An Odd But Fun Saturday.

It's been quiet around here, and for that I apologize. I wish I could say it's because I was out and about galavanting around New Zealand being awesome, but sadly it's just the opposite. It's been quiet, boring etc. Work's winding down, a certain malaise brought about by that has made doing anything not so fun.

SO! In order to get out of my funk, I did two things. First off, on Friday, I had the best Kite Surfing session of my life. Everything went perfectly. No gear foul ups, good wind, good friends and a lot of lessons learned. I'm now getting fairly proficient. More about that later.

After that, being as I was still sore from the Friday, Carly and I postponed our plans for camping and instead decided to simply head up the Hutt Valley to the park she'd taken her class camping in February. That was the plan at least, the reality was slightly different.

We had a few errands to run, mostly at the Home Depot equivalent: Bunnings. Problem is that I always get lost when driving in the Hutt. It's a dark spot in my internal GPS. So we end up driving through Upper Hutt, Lower Hutt, parts of Petone etc. all looking for this Bunnings that I've been to probably 5 times in the recent past. All of a sudden, Carly points up the mountain and says: "PICKAPART!" (it took a while for my brain to parse what she was saying).

Our car had been vandelized while we lived in town, someone had broken the passenger side mirror. Being that it's a cheap as chips car, going to a dismantlers to get a new mirror was proving difficult and I certainly wasn't going to pay for a new one. One of the guys in my welding class, a fellow subaru owner, pointed me towards a do it yourself wrecking yard called Pick-a-Part, but I'd never managed to find out where it was. Turns out it was right in front of us.

So Carly and I paid our dollar entrance fee and stepped behind the door to find a HUGE wrecking yard of cars, all lifted off the ground, in various states of damage and completeness. We strolled through the Subby section, found a Legacy Wagon that was the right year and I went to work dismantling the doors while Carly dismantled all the windshield wiper assemblies (ours were looking a bit rusted). Grabbing various bits and pieces along the way, we got all the parts that were broken on our current car. We both felt rather handy and I felt more than a little manly :)

Got to the cash and It turns out the total cost for the mirror, visor, 3 windshield wipers and bits of trim was 41$. I definitely saved at least 200$ for spending 30 minutes there. What a success!

After that, we headed to Kaotoke Regional Park. It was a stunning spot, definitely popular as a walking / pick-nick park, with some nice views, a river system that feeds into the Hutt River and a ton of native trees. It's definitely a very leisurely stroll, but it was a nice way to spend some time together alone. Carly decided to go swimming in the (much to cold) river, given that she had a Rasher (basically a neoprene shirt made like a wetsuit). I had no such luxuries and contented myself with a quick foot soak while watching her play in the water.

Heading back, we stopped for ice cream, I made Lamb Kafta (lebanese ground lamb shish kababs) on the BBQ and we relaxed by watching some TV together.

Simple relaxing pleasures :)

Moonlight Over the Bay

Around 10:30 last night, Carly yelled up to Wes and I (who were playing some Xbox) to take a look out of the window. The moon was very low for some reason and it being a beautifully clear night, was reflecting over the water in a fairly stunning way.

Digging out a tripod and putting all of my camera knowledge to the test (boy am I glad I took that photography course!) i managed to get a a few nice night photos. Click on them for the full resolution pictures:

Dive dive!!!

so blaise (what a hubbie) thinks i don't spend nearly enough on myself. he's been on me to do something, anything that is a me thing. so today i did it, i walked into the Island Bay dive shop and signed up for my international scuba diving certification.

my course will start april 15, i have 5 nights of theory then 2 full days on saturday and sunday of ocean dives. plus this shop is offering me 6 free dives with gear on saturdays with their club to improve my skills even more.

then Blaise decided that i would receive my birthday prezzie early and he bought me flippers, booties, mask and snorkel today. i'll get a picture of it later, so i'm going to hit the local pool tomorrow on my day off to practice with my flippers, i need to get a doctor certification next week and i'll take my snorkel and mask to Island bay when its came and paddle about.

FISHIES!!!

i'm so excited.

ps. dad i got another thing to do with you when you show up. are your dive tags still good?

Carly's 6 month post

Well i do miss how often i could call my relatives i have to say this new home has certainly strengthened my choice to come to NZ. The space and freedom of this new house is making me feel more relaxed and as Wes said "now this view, this view is what i expect of NZ" and he is so right.

school is awesome, i love my kids, i love my teacher partner, the vibe in the class is great. he's leaving end of april for his course in the USA so soon i'll be full time for a few months. i already do my 2.5 days and i've been relieving every week as well at least once a week. i've been very lucky to get all of teacher partners relief days. so i get to work with my kids, continue my regular work and get paid than my regular pay to do so...sweet!

We have a great bunch of friends here. Who i want to thank btw for helping us move, that fridge wouldn't have got up the stairs without their efforts, so thanks Alan and Charlie! And thanks to the lovely Rachel who brought a mexican casserole and fresh garlic bread for us to eat that night.

life is good, so kisses to family and friends back home and come visit us when you can.

The Obligatory 6 Month Post.

As of today (North American Time) we've been here exactly 6 months. To be honest, the last few weeks I hadn't even thought about it. It wasn't until we were done our move etc. that Carly and I remembered. I guess that's a good thing. I really haven't thought much about Canada, at least not in the "Man I wish I was back there" sense. By and large, things here have been going very well for us (probably better then really could be expected) and for that I'm grateful.

We've got some good friends, a nice place, we are both working, we lack for nothing. It's not been without its fair share of problems, but nothing we couldn't deal with. The real question is, was it worth it? So far I think I'll say yes.

So rather than recap the ups and downs, I leave you with this:

Settling In.

... And we're back. I've got to hand it to our ISP, Snap they have been 8 shades of awesome overall for us. We have our local phone and the intarwebs with them and we've had very good service. Things went off without a hitch for the switchover. I wish I could say the same about the move...

Well in all truthfulness, it went well. The events leading up to it were a little frustrating however. Carly's school has a very tight parking lot. on the edges of said parking lot are posts that are meant to remind people no to park their cars so the noses of said cars are over the sidewalk. Doing so makes it difficult to get kids and supplies in. Sadly, those posts are not particularly well anchored and have a tendency to fall over, leaving their anchoring point (a tube anchored into the concrete that sticks up about a foot from the surface) at the perfect height to slide undetected under a bumper and get hooked. The result can be seen here:



Suffice it to say I was not a very happy camper.

The move itself was largely uneventful. As is the case with a lot of rentals here, several appliances were missing. We jumped on Trademe to find a fridge and washer (we're still looking for a dryer). Once the items were won, we arranged to borrow a car with a towhook from our good friend Alan. Herein lies one of the nicest surprises so far for moving in New Zealand. Getting a trailer is a) easy b) cheap and c) very low on hassles. Every gas station has a few that you can show up and grab. Nice ones too, with a wire cage around them for tall items, in relatively good repair etc.

Wes and I headed off bright and early to get the washer. I had googled the address and thought I knew where I was going. Turns out I didn't. Long story short, 2 1/2 hours later and we finally managed to pick up the washer. The fridge was easy to find, difficult to retrieve. We managed however. The fridge itself is HUGE. It's a design I've never seen before, a 3 door model. The freezer is at the top, the fridge in the middle and there's a dedicated crisper drawer at the bottom for veges etc. About 15 years old, it's not going to be winning us any energy conservation awards but it was cheap and it works.

Now, our new place is a split level townhouse. The kitchen is unfortunately at the top of said house. The fridge was large. You can see the problem. The solution was fairly straightforward. Raw Strength. We got a few friends to help us and we managed to get it to the top. We promptly celebrated by cracking a few beers, waiting for dinner to be cooked (Rachel had brought us a wonderful mexican casserole) and slapping ourselves on the back.

We're still unpacking now, but in the end, it was totally all worth it. Island Bay is shaping up to be a very cute neighborhood, the townhouse so far is working out and this is what I get to wake up to every morning. (click on the photo for a full sized view)

Incommunicado.

Just a note, but over the next couple of days, we'll be moving to our new place in Island Bay. Internet will be spotty as will be land lines. Our mobiles will be the best way to get a hold of us. I'll send out the details via email to all family members just in case. Hopefully the internet hookup will go off without a hitch and we'll be back on line by the weekend. The very, very busy weekend.

Welding

One of the things I've completely forgotten to mention up until now is that I'm currently in a Welding class. Specifically, I've been working on learning MIG, TIG and Arc Welding. The course is at the adult education wing of the Wellington High School which offers quite a few courses I'm interested in for approx. 150$ per course (8 weeks, 2 hours a week, that's less then 10$ an hour for a workshop with unlimited welding materials)

Why you might ask? Well, the basic reason was that I wanted to try something completely different from what I typically do; something that would take my mind off of the day to day and end up with a useful skill to have around for the crazy projects I typically end up doing.

I also wanted to see if it's something I could get more training on if I decided to give up my current career. Having a backup that's more or less always in demand isn't a bad idea. In the end though, the number of projects that I dream of that could use basic welding was the catalyst for the course.

Right off the bat, I'm going to be building a steel framed aluminum roof box for our car. something like a Thule box but done DIY. The instructor of my course actually works for a company that does steel tubed cargo protectors that go between the driver and the cargo in commercial vans. He's able to get tubing cheap and get it cut and bent for me. All that would be left to do for me is weld it together.

Further along, furniture might be a possibility. Making legs and frames for tables and bookshelves out of box steel would match much of our furniture.



Finally, I'd eventually like to get into restoring older japanese motorcycles. Honda CBs from the 60s and 70s preferrably. Part of that is customizing them to get the "cafe racer" look for them, as seen in this excellent example from www.cb750cafe.com:

That's the dream at least. We'll see how it goes in the end. So far the class has been going well. I've only burned myself significantly once, I'm starting to get the hang of MIG welding and I can join two steel tubes fairly reliably. All in all, it's another skill to add to my collection of excentric intrests :)

Riding the Downturn.

A few people now have asked me what the impact of the financial crisis has been here in New Zealand. First off, I am most definitely not an economist (didn't even play one on tv), nor do I have my finger on the pulse of the New Zealand markets. I do, however, have a friend whose in the financial trade as well as a vested interest in the country around me. So briefly, here's what I'm seeing these days:

Right off the bat, the NZ Dollar has tanked. it was hovering around 0.77$Cdn when we moved here, now it's aroun 0.63$Cdn. Though this is actually quite beneficial for someone with money outside of the country who's planning on staying, overall it's made life much more expensive. Gas is up 0.40$NZ/Litre, most consumer goods have gone up about 20% and it sounds like they are going to keep climbing as transport costs increase. Our grocery bill, surprisingly, hasn't gone up much at all. Carly and I try and only buy local produce, meat and other products, so we're not seeing as much of an impact.

Other then that there's definitely been some losses of jobs. There's a lot of talk about some smaller redundancies, though there haven't been a lot of big announcements. I heard through the industry contacts I have that there were some layoffs in my field, which is one of the reasons I decided to jump on the opportunity I was offered.

There's been some coverage of the New Zealand real-estate market in Canada. My dad mentioned some of the coverage was spinning it as a collapse, or at least a dramatic decrease. From what I've seen and talked to my friend about, the context of real-estate in NZ makes interpretation a little more difficult. Yes, the interest rates are the lowest they've ever been (hovering around 5-6%). Sales are down and average price is down slightly. This doesn't quite paint an accurate picture however.
From my understanding, Auckland is having a worse time of the crisis then the rest of the country. Auckland also represents 50% of the population. When things are bad there, the national numbers take a dive. Prices for housing in the major urban areas were in many peoples eyes overinflated and Auckland was the worse. So it's correcting and by doing so it's dragging all the averages down.
There's another big factor to take into account that isn't as clear. NZ tax law is vastly simplified compared to the US or Canada. As such, there are very few ways of reducing the amount of taxes you pay. The most popular is running a business of some kind as secondary income. This allows you to write off a part of the expenses. So many people choose to own an income property as their business. It's a bit like a forced savings account, it makes a little (maybe 5%) return on average, you have to pay down the mortgage every month, but you get to write some of it off.
There's been a definite hit in the income property market. There's no doubt about that. We live in a building where most of the apartments are bought to be let and the ones that are for sale right now aren't moving no matter what they try. However I'm not convinced that the residential (primary market) is doing that badly. Prices for houses we'd consider buying are staying pretty stable and they seem to be moving, at least in Wellington.

The biggest thing I've noticed however are the number of small businesses that have folded. "97 percent of New Zealand businesses employ under 20 staff." according to this article. Many of them are hurting. Doing a walk through our neighborhoods (Mt Cook and Newtown) you see a lot of For Lease signs. Small companies are letting go of staff, having very agressive sales and being bought up by other competitors. The Readings mall is a ghost town, I counted at least 6 For Lease signs. Some businesses are still operating despite the fact their building is up For Lease. I don't quite know what that means, but I'm guessing it can't be good.

Overall, the downturn has definitely hit New Zealand. We're seeing the government take the same line as many other countries, stimulus packages flying left and right. Carly and I are lucky that we're both employed right now, Carly for a year, I'm starting a new job so should be covered for at least a little while. Hopefully it doesn't last too long, but if it does, it may make buying a house a lot easier :) Silver linings and all...