hope they get some sleep tonight.

Scones!

2008-05-02T09:31:00.003+13:00

My Own Private Ngaio

2008-05-01T21:57:00.008+13:00

The girls and I had an absolutely lovely day today. After a massive wind and rain storm last night, it was still overcast and sprinkling this morning so we thought we'd plan a day of indoors activities. I've been dying to try my hand at baking some good old New Zealand afghan cookies using the Edmond's Cookbook, so we headed to the store for the ingredients.

On our way, we to stopped at the library to get library cards and check out some books. The girls got a ton of books on tuataras, their latest obsession, and I picked up the latest No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency book. I've been so out of it I didn't even know there was a new one coming out! I'm not sure what is more fun, anticipating it coming out and picking up my months earlier pre-ordered copy, or being out-of-the-blue surprised to find it just when I was looking for a good read. (oh, by the way, did I mention we have no tv and no intentions of getting one for the time being?)

By the time we finished at the library and the grocery store, the sun had come out. It's winter here and the sun puts on a good show when the clouds finally part. It's the really low, golden, kind that streams down in shafts. Our house sits on a hill that faces the sun all afternoon and the whole house warmed up in it's radiance and dried out after the soaking from the night before.

We decided to take advantage of the break in the clouds to head to an excellent park very close to our house that we just discovered. I took some pics of the girls going down what has got to be the hugest slide I've ever seen. Kiwi parks and play structures are flippin' awesome.

When we got home, the girls played in the room downstairs that they have claimed as the play room. They mostly read their books and drew pictures of tuataras which they hung all around the room. I made the afghan cookies, and took some pictures of the yard. The plants and trees are beautiful and Haley and I planted some herbs amongst them yesterday.

The girls start school on Monday. We had to buy all their school supplies and put together emergency kits. Zoe is really looking forward to it, but I can tell she's nervous about being the center of attention. I know she's dying to be around kids her age. Haley is a bit nervous. I think she has a harder time imagining what it is going to be like and she worries that she won't know what to do when. I'm nervous for them as well. I hope they quickly master all the little cultural differences so that they can focus on their learning. As much as I crave time alone, I know it will only take a small dose of it before I'm once again missing my girls.

At the end of the slide show are the afghan cookies, er, afghan BISCUITS I should say. They didn't turn out as tasty as the ones I've bought. New kitchen, new recipe, new ingredients in a new country. I'll just have to keep trying. Tomorrow it's scones!

note: the first pics in the slideshow were taken last weekend on our whirlwind tour of the Greater Wellington Area. I belive that is Kapiti island you can see off the coast. The views were breath-taking. We are living on the end of the earth, quite literally.

My Wife is a Driving Mutant

2008-05-01T13:50:00.005+13:00

My wife has no problem driving here.

Just as we were getting the keys to our house, we rented a small car (Toyota Corolla Hatchback) for a very reasonable price from Budget (budget.co.nz?) so that we could easily pick up items that we hadn't yet realized that we'd forgotten to get. This proved wise, as things like toilet brushes aren't really at the top of the move-in list.

We're in Ngaio now (pictures to follow) and it's not as easy to get around. Ngaio is a bowl of hills with the shops, the school and the train station on the valley floor. There are no straight streets in Ngaio. There are no perpendicular or parallel streets in Ngaio. Getting around quickly and easily requires mountaineering gear or a car.

So we picked up the car and Joanne took the helm and she just... drives.

She's always been, as she calls it, "left-right indifferent." I've used the phrase "left-right impaired" but she doesn't like the negative connotation there. When I ask her if I should turn left or right, she'll just say "go that way" and point. When we got off the plane at Auckland Airport and went through customs, the customs agents gave us directions to the next gate saying "it's to the left, and then to the left again." With Joanne in the lead, she took off into the terminal and very decidedly made a sharp right. "Is this the way? This doesn't look right..."

I'm wondering if her "left-right indifference" is somehow serving her here--as if it were some sort of mutant evolutionary condition with an unexpected upside. Sort of how being double-recessive for the sickle-cell anemia gene makes you highly resistant to malaria. She seems to have absolutely no problem driving around, maintaining her speed, obeying traffic laws and keeping her sense of direction. She's already got Ngaio pretty well wired-up and can get around extremely well.

Life On the Open Road...

2008-04-28T14:12:00.013+13:00

...with Daddy Mum Haley and Zoe!

We finally hit the highways and byways of enzed (NZ) this weekend to pick up stuff we'd bought on TradeMe. TradeMe is sort of like New Zealand's Craigslist and eBay combined, and it's quite popular. It's like eBay in terms of site interface an layout and like Craigslist in terms of community and populist origins. So far it's seemed to lack the Craiglist "crackhead dirtball" factor that runs like track-marked veins through the meat of the trading community there.

We bought a used refrigerator, a used kid's bed and a used dining room table and chairs and got really good deals compared to new versions of all of them. Joanne did a bunch of shopping around to get the idea of prices on buying things new and then could make educated buys on Trademe for the same or similar items---knowing well how much we were saving. That was some dinkum thinkum because we saved LOADS on these things.

My contribution to frugality without sacrificing quality was to sign up for a three month online subscription to consumer.org.nz so we could use their ratings and rankings to plumb the depths of TradeMe's online auctions and pluck out the best items we could find. Consumer has been a huge help in distinguishing between all these crazy brands that we don't recognize. We bought a Fischer and Paykel fridge. Who? Yeah, exactly.

After our auctions closed and our sellers were contacted, we built a list of addresses and mapped them to find out where we needed to go for pickup. They were all listed as "Wellington area."

And technically, they were. Though at probably the farthest corners of the Wellington Area that you can possibly be. This meant it was time for a...

..wait for it..

..ROAD TRIP!

We rented a well-intentioned though somewhat world-worn van from Handy Rentals (www.handy.co.nz) for a reasonable price and set out from their lot on Thorndon Quay in Wellington CBD to Paraparaumu, a seaside town up north. We'd been chomping at the bit to see more of the country and finally got our chances in the shape of a cross country milk-run to collect furnishings and so-called "white-ware" (large appliances are called "white-ware" here.)

Road trips mean cars, and cars mean driving and driving means Americans retraining their lizard-brains to work the controls in a car with the steering wheel on the "wrong" side of the cabin to navigate along the street on the "wrong" side of the road. I'd been wary of this whole experience since we got here to Wellington as I pictured myself veering out of control into oncoming traffic at every opportunity and securing my family a matching set of sucking chest wounds and massive head injuries inside a bird's nest of twisted automotive steel.

After we'd signed the rental papers with the very friendly and helpful guys at Handy, we got in the van and discovered it was a manual transmission. No worries, mate, I can drive a stick. Wait, the stick is on the LEFT. With the gear shift to the left of me, the turn signal to the right of me, Joanne riding shotgun on the left and charged with staying to the LEFT of oncoming traffic, I pulled tentatively out into Thorndon Quay traffic at around 12:30am.

We finally returned the van at about 6pm, after what resulted in a roughly five hour butt-clench for me. I think I pulled a muscle back there.

Fortunately for everyone inside and outside the van, it was perfectly fine. I was so terrified of my driving instincts putting my family in mortal danger that I was extremely circumspect about everything I did on the road. I was very mentally present the whole time, and well aware that if I were to drift in and out of reverie on the road as I normally do during flat, straight highway driving that I might come-to in the wrong lane headed straight for a bus full of nuns.

Roundabout

Ill be the round about
The words will make you out n out
--Jon Anderson and Steve Howe of Yes

The biggest challenges seemed to revolve around (hah!) the roundabouts that I believe are a nod to traditional British civil engineering. These seem to be where urban planners let as many as six individual roads all converge on the same spot and then sort of shrug and hope for the best. In practice, they're a rotating Circus of Death where cars move in a clockwise circle in and out of the lanes and the laws of physics and indeed the concepts of time and space cease to exist in any meaningful form.

You see a sign before you get to the roundabout that shows you the roads it services. The road sign has a big circle with lines running out of it at random directions. It looks a bit like The Artist Formerly Known As Prince's symbol but with extra legs at various points and lots of names tacked on here or there. You get about 5 seconds to squint at this before you're at the roundabout proper and you receive your only instruction. It's in the form of two signs that say simply "GIVE WAY!" (I've added the exclamation point here because the signmakers seem to have omitted it.)

The idea is that if no one is coming to the right, you can pull in. Then, depending on whether you're going to exit the roundabout you can either stay in the lane into which you've pulled or jockey to the right to allow others to enter. When you see your street coming around on your right, you pull to the left and signal to turn left out of the roundabout.

Sounds easy, right? Factor in that once you've entered the circle, you've left the realm of squares where streets make right angles with each other and the way you were previously headed is "forward" and entered the realm of circles where right angles relax and all roads lead away like spokes on a wagon wheel and the way you were previously headed is now completely lost in the mists of time and space.

All of my great Emergency-Mystery-Moments on the road were roundabout related.

The Little Van that Could

I mentioned that our van was well-intentioned yet world-worn. I believe it is a 1998 Toyota Hiace---a 5-speed manual transmission utility van with lots of cargo space, a fold up rear bench seat for our passengers and over 160,000 kms on it. Putting it into second or third gear was always done with a sense of opportunism and a fallback plan. Sometimes the trick was to put a lot of muscle behind it and sometimes the trick was to use a gentler more encouraging tack. When it'd finally engage, the clutch would let out a soft little squeal almost like sighing at finally giving in to the idea of changing gears in the first place.

The shocks were really soft too. Joanne even called out that fact and suggested that the soft shocks actually helped her with the car sickness that is always a concern of mine when driving her around. I think she gets most sick from rapidly changing lateral force more than anything, and the floaty shocks seemed to lessen that.

One of the standout moments for me was trundling through a roundabout out of gear and clipping the left curb while frantically searching back and forth between second and third gear before finally settling into a third with a little squeal just as we turned out of the circle. Afterwards Joanne and I just busted out laughing. It was pretty comical, though at the expense of the tired yet stalwart Toyota Hiace.

Mission Accomplished

Ultimately we hit our points of pickup and took the fridge, the bunk bed and the table over to our new rental house in Ngaio and left it all in the garage in prep for move-in date.

It was a fun trip on many fronts. We got to see more of the country, we got a tour of Wellington area highways and byways, we met some very nice and interesting people, we got out of the city for a few hours and most importantly we secured some key pieces of houseware.

The trip over to Upper Hutt from Paekakariki on highway 58 deserves a blog entry of its own, so I'll leave discussion for that time.

Next time we road trip, we'll make sure we have whatever the Kiwis like to take on road trips with us. Back in the states it used to be Funyuns and Welch's Strawberry Soda. I wonder what counts as "road trip food" here.

ANZAC

2008-04-27T13:44:00.004+13:00

ANZAC day is a big day for New Zealand. It's kind of like their Fourth of July, Memorial Day and little bit of the Boston Tea Party rolled into one.

I've read historical descriptions of ANZAC day that describe in specific terms all of the details of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps beach landing and invasion at Gallipoli in 1915, but these accounts don't really touch on what ANZAC day MEANS to New Zealanders.

Armies from Australia and New Zealand were called by England to fight the Ottoman Empire, were thrown in as expendables, and through colossal incompetence and bad luck were massacred.

ANZAC Day is a bit like the Fourth of July in America in the sense that it marks the point in history that New Zealanders saw themselves as independent. They left for war as Servants of Her Majesty and those who returned came back as New Zealanders.

It's also a little like Memorial Day in the sense that it's a day of remembrance and somber tribute to fallen men and women of all wars past. It's a day where people lay wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to remember their own relatives who died in war.

The Boston Tea Party in American history marks an event where things came to a head between the colonists and the mother country. New Zealand and the United States both started out as English colonies and shook off (to varying degrees) the economic and political chains as they emerged as sovereign states.

Of course, the Fourth of July is not somber. It's about tailgate parties, sunburn and blowing things up as much as it's about independence. It's a mid-summer day off work for cookouts and partying, blockbuster movies and big sales at all the stores.

Memorial Day is more of a day of remembrance, but it's also the first holiday weekend of summer and a time to get out of town, go to the lake house, rent a boat, barbeque on the beach, and, well, have a bunch of big sales at all the stores.

ANZAC day seems to retain more of its original flavor, though there are, in fact, big sales at all the stores.

Zoo and Park Trip on ANZAC Day

2008-04-25T23:40:00.010+13:00

Here's a little video from the visit to the Wellington Zoo today. It was my first visit and I think the third for my three girls (counting Joanne of course.)

Here's a slideshow of our trip, followed by some choice (big NZ word) videos.

The Cotton-Top Tamarins were so cool we came back for their feeding time.

We also got to spend some time with the Chimpanzees, both at feeding time and afterwards when they moved indoors. Sally has a 6 month old baby who's just now walking and trying to get away from her.

Speaking of primates, look at these simians at the park where we hung out after the Zoo:

And the whole family got in on the act on the Roktopus too. I think they also call them the "Witches' Hat." They're very fun and kind of dangerous... especially when you get a bunch of overeager yanks aboard.

Blunday Suddy Blunday

2008-04-21T15:03:00.003+13:00

We had a pretty low-key weekend. We had big plans though! We were going to rent a car and drive up to the Kapiti Coast and go kayak somewhere. We ended up doing none of that and instead hanging pretty close to the apartment most of the weekend. The weather on Friday evening and Saturday morning was disouraging us from venturing out. We got a cold snap and a bunch of rain. It was good weather for soup.

We tried a french bistro up on Cuba St. called Le Metropolitain. I think there are probably a couple of accents here and there in that name, maybe. At any rate, it was probably the first bad meal we've had in Wellington. It was expensive, service was slow, and the food wasn't very good. Three strikes! The staff was authentically French, however, so I'd put that in the minus column as well. Don't eat there, we definitely won't go back. D'accord?

At least we got out of there before the Edith Piaf cover band got set up and started to play. I'm pretty sure playing Edith Piaf records over a bowl of whole milk would yield cottage cheese in the first 10 seconds. It sounds a bit like a young boy being beaten to death with an accordian.

There was, however, a highlight to that meal and that was Haley and the Escargots. Sounds like a cool name for a book, a band or maybe an art film.

Joanne and I knew that Haley would eventually have snails some day, and we both looked forward to it with great anticipation. Haley is our adventurous eater---often preferring exotic foods over the mundane pizza-and-fries preference which is almost universal among the world's children. Haley goes for the squid, octopus, heavily spiced meats, bitter green vegetables like kale and spinach. We knew she'd be up for escargots, and sure enough when enticed with the option of eating snails she was all over it.

And she LOVED them.

She had the escargots tongs and the two-pronged fork since her snails were still in their shells when served so she got the full experience. Watching her work them out of the shells and hungrily chow them down was a singular joy for both of us. It made everything else about "Le Metropolitain" worth it.

Sunday I gave mom a much needed break and took the girls to the park, bought them some ice creams and let them lose their minds. We also stopped off at an art museum and Zoe took pictures of pretty much everything in the place. It was an absolute blast.

On Sunday night we met up with Jake and Brandie, other insane immigrants like us who moved with their two young daughters from a comfortable and perfectly happy situation back in the States to the Wellington area this year.

We knew Jake and Brandie back in our previous life and by pure coincidence their moss-free rolling stone knocked into our own as we were preparing to leave the country in March and we reacquainted ourselves. We each arrived within about a month of each other. And we're currently living in apartments on the same street. Only about half a block away from each other. The similarities of our situations are quite remarkable.

I think it's cool that we can kind of lean on each other a bit as we get underway as full fledged Kiwis. They're driving cars already! That blows me away.

Milky Way Bars

2008-04-18T16:33:00.006+13:00

Milky Way bars here are just like Three Musketeers back home: just whipped nougat.

There's no layer of caramel on top of that nougat, they just cover the nougat with chocolate and be done with it.

Weird.

The Morning Parade of Faces

2008-04-17T10:10:00.004+13:00

Since we're living in the city in a serviced apartment, my commute to work is along city streets (and not too many of them since we're so close) and past a lot of busy city people also walking to work.

When walking on a crowded sidewalk, you stay left---not right. In NZ they drive on the left, and the "keep left" mentality carries over to pedestrian traffic too. In fact, if you're walking straight towards someone who's also walking straight towards you and it's clear you'll need to step to the side to pass each other, the other person will step to his left---your right. This was unexpected the first time it happened to me, as I stepped (naturally) to my right and ended up doing a bit of a back-and-forth dance with the man which ended in apologies on both ends before going about our business.

I've been meaning to take a picture on Willis St. on a crowded sidewalk to post here, but haven't ever had my camera during busy sidewalk times so I took this picture I found on Google and flipped it (you can see "Taxi" reads as "ixaT" on the sign) to demonstrate sidewalk direction in Wellington.

I love my morning walk. I love the parade of faces going by on the right. These faces aren't the kinds of faces that I'm accustomed to seeing on the sidewalks. The shapes and colors and styles and adornments are fascinating and slightly exotic.

These are city folk. Many are gussied up for a day of Big Business in their dark suits, clacking heels and white collared shirts. Much of the hair is close-cropped and tidy. Younger men's faces have short hair spiked straight up with beauticians' chemicals or smoothed to a ridge along the middle of the head like the dorsal fin of a fish. Older mens' hair lines sport widow's peaks more often than not.

But sprinkled in with all of the business-attired are the various and sundry. And they vary a lot. I see earthy hirsute men AND women with hair in dreadlocks and tied up in the back into a bunch marching past me. There are youngish men and women in black clothes, pierced and dyed and buckle-strapped into leatherwear heeling it down the thoroughfare. There are doughy middle aged guys in T shirts and jeans like me. You could say the same thing about the morning crowd on the streets of San Francisco, actually, and you'd be spot-on there too.

But somehow these faces are different. The features are different, the colors are different, the hair and hems and heights and drapes and dresses and décolletages are notably different.

And every morning it's fascinating to walk past all of these faces and be bombarded with these images as my brain is still slowly grinding into gear.

Cheers, Mate!

2008-04-16T10:31:00.006+13:00

Something I'm finding useful down here is "cheers." It's a common Kiwi utterance that's used in all sorts of situations. If you complete a sale with a cashier, it's common to hear "cheers." If you pick something up off the ground that someone dropped and hand it to them, they'll say "cheers." Someone getting into an elevator you're holding for them can say "cheers" in place of "hello" and "thanks" or they may wait until they get off to say "cheers" as a sort of "thank you" and "goodbye."

It's a sort of friendly linguistic spackle used to mend cracks in conversation or to put a friendly sort of sentiment into situations that normally don't require speaking. I like it.

It's kind of like everyone's walking around engaged in an extended round of toasting with pints of beer, only they've set their beers down to go about their business but are still in the mood.

"Mate" is added to the end of "cheers" a lot. I don't know if women get referred to as "mate" though I suspect it's a guy thing. Total strangers refer to me as "mate" even though it has an air of familiarity about it. It's kind of like "man" in the states if "man" were more appropriate in all situations. Saying "Thanks, man." to someone at , say, an Information Booth at the museum is sort of breaking through the layer between the air-of-professionalism and the air-of-familiarity. It might be a little weird if the guy is a sixtysomething art docent and you're in your thirties.

Here in Wellington I get the sense that there's no such layer. It's pretty normal for people, where there's a situation calling for professional distance, to call me "mate" or say things like, "Cool." to indicate that things have worked out satisfactorily and we're done with our interaction.

There's a sort of comfortable informality that's disarming. I'm working on adopting a few of the patterns of speaking that contribute to comfortable informality. It's fun to spread it around.

Cheers, mate.