Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition
In which we find ourselves in another part of the world
The very first box in the new house. We spent the last weekend in June moving various fragile and awkward things ourselves so the movers could whoosh through on Monday.
We filled up a truck AND a cargo van.
It took a few days to start really cooking.
Somehow, all this eventually fit into the closets.
The payoff.
We’re all moved in to our new house. Well, almost… there’s still pictures to hang and some things to organize. But for everyday activities, we’re here, and we know where our stuff is.
It’s been mostly a full time job, going hard the first week of unpacking and slowing down gradually. I think we can pretty much say that moving is done and normal puttering is beginning. Today, for example, we triaged our pictures, and I put some of those little rubber bumpers inside cabinet doors… why the previous owners didn’t do that is baffling!
The silver lining in the cloud of unemployment has been that I’ve had the time to do all this settling in. But that can’t last forever, and next week I’m back on a plane for a networking event that has taken on new importance.
Matariki is the Māori name for the cluster of stars that rises in midwinter and for many Māori heralds the start of the new year. In Japanese, this constellation asterism is known as Subaru, and I learned it as the Seven Sisters or the Pleiades. It was already too light when I took this picture, but the stars in question are over there somewhere.
Matariki is also the newest public holiday in the NZ calendar, and we celebrated it this year on Friday the 28th of June.
I don’t know a lot about the cultural practices associated with Matariki, other than the vague idea that you’re supposed to reflect on the old year, flush out the bad stuff, and then look ahead to the new year refreshed and invigorated. Fair enough, that seems like a good plan!
I did my bit for marking the annual change this year. I finished my job the day before (thanks for nothing, National Party government). And after I had a bracing sunrise swim, we hauled the first carload of stuff over to the new house… one down, quite a few to go!
The big moving truck comes on Monday. The job search starts in earnest on Tuesday.
Happy New Year! Manawatia a Matariki! Bring it on!
We will move to the new house over the coming weekend.
We’ve been packing steadily for a month now. On the one hand, that’s been nice… doing a couple of boxes here and there instead of madly exhausting ourselves for a few days. We have a lot of stuff, and we don’t use most of it every day (hmm…) so this slow and steady process has been fine.
But on the other, it leaves plenty of time for the sadness to creep in. We’d invested time, money and thought into making this house ours over the past almost four years. Now we’re consciously stripping ourselves out. We are daily faced with the idea that no matter what a great job we did finding curtains for a window or arranging pictures on a wall, nobody cares. At least not a potential buyer, someone with whom we may share very few cultural touchstones.
So, into the boxes it all goes. We’ll keep what’s important to us, like this plant which has survived every move in the last 37 years. We will reassemble it all in the next few weeks, and then we’ll find new curtains, new arrangements, and turn the new house into our new home.
I was out metal detecting the other day, way out in the shallows of low tide, nobody around me except a few of these red-billed gulls.
I didn’t find any treasure but I sure had fun watching these guys stir up the sandy mud with their fast feet. I guess it must bring some tiny little creatures out of hiding?
The TikTok world loves fast footwork. I won’t link you to them, but whether it’s jumping rope, tap dancing, roller blading a slalom course, or who knows what else, this kind of video is a thing. Hopefully this clip also goes viral and I will be able to retire on the ad royalties.
Oh wait… I don’t do ads. Or TikTok! Oh well, enjoy!!
The post-flood renovations and improvements to the Northcote Bowling Club (which we in the petanque club share) are just about done.
One of the last projects was redoing the BBQ area. It looks great now.
As an aside, I’ll mention that antipodean barbecues usually have a flat griddle for part or even all of the cooking surface instead of a perforated or wire grill like I’m used to from the US. I was horrified at first but have come to see the value… not only is the grease not dripping into the works, but it’s way easier to fry onions!
This pumping station has been under construction for the last 2-3 years, snarling up parking at Mairangi Bay, which is my group’s home swimming beach. It’s finally operational.
The pumping station promises to move a bunch of wastewater from its big underground reservoir to the water treatment plant a few miles away. This is supposed to reduce the frequency and quantity of sewage overflows during storms. That in turn means cleaner water in the bays, and so more swimmable days. (Or maybe it’s better to say fewer unswimmable days, since actually the water is pretty darn good for being in a big urban area.)
We’ve had one big rainstorm since it opened, and all the beaches recorded sewage overflows (according to the Safeswim website) just like they always do. I don’t know enough to say whether the pumps are actually doing anything, but I sure hope we see some improvements!!
I took the metal detector out to Devonport yesterday. Didn’t find a pot of gold, or really anything interesting. I eventually moved to another beach and found a few old coins.
But after a shower soaked me a bit, this super rainbow appeared. one end was pointing right at the big navy ship in port…
One afternoon last week I found myself in Parnell, walking on one of the very first streets we walked on when we got to New Zealand seven years ago.
I was blown away by the painted utility boxes back then… something I’d never really seen before. Now, they’ve become a common sight that I don’t even think about. There are a lot of them, often painted by community groups, and many aren’t even that well done.
But here’s a good one. If the apartment building weren’t there, it’s more or less a representation of what you would see… that impressive structure is the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which sits on that hill which is just about there. I haven’t actually seen a Cheshire Cat in those trees, but who knows?
Mostly the “big issues” are things that happen far away or to other people. But here’s someone I’ve met several times, and her partner with whom I have spent quite a bit of time in the pool and the ocean. And what’s really a bigger issue than living or dying?
“The best shitty option” certainly seems right. I hope Tracy’s story inspires political thinkers in the UK and elsewhere.
My week in Dallas at the HL7 meeting is especially filled with meeting rooms, partly because my schedule happens to be extra full and partly because the hot weather and the hotel location conspire to keep me indoors.
But I’ve still been able to get out in the evening with the gang for way too much food…
The current solar storm is all over the news and our social media feeds today. It’s caused the northern and southern lights to flicker in places they don’t very often.
In musing about hopes and dreams for the new house, we wondered whether our new vista would have been dark enough to see anything last night.
Shortly after that conversation, the current owners sent us this picture. YES! Amazing, even though we didn’t see it ourselves.
Now to find out if we’ll be lucky enough to catch the next time this supposedly once-in-a-century show comes on.
For the 11th, and hopefully final, time, we just bought a house.
It’s about 40 minutes north of our current place. Still technically Auckland, but you gotta drive through some sheep farms to get there.
As much as we like our current house, this new one seems even better for us… the views, walk down to the beach, a garage, fewer stairs. It has the potential for a tenant or Airbnb on the lower level. There’s even a butler’s pantry! The upstairs was renovated a couple years ago by… wait for it… one of my swimming buddies! When I called him to ask for advice, he said hang on what’s the exact address? And sure enough, what a wonderful coincidence.
We’ll be able to walk to all the shops we need in two directions and, with some adjustments, continue all our current activities (pétanque, swimming, Lee’s volunteering) up in the new community. The gym has a location close by.
Altogether, it feels like it was meant to be. It was sold at auction, quite common here, but as it turned out we were the only bidders. We probably paid a few thousand too much, but we weren’t off by much I don’t think.
Now comes a few furious weeks of moving and prepping our house for sale. But that will pass quickly, and from that point forward it’s (virgin) margaritas on the deck, listening to the birds and watching the sailboats in the bay.
My former colleague Joni always shared the bounty of his feijoas with me at the office. I was thrilled when he called me up last week and offered me a batch.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, feijoas are a NZ national thing. In our house we have one “love ‘em” and one “hate ‘em”.
We had a nice lunch at a Balinese restaurant and he gave me two big grocery bags full. Here they are laid out to dry off a bit on our NZ silhouette beach towel. After leaving them closed up in the spare bedroom for a day or two the smell of feijoas was wonderful.
Now it’s smoothies for a while…
I saw the new Americas Cup yacht out practicing today. It was going so fast, unbelievably fast, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it fast.
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 