crazyscot

An eventful Saturday.

This morning I went to visit the electrical wholesalers, for the last couple of bits I need for tidying up the shed electrics, then to the PO box (nothing of import) and the supermarket.

This afternoon was scheduled for some of the last bits of the shed painting, until disaster struck: the kettle broke! OMG, oh noes, etc. The lid fixings had sheared, the upshot of which was that the lid wouldn't close, so the steam cut-off wouldn't operate. The priority of doing the painting was rapidly dwarfed by the need to have the ability to reliably summon hot drinks - especially as rustica's term starts on Monday - so we set off to the kettle mine (which looked suspiciously like Noel Leeming). The chap agreed it was a warranty failure and started working through the options... but as it was obsolete (bought 19 months ago), he couldn't authorise a replacement without talking to the service centre on Monday to see precisely which kettle he could replace it with.

48 hours without a kettle?!? In the words of a famous-in-NZ ad campaign, "Yeah, right." But he thought his manager (who was busy helping another customer) could authorise it. Thankfully he could and did, so we returned triumphant with a shiny metallic red kettle. (Somewhat alarmingly, it seems that Russell Hobbs are doing a whole line of brushed metal appliances in vivid colours.)

I observe that having bought a kettle in July 2011 with a tag price of $90, on which we got 50% discount because we were buying nearly $2k of other appliances at the time, we now have a brand new kettle (tag price $150) and a fresh two years warranty. I don't think I'll ever understand retail mark-up...

Melodrama averted, we set about the painting.

Afterwards I was noodling around on FB and one of those sponsored suggested pages (also known as ads) came up in my news feed. Crabbies Ginger Beer NZ. That got my attention. We used to love that stuff; got through a lot of it before emigrating but it wasn't available here.

Inside my head, Picard's voice declared a Red Alert and called for some scans to identify the source of the signature. Some searching revealed that Crabbies have been importing since November last year, and it's available nationwide in Liquorland (a chain of bottle shops).

Picard ordered an away team (of one) to go out in a shuttlecraft (which looked suspiciously like our car) to the asteroid (bottle shop) suspected to contain the precious dilithium ore. I tore out of the house, muttering cryptic mutterings to C, who was still working in the garden at the time.

The chaps in the bottle store were slightly surprised to see a punter walk in, look around, make a bee line for the Crabbies, then pick up an entire case of the stuff. (Seems it normally sells in single bottles.) They scratched their heads for a second over promotional pricing, then asked me for ID. That made my week :-D

When I got back I called rustica over and opened the boot. Her jaw dropped :)

But having responded to an ad (and how!), having demonstrated I am sliding into a certain target demographic - I feel a bit dirty now.

Radio silence for a bit, but I have been busy...

We have a shed. Long story short, we had a builder in to reclad it recently (it used to be asbestos), but reinstating the door was left to us. So I made a new door (actually, a double stable door, so four doorlets) to replace it. Rather than say more here, I wrote it up as a guest post for the Country Skills Blog which will hopefully be appearing soon, along with a sweet lemon pickle recipe (awesomely tasty - will be making more of that!). More photos to follow as we (well, mostly rustica) have been painting this week.

In case you don't read the blog and are curious, I made a few more guest posts the other month (lemonade, lemon liqueur, lemon sorbet and a rather hot lemon pickle recipe - which is itself an adaptation of a lime pickle recipe that miss_next posted a few years ago). Spotting a pattern? Well, we do have a lemon tree, and it provides us with rather a lot of lemons...

I had been contemplating writing something up to mark the anniversary (this Wednesday) of the big quake that took out half the CBD. The other day the Press (our regional newspaper, Christchurch and South Island) solicited people's memories of that day. To my pleasant surprise, they found mine interesting enough to publish!

• Special feature section (mine's under The Future - scroll down)
  
• My article itself

( This is what I submitted, for posterity. They very lightly copy-edited it for publication. )

rustica and I had this conversation the other night where we ended up listing all the wonderful things we could think of about NZ in an attempt to try and entice people to follow us.

So, four months since we set sail, so to speak, where are we? ( Read more... )

Of all my favourite ways to wake up in the morning... let's just say that being called out by my inner paranoid on a full-scale security alert because the garage door just opened itself isn't one of them. It really did happen; this house has an electric opener, which is relatively loud in the upstairs bedrooms and pretty unmistakeable. I remember glancing at the clock as I threw on my dressing gown, seeing it was 4:04 and thinking something suitably inscrutable. As it happens, that was appropriate status code as I got to the garage just in time for the door to finish closing itself.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot?

My best guess is that the opening control on the wall is dodgy; I already knew it was half dodgy as the plastic button (which actuates a microswitch) was half-jammed. (This is as opposed to the remote, which we know is dodgy, but in a different way - the battery spring is loose.) I popped the plastic button off the switch trivially (not a good sign!) and replaced it, and it's definitely sitting differently in the surround. Why it chose that particular moment to activate remains a mystery, but I switched off the opener at the mains and will leave it that way for a few days.

No, I didn't get back to sleep, why do you ask?

Two weeks ago we had Snowpocalypse 2. Last week was glorious, with temperatures hitting 20C. This week isn't looking quite so impressive, but still pretty fair. And yet it's still August, morally February if one naively believes that the austral seasons are six months off from those north of the equator.

We've been food shopping at the weekends since C started work, and are surprised. I wouldn't dream of visiting the supermarket on a Saturday afternoon - they're inevitably heaving. Yet we've found the big Countdown stores to be fine. Busy, yes, but nowhere near heaving; able to park near the store entrance, and not needing to queue for ages. OK, if you go to the shopping malls at that sort of time, they're busy - I guess with people who shop for the experience - but evidently the average Kiwi does their food shopping at other times. Just when is a mystery, as they don't seem to do so on Sundays either, nor the occasional evening that we've gone... Does an NZ passport carry with it the ability to use a hitherto-concealed eighth day of the week? I Think We Should Be Told!

Last week I received two letters from HMRC, dated a day apart. One of them thanked me for my leaving-the-UK form, said they wouldn't consider pre-emptively refunding my tax paid this year as I'm already on Self Assessment, but have I considered joining the Non-Resident Landlord scheme to get my rent paid to me without tax taken off? The other letter (surprise surprise) thanked me for my NRL application and confirmed that they have approved it. Left hand, right hand, etc.; but I don't expect any different. At least when ringing the IRD here to activate my online self-service account the process was straightforward and efficient, so while I will have to fill in one tax return for each of the UK and NZ next year, I don't expect the latter to be in any way taxing (ho ho). Famous last words...

This afternoon I am sitting in at home, waiting for the removers to turn up with our kit. They're late, due to the MAF inspector turning up very late, but I've just had the call to say that MAF have released our kit and so it's on its way. At last!

This house isn't quite so bad now the cold snap has passed. ( Read more... )
We are now renting a PO box. I have updated my contact details post (linked from my profile in case you want to update your address books).

My work are quite keen to recruit more engineers (generally embedded, DSP and hardware) and have a number of positions open, so if you fancy working in a seismically active zone, let me know :-)

We are slowly getting the hang of this place. There are a couple of shops and takeaways nearby, squirrelled off down a little street. There's a noticeable price difference between the dairies/superettes ($7.50 for a loaf of bread and 2l of milk!) and the supermarkets.

We've been to see one house, and have two more viewings today; we've also started trying to get our heads around what's available at two of the larger malls nearby and the different ranges at the three major supermarket chains. I've got my IRD (tax file) number, which involved a rather long queue at an AANZ office [*] over towards the dusty, earthquake-battered side of town.

[*] Yes, the AA. Here they act as agents for Land Transport NZ for all your tasty driver and vehicle licensing goodness, as well as carrying out a number of services for the IRD, passport office and so forth. They offer mutual memberships from other AAs across the world... except the UK, whose AA cut themselves off from the others a few years ago. Duh.

Speaking of cars, we've also been to a car dealer to see what's around and available. We're contemplating a Mazda 2 or Mazda 3, if the price works out OK; there's something to be said for arranging a lease-like finance deal to cover the 2 year horizon we've set ourselves for deciding whether we're staying here long-term. Most cars in NZ have auto boxes as there just isn't the resistance to them here that we see back home. I have at times been a good bunny regarding this country's wacky right-of-way while turning rule - and also completely screwed it up at others. rustica bought a copy of the Road Code, which I ought to study as well.

The motel room is nicely appointed with modern fittings, though (as ever) it's a motel room. The very new toaster beeps five times before springing up. I wonder if it's a relation of Talkie the Toaster.

And yes, it is 0730 here. The jet lag is slowly moving in the right direction, but I've still been awake since half past four. The first vestiges of Sunday's dawn are just starting to appear.