New Zealand blog 2: July 2007

Our house on Southampton Street!! Don't let the ivy fool you into thinking it's a charming touch to the exterior of the house. It's the worst kind of parasite that has invaded the entire property and with malicious intent chokes out all the cool stuff.

We saw the house for the first time on a rainy night and decidedly immediately to take it based on the two previous crappy apartments we had looked at. It wasn't too big, was fully furnished and had a back garden; internet, gas and telephone were included in the rent. Good deal! Only after moving in did we start to discover the house's many quirks: 1 electrical outlet in the entire living room, a non-functional oil column heater, the garden was completely overgrown and neglected,

the internet wasn't connected, we could only call local landlines with the telephone, whose 4 key didn't work, etc. I actually seriously debated just moving out and trying to find an apartment in which a human had already successfully lived. But we stuck it out and gradually it started growing on us. Our house is naturally as warm and cosy as a mausoleum, but this feature is endemic to all housing in NZ as none of them are built with insulation. Our house is an old wooden farmhouse built around 1875 and is inherently freezing cold inside. We keep the living room and the kitchen/bathroom heated, and that's it.

Which brings me to another point. NZ is EXPENSIVE. Norwegian prices on US-or-less salaries. Money just doesn't seem to go far here, and that for mediocre quality at best. Stranger in a strange land, I tell you.

After a week or two we discovered two cats that lived underneath our house and our next-door neighbors'. Took awhile before they warmed up to us, but then it wasn't long before they were making themselves at home.

The big one we just call 'Mamma' and the little one SM has named 'Lille My' after the Norwegian animated series. There's also a small black female that sits in our window and paws at the pane as if she wanted to come in (but doesn't really), a large grey male that pees in our garden, a large black tom that beats up on our girls, a stripey grey and white tom that beats up on everyone, and a stripey tom that keeps mostly to himself. In other words our neighborhood is crawling with strays, some of which are quite wild. But our girls are good cats and they come in at least once a day to eat and lay in front of the gas fireplace. Which, by the way, we have started calling the 'TV' since Mamma kitty will just sit in front of it and stare at it for long minutes at a time.

We hung out a sewett block from the walnut tree in the backyard, and soon we had a constant barrage of tweety birds frequenting our garden. These little guys are called wax-eyes because of the ring of small white feathers around their eyes.

The weather was pretty crappy in July, quite cold and somewhat rainy. Not that it was much worse than a winter in San Francisco, for example, just that when you're cold at home, you're cold outside and just generally cold all the time. SM braved the crappy weather one day and rode his bike down to the estuary to take pictures of the black swans

and one of the windsurfing areas at low tide

Which brings me to the highlight of the month of July, namely that on the 16th of July, 2007 SM had a birthday!! Since we didn't have any friends here at the time, our birthday celebration was small, but intimate - just me, SM and Spongebob Squarepants, who posed the question 'Stor gutt?' (big boy?). We were going to get a Spiderman cake, but after seeing SM's eyes light up when he saw the Spongebob cake in the diplay there was no going back! The girl at the bakery was very curious as to what 'stor gutt' meant, the other bakers had been pondering whether it was some form of German ha ha.

Doesn't look a day over 20, eh??? Last year we celebrated his birthday in Geneva, Switzerland, at the most amazing Thai restaurant. This year he had to settle for nachos and cake, but as long as we're together the day is always good :-)