My mind has gone blank

There was something that crossed my mind earlier which I fully intended to blog about. I'm sure it was really interesting, but I have completely forgotten what it was.

Instead, I will talk briefly about New Zealand school uniforms. They are so old-fashioned! It is a common sight to see teenage boys walking along the road in shirt, blazer, long shorts, and knee-high socks. Long uniform shorts, something I have never seen in real life before moving here. And there is at least one school here that kits its girls out in skirts so long that they practically brush the ground. In most Irish schools, those skirts would be hemmed and/or rolled up to somewhere mid-thigh. My own school skirt was rolled up at the waist until I grew tall enough that it barely skimmed the tops of my knees when worn the usual way, and that was still quite conservative compared to some of the other schools in the area.

I'm all in favour of school uniforms - they surely make it easier for parents (although not necessarily cheaper) than having to sort out fashionable outfits for their kids to wear to school, and I imagine it makes for less clothing-related bullying, too. And I don't have a problem with the uniforms that are worn here - I just found it really noticeable.

Sadly I have not managed to take any photos of kids in school uniform for this blog entry, as I fear it would make me look like I was up to no good if I start stalking them with my camera. But here is one from the interweb for your delectation - it is from a Dunedin website, but seems fairly like what I see here in Christchurch too:

The carpets are in!

It is a beautiful summery day today, and I have taken the day off work - what perfect timing. This morning I went to a nearby garden centre and picked up some bedding plants to go beside the front door, and also a few essentials for growing seeds. We have a vast amount of seeds ready to be planted, as soon as we figure out how and where!

On my way back from the garden centre I stopped by the house, and the carpets were already done! It looks great and is just what we wanted - an inoffensive neutral.
By the way, do you like how the curtains appear to be expecting a flood? All the curtains in this room (three windows plus the sliding doors) were absolutely disgusting when we moved in, covered in dust and grease, and were also in quite poor condition with the plastic backing flaking and peeling. Obviously we don't plan to keep them for the long term, and we also didn't want to spend any money on cleaning them, so I chucked them in the washing machine. They all shrank by several inches. Oops.

Also, our garden now has little blue flowers growing in it, which is a change from two days ago. I'm pretty sure they're weeds, as there are some blooming in the lawn as well, but they add a welcome splash of colour, and a nice contrast to the yellowy bush thing (sorry, no idea what to call it) behind them.


Close-up:

Another busy week

It is Wednesday night, and we have spent every evening this week at the house. Phil and Lou did loads of wallpaper stripping, as did Skry. I did some wallpaper stripping and a lot of painting. We all helped with lifting the old carpets (including lifting all the staples that were holding down the old underlay). It has been a mammoth effort so far, and we still have a lot of work ahead of us. But the new carpets are being laid tomorrow, so we are all taking the day off decoration to rejuvenate ourselves. It has been well earned!

Our electrician Paul has been there nearly as many evenings as we have this week. He's a lovely guy, and has done a very professional job for us - less than $2000 to add to our plug sockets (we went from nine or 10 single sockets to nearly 40, all around the house), rewire some lights, and upgrade the fuse board circuits. There's no way two computer programmers could survive with just one socket in the study, but now we have 12 in that room alone, which should be ample for all our electronics and gadgets!

The wallpaper stripping has left the walls in a bit of a shambles. Walls here don't seem to get plastered unless they absolutely have to be. Ours weren't plastered when the house was built, so the wallpaper was applied directly to the plasterboard. There is a plastered stripe across all the rooms where the top and bottom pieces of plasterboard were joined, and the wallpaper lifted off that bit beautifully, but everywhere else there are lumps, bumps, nicks, and glue that just won't come off. Unfortunately we can't afford to have them all plastered now, so we're just going to have to do our best. I bought some really gloopy sealing paint and am applying that as an undercoat, which helps a little bit, but it's still far from perfect.

At least the old carpets are all out of the house now. The place will be transformed once the new ones go down. We'll have to tread very carefully after that, while we complete (or at least find an acceptable stopping point for) our renovations, and put down lots of plastic sheeting, but it will bring the whole house together. And then we get to choose colours for the walls - that is the fun part. I am doing the two bedrooms, Skry is doing the study, and we've already agreed on colours for the living room. Check back here for details at a later date!

Irish tackle Kiwi "doctor and man drought"

More Irish landing here in New Zealand - I wonder how many of us are over here now. I could find out, I'm sure, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

From the paper:

You might say Wellington Hospital has had a touch of Irish luck.
Twenty-two foreign junior doctors have just arrived in Wellington – the biggest contingent of overseas-trained doctors to start at one time. Half of the group are Irish friends who trained together and wanted to stay together.
Caoimhe Hartley, 24, said the friends had spent six years training together at University College Dublin. They then worked at the same hospital before deciding to have a change of scene.
"We all wanted to stay together in a big group . . . Because we are all together, we will have a great time." They consulted a recruitment agency and ended up in Wellington because it was the only place that could take them all at the same time. "We had asked to be in New Zealand."
Stewart McKenna, 25, said they had been regularly working 120 hours a week in Ireland.
Sarah Doherty, 24, added: "The working conditions are much better here."
Besides doing their bit to alleviate New Zealand's doctor shortages, the men, who are flatting together, also appear keen to help tackle the "man drought" – asking if The Dominion Post could say they were keen to meet good Kiwi girls.
Nine of the new doctors will start off working for Capital and Coast District Health Board in Wellington, and two others will work at Hutt Hospital. They are due to move on to Palmerston North's MidCentral District Health Board after their three-month stint in the Wellington region. Most of the rest of the new group of 22 are from England.
About 250 junior doctors are employed in the greater Wellington region, about a quarter of them trained overseas. Capital and Coast recruitment consultant Cathy Fraser said the DHB hoped the new doctors would decide to stay on.
"We're really excited to get the group of 11 here. It's a bit of a coup."

And in other news, we spoke to four different carpet warehouse people in the last two days, and have somebody coming out to fit new carpet in the whole house on Thursday. I won't be sorry to see the back of that stained, cat-pee-scented, blue floor rag that we currently have!

Wallpaper stripping

What a job. Taking down the wallpaper itself is easy enough. But taking down the backing paper and old glue? It's a nightmare - and we have to do it for every wall in the house. Even with Phil and Lou giving us loads of help, after two nights we've barely made a dent in it.

Kitchen before and after

Before: brown melamine units (to match the brown cooker and hob):


Embossed wall tiles with some sort of wheat design on them:

After: copper range hood de-greased to the best of my ability, units primed and then painted in Resene Spanish White, tiles primed and then painted in Resene Burgundy water-based enamel.


Sorry about the poor image quality - my mobile phone again. I really should remember to bring a proper camera with me, but we are so busy all the time that I don't think of it, and my phone is always in my bag so it's handy.

We still have to remove the wallpaper and then paint the walls, but I think the kitchen is already vastly improved. What do you reckon?

Our spa bath

Our house came with a spa bath. I think spa baths are really gross (germ soup), but Skry wants to keep it, so I think I'll just have to block it from my view with tomato plants or something. Those should grow really well in the conservatory! Anyway, the stupid thing is full of green scummy water, which stinks the whole place up when the sun shines in the windows, and I can't figure out how to drain it.

Here's the spa:



And here's the control panel:


Outside the conservatory is a pump of some kind, but I couldn't find anything out there that looked like it would drain the spa itself. And also outside is a pipe which has a lever for Open/Close, but when I moved it to Open, it merely dribbled some water at me and then lay silent. I got no impression of draining water, although maybe I closed it again too quickly.

If anyone is familiar with make/model above, please mail me with instructions for use!

A weekend of painting, and some mystery plants

This has been a busy weekend! All day Saturday and all day Sunday, we have been cleaning, painting, shopping for cleaning and painting supplies, or vigorously debating colour schemes. Luckily for me and Skry, we have some extra labourers in the forms of Phil and Lou, who are helping us out now in return for some free accommodation once the house is fit to live in.

I've already applied primer to every fake-wood brown surface in the kitchen, and will get some proper paint to do it up with tomorrow. I'll post the results here so you can see the before-and-after pics, but I'm already sure that it's going to look way better.

We also have some mystery plants in the garden. In fact, the only plants I can say I truly recognise are daffodils and flax. I deduce that there's an apple tree because there is a big tree with rotting apples on the ground around its base, and I think the pink flowery thing is a camellia, but that's about it. Can anyone name these for me? (The ones where you can't see grass around them are trees/bushes.)

1.



2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Sorry about the poor picture quality - I took them all on my mobile phone. If anything is of particular interest I can go back with a proper camera.

EDIT: After a variety of comments and suggestions from various people, this is what we think the plants might be:

1 – Alchemillia (Lady's Mantle)

2 - Camellia

3 - Magnolia

4 – Cordyline australis (Cabbage Tree)

5 - Pseudopanax laetus 'Five-finger'

6 - variety of Agave

7 – still unknown - I need to get a better photo

8 - euphorbia

Thanks, everyone!

We have the house keys

What a week! The plan during this whole house buying deal has been to complete (or as they say here, settle) the sale on August 15th, which is today. But it did not go smoothly!

The players:
NZPost - the national postage service
Nationwide - our bank in the UK, who were holding the money we needed to pay 10% of the house price.
ANZ - the bank in New Zealand who are giving us a mortgage for 90% of the house price.
BNZ - the bank in New Zealand where we have our current account
Lucky (yes, really) - our mortgage broker

NZPost
About two weeks ago, we posted an express courier letter (delivery within 1 to 5 days) to the UK to ask for our money to be transferred to New Zealand. NZPost took the best part of a week to get it out of the country.

Nationwide
Nationwide received our transfer request on August 4th (I think). We were so relieved that the request had finally got there, as it was in plenty of time to pay the 10% deposit before the settlement date. So we waited, and we waited. And waited. I sent them messages on their website, which were ignored (and incidentally have still not been answered, although they are meant to be responded to within 5 days).

On August 8th, I phoned them and was told that actually our form had not been filled in correctly. Bad on our part, but why had they not got in touch with us? They are aware that we're in New Zealand, and they have phone and email details for us. Anyway, I supplied the missing information, and was told that we were good to go.

On August 12th, Skry phoned them to find out what was going on. After multiple attempts, and being repeatedly directed to an automated queue which promptly hung up on him, he finally got through to a person at 1.15am. She couldn't help, but said she would call back.

At about 2am, she called back to say that our HSBC account had insufficient funds to transfer anything to the Nationwide account. Er, what? We don't have a HSBC account, and we're transferring out of the Nationwide, not into it.

I fell asleep at that point, but Skry was still being called at 5am or so. The end result was that the Nationwide admitted they'd actually lost all our information, and we'd have to start the whole transfer process again. At least they would accept fax instructions rather than posted instructions, this time around.

On August 13th, after a very angry fax from us, Nationwide finally triggered the transfer to New Zealand.

ANZ
Lucky arranged a mortgage for us through ANZ. Due to the problems we had with Nationwide, ANZ also agreed to give us an overdraft until our money arrived from the UK.

On August 13th, we opened our account with ANZ and were assured that everything was fine, we could pay off the overdraft as soon as our money arrived, and nothing would stop the settlement on the 15th.

At noon on August 14th, Lucky contacted me in a panic to say that ANZ had reneged on the deal. They would give us an overdraft, but it would need to be paid back on the 15th. What use is that?! The rest of the afternoon was filled with phone calls between me, Lucky, and a manager from ANZ. It seems that the local ANZ had been quite happy to lend us the money until next week, and had agreed to do so, and a manager further up the chain had stepped in and stopped it. Despite everybody's best efforts, they would not change their stance.

BNZ
At 1.05am on August 15th, I got an automated text message from BNZ. The money from the Nationwide account had arrived. Phew! Talk about leaving it until the last minute. After visiting our solicitor, and signing all the necessary papers, I took myself down to BNZ and transferred the money to the solicitor's account. BNZ is the only bank that hasn't messed us around - that part went perfectly smoothly! - and a couple of hours later I got the call. The house keys were waiting for us to collect!

Current Situation
Skry and I nipped round to the house this afternoon, and found the previous owner still packing up the last of his stuff. It was nice to meet him and reassure him that his house would be well looked after. It's too much for him now, but it was his home for years and he's sad to leave it. We're going to tackle the decoration work tomorrow, wallpaper stripping and painting and general upgrading. But for now I'm just happy that we're in :-)

Urban agriculture

Urban gardening has been much on my mind recently, since our new house has so much space around it. Skry is a vegetarian and loves pretty much all veggies, and I really enjoy salad vegetables/fruit such as onions, tomatoes, peppers, and of course potatoes. We plan to revive the much neglected vegetable garden at the side of the house, and start growing our own food.

As it's mid-winter here, it's a great time for us to plan and prepare what we are going to do with the space. I bought Skry a copy of How to Grow More Vegetables, by John Jeavons, and it has some very interesting and exciting ideas about growing a lot of produce in a small space. (It also has some very cool 70s-style ink drawings of bearded hippy types doing the digging and weeding, but that is beside the point.) This book suggests that spending a lot of time at the start preparing the soil, and then sowing particular plants very close together, will reduce the amount of weeding and give a better crop yield. How this works out in practice remains to be seen, but it certainly makes inspirational reading!

Anyway, I plan to take some photos of the garden as soon as we move in, and then regularly update about what we're doing with it. So, as the saying goes, watch this space!

House update

A quick update on the house purchase, since I know a few people have been wondering.
- all the legal stuff went through fine
- the bank is poised and ready to give us mortgage money when we sign on the dotted line
- we still don't have our money for the deposit, which was meant to be transferred from the Nationwide last week. They don't seem capable of getting in touch with us to clarify important details; we resolved one problem on Friday morning after I phoned them, and I was assured that they now had everything they needed, but the money still hasn't budged.

But we are still scheduled to get the keys on this Friday, August 15th!

EFTPOS

One of the things that took us by surprise when we moved to New Zealand was EFTPOS. This is a method of direct debit banking, very similar to Switch/Maestro in the UK, where the bank issues a plastic card that can be used to pay for purchases at the point of sale. If the money is in your bank account then the sale will go through, and if you don't have money then there will be a problem, so it's not like a credit card, it's just a debit card. We were already familiar with that sort of technology, but in the UK and Ireland it is generally only used if a person doesn't have cash on them for some reason, or if it's a purchase of at least £10. Many retailers there set a minimum spend for that sort of purchase because it costs them money to process it.

However, in New Zealand, everybody uses EFTPOS for just about everything. Buying a cup of coffee? Use your card. Paying for a magazine? Use your card. Out for a team lunch at work? Everybody files up to the till and pays for their own individual meal, using their EFTPOS cards. People just don't seem to carry cash at all here.

It's not all good, though. I was in a supermarket a couple of months ago and there was a power cut, which knocked out all the EFTPOS terminals, and of course almost nobody had cash with them. Massive queues formed at the bank machine outside, and it took me 20 minutes to get out of there even though there was only one lady in front of me. (By the way, I had cash!) So there are pros and cons to this way of purchasing goods. I try to always have at least one note in my purse for emergencies, but it's easy to get out of that habit, and then we find ourselves hoking around behind the sofa cushions for enough money to pay the pizza guy when we get a delivery!

An afternoon at the poo ponds

As part of a work training course, I spent quite a while this afternoon at the Christchurch wastewater treatment plant - colloquially knowns as the poo ponds. It was actually really interesting, although quite smelly in places. I have never before seen sewage in the process of being treated, and really it is far more efficient and cleaner than I had realised. It only takes a couple of hours for sewage to be fit to release into the oxidation ponds, where it spends another 21-25 days until it's clean enough to be pumped out into the sea (not drinking water quality, but usually bathing water quality at that point).

The first thing we saw was what they call "rag" - the solid material that is present in the sewage when it arrives. Apparently it is known as the Three Ts - tissue, turds, and tampons. Mmm, nice. Anyway, in reality it just looks like a grey pulpy mess with some identifiable bits in it. We could see a shower cap and half an onion, both of which I had not expected, but nothing particularly offensive.

When the really obvious gunk has been separated out, the sewage is solidified in some sort of process that I didn't really understand, but it starts out looking like brown water and a couple of metres further on the conveyor belt it looks like this - lumpy sludge.


We saw various other bits and pieces, including one section that was so pungent that I was nearly sick on the way out. It wasn't a sewage smell, exactly, but it was really hard to ignore and really unpleasant to breathe. (We didn't visit the smelliest part, which can make a person pass out very quickly, so I can only imagine how much worse that would have been.)

Outdoors, there were various settlement ponds for separating liquid from solid, and another conveyor belt thing that dumped the final solid result into a big pit. It is currently being put onto a closed landfill as a capping/fertiliser layer, but once that landfill is capped I am not sure what will be done with it.

The whole plant uses just natural gravity and microbes and oxygen and sunlight to clean the water and remove the dangerous material and the pollution. Also, it uses naturally produced methane gas to convert to electricity and power the entire plant, and usually generates enough to sell back to the national grid as well. It may not be everybody's idea of a fun afternoon out, but I found it both interesting and educational!

The uselessness of NZPost

The postal company here is called NZPost, and they are the most useless outfit I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. As regular readers will know, we are in the process of buying a house, and as part of that we need to transfer money from the UK for the deposit. This entails writing a letter to our bank in the UK to authorise the transfer.

On Tuesday 29th July, Skry took our letter to the local branch of NZPost and sent it using their fastest, premium delivery service - international express courier - which cost us a premium delivery charge of $42.50. According to NZPost, this is "a premium courier service for urgent documents and valuable parcels that require targeted delivery to main cities in major worldwide destinations in 1 – 5 working days".

On Saturday 2nd August, the fifth day after posting, our letter finally left New Zealand. Excuse my language, but how the hell is that an express service? Here is the current tracking status, which shows the letter finally leaving Auckland yesterday:

Five days to get a letter out of the country is neither a premium service nor an express one. First class mail would be faster than that - it's absolutely ridiculous.

Quite apart from this issue, I also have another huge problem with NZPost. The postal system here is a bit different from the UK and Ireland, in that people don't have letterboxes in their front doors - they have mailboxes at the roadside. These mailboxes aren't generally secured in any way, but since we are currently living beside a main road and our mailbox is the closest to the road of all the houses in this housing block, our mailbox is particularly insecure. When we moved in, I contacted NZPost to find out whether our mail would actually be safe or not. This is what they said:

Dear Jenny,

Thank you for your inquiry regarding Mail delivery.

Small Packages less than 1.5kg in weight are delivered by a postie. If the postie feels that it is unsafe to deliver this, they will leave a notification card/Card to Call. Any parcels over this weight, are delivered by Courierpost. The courier again, will try and deliver the item; however, if they do not have a safe place to leave the parcel, they too will leave a notification card/Card to Call.

An item that requires a signature is automatically carded/Card to Call, if there is no one available to sign for the item.

I trust this clarifies your concerns.

Thank you for contacting New Zealand Post Online Customer Service Centre.

Kind Regards,


Felila Fagalilo
New Zealand Post Customer Service

About a month ago, I received delivery of a long-awaited delivery of some quite expensive perfume, ordered online from the USA. Well, I received the package, but not the contents. This is what it looked like:


Not only had the package been left in a puddle, but it had been left in our mailbox in full view of all passing foot traffic along the main road - during the school holidays, I might add. I'm really not surprised that the perfume was stolen, only that the packaging was left for some reason.

When I contacted NZPost to let them know that their postie had left a clearly marked and clearly valuable delivery in an unsafe location, their response (after about two weeks) was that perfume is not meant to be sent in the post, and so I was not entitled to any compensation. If perfume isn't meant to be sent in the post, why did they accept it at the border when it arrived from the USA?? I don't see how that has the slightest bearing on the problem of their incompetence. I am still pursuing this issue, as they should be held liable for their postie's actions, but I was just flabbergasted that they even used such a flimsy excuse.

If I ever have a choice about using NZPost or some other company in future, for anything that is the slightest bit important to me, you can be sure I'll be using the other company. I advise everyone else to do the same!

Stormy times in New Zealand

We have had some wild and crazy weather over the last few days. So far, the part of Christchurch we’re in has escaped the worst of it (although our balcony door did spring a leak), but there are floods over a lot of Canterbury, and most of the country has been gale-swept and rain-soaked. Roofs were blowing off buildings in Greymouth, where we were last weekend – we were very lucky with our timing! One person has definitely drowned and another person is missing presumed drowned, and some buildings have slipped into the sea in Auckland. Nearly all the main roads seem to have landslips blocking them, too.

Here are some pictures for you, all taken from local news sites.