Neglected Blog

Ah my poor blog. It has been getting a little neglected lately and I must remedy that. The point of starting a blog in the first place was so I could store my thoughts and memories for when I forgot them and it's not going to do that if I leave it empty!

As I remember things from the last few months I will post them up here as well as keeping up-to-date with stuff.

This week I have mostly been: eating hot chips, skating, getting freaked out by meditation podcasts, snug under a blanket, wearing a scarf.

I also: went to an ice hockey game, watched the movie RED.

First Quarter

Looking back my last few blog posts, I can see that I have left some pretty big gaps in my activities so here is what I’ve been up to the last few months.

The first was the Big Day Out where we saw some awesome bands. I particularly enjoyed Rammstein and Wolf Mother. Iggy Pop and the Stooges were good and had loads of energy and I also enjoyed Lupe Fiasco.

I was sad to have missed Steriogram and I think it was mostly laziness that meant I missed their gig at a local venue too. I’m bad :( Walkie Talkie Man is an awesome song.

A week after the Big Day Out our container arrived from the UK and it was unboxing time. Finally I was reunited with the football inflator adapters, lint rollers, a couple of screws and the bubbles I was given in Pisa. I don’t know how I coped all those months without them :\

Then we decided it was time to be more sociable so we joined up with a local sci-fi group and met some cool people.

At the start of the month we went to the opera Xerxes which was awesome, very colourful and quite funny. This was held in the Civic theatre which is a very pretty theatre. Inside the main auditorium looks like an ancient greek amphitheatre and the ceiling above has glistening stars. People get very dressed up for the opera here and I saw more than a few tuxedos and even someone with opera glasses! I’ve got tickets for a couple of ballets and I’m wondering if they will be as dressy.

We’ve been to a couple of Blues super rugby games which have been really good – helped by the Blues winning both times! I like the whole experience of going to the rugby games. There is usually some kind of show before hand with competitions and cheerleaders that actually do cheerleading. There’s more of the same at half time with opportunities to win stuff or get freebies like t-shirts and mini rugby balls.

a few weeks ago we went to a friends house for his birthday and ate cake and watched movies. From Dusk to Dawn was not what I expected!

I particularly liked his shelving unit make out of cardboard and styrofoam. We don’t need IKEA with kiwi ingenuity like this!

And that brings us to last weekend when we went to the Stone Temple Pilots gig. This was brilliant and they played all their best songs.

So that’s more or less the first quarter of the year!

Nothing to Wear

The nights are fair drawing in :)
It has started to be a bit chilly in the mornings when I wake up and it’s a bit dark too, but the clocks change at the end of the week and I have to try and figure out what time it is in the UK, has the clocks changed there already?
Despite the chilliness in the mornings, the afternoons are bright and warm and similar to a normal Scottish summer’s day, with that little hint of coolness in the air and it’s an easy 20 degC when I’m heading home at 5pm. This confuses me, and I usually end up over dressed for work in boots and jumpers and scarves. Even Kane, who has only worn shorts for the past 5 months, has taken to wearing jeans on the odd evening.
Selecting the appropriate clothing does require a re-education. Even though the mornings are cool to begin with, it gets warmer and it’s still not yet jacket weather. It does rain though and my goodness it rains! I’ve never seen so much rain all at once! Last Saturday I was out and about quite early in the CBD, I elected to wear my uniform of converse trainers, jeans, t-shirt and a jumper because it was raining and looked cold. My jeans got totally soaked at the cuffs and was drawing the water up while the jumper was causing me to over heat! I saw a good few people wearing vests, shorts and boots carrying umbrellas and this is now making sense to me!
I’ve fallen in with a decent crowd and I might ask them for some advice on how to dress myself but it’s likely they’ll tell me to wear my Star Trek TNG uniform or something!
One of the main reasons for moving to New Zealand was to do more, to get out of the rut and do some living and I can honestly say that I have done more in the last few months here than I had in the last few years in Edinburgh. Even with the scary earthquakes in the South Island and the tsunami warnings closer to home, I’m glad I live here.

J 2.0 in beta

When I trained for and ran my first half marathon, I was so happy to cross that finish line!  I wore my medal for weeks!  But I was also sad because this thing that had consumed so much of my time, so much of my life was now gone and there was nothing left to fill it.  (That’s when I started training for another one.)

Moving to New Zealand has been a bit like that first half marathon.  It was such a big goal that had been in my life for a long time that now it’s achieved I have nothing to focus on.  (I am certainly not planning another move!)

From the exercise in my last blog post I have focus again!  And amongst my goals of buying a house, looking at service delivery at work and travelling in New Zealand, I plan to run the Auckland Half Marathon.  Ahh.. race schedules, how I have missed you…

J 2.0

It’s January where traditionally I create a new resolution booklet – yes a booklet – filled with the familiar headings and under each heading a list of, more depressingly, familiar goals and instructions on how to succeed.

This always leads to a kind of bottleneck, where I try to do everything at the same time and after about a week I’m exhausted from my rigorous exercise program, starving from my restrictive eating plan and broke from trying to create the “stylish new me” despite my involved financial budget and savings plan.

This isn’t working so something has to change.

Magazines and other media are telling me that it is bad for me to set such lofty goals as this has a negative impact when I inevitably fail, and instead perhaps this year my resolution should be one of acceptance or to be kinder to myself.

In my opinion, to not even try is much worse than failing!  Acceptance??  What?! am I suppose to just say, this is all I will ever be?

Neither of these approaches work for me.  However, I think I have an idea!

Instead of trying to change everything all at once, just tackle those goals one at a time until they are integrated, internalised, habit, second nature.

So the first goal is some personal admin of the mind.  I’m going to have a think about who I am, where I have been and what has made me into this version of me right now.  (One of the things I already know about myself is that too much introspection is very bad for me! so I will not spend too long on this exercise)  Then I’m going to have a think about where I am going, where I want to go and what that version of me will be like. 

This is one of my favourite exercises.  I learned this reading Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Imagine it is 5 years from now and you going to a social gathering.  You get yourself ready and head to the venue.  You arrive and see that all your family, friends, co-workers and people from your community are there.  You then come to realisation that this is your funeral and a key member of your family stands in front of everyone and begins to talk about you.  They reminisce and talk about what kind of person you were, what qualities you had and achievements you made.  Next a friend stands up and talks about what kind of friend you were.  Then a co-worker stands up and tells everyone what kind of person you were at work and your achievements and successes there.  Finally a person from your community or other group you are involved in that gives some kind of service stands up and they tell everyone what kind of contributions you made or of your involvement.

This exercise gives a good template for who you are, the best version of yourself, and of where you want to be heading.  It gives you insight into your values and of what matters most to you and these are the things you should be giving the most of your time to.

One Month In

We have now been living in New Zealand for 1 month!  And what a month it has been :)

In the first few days we picked up our rental car and had all the flurry of buying kitchen appliances etc.  Once we had the essentials; food, cooking implements, something to eat from, something to sit on and something to sleep on, we were good to go.

My advice to anyone else doing this – register for FlyBuys, we could have gotten so many points :(

Furniture here seems very expensive at first glance.  I’m an IKEA girl and I feel at home with veneer and fibre board and a cheap price tag.  However, things are actually made of solid wood here, mostly New Zealand pine with a nice stain or super glossy.  Once we got our heads around that, we started to see furniture as an investment and not just something that will do short term. 

We took our time figuring out what bedroom furniture we wanted, shopped around and managed to get a really good deal on a bed and mattress.  We got a duvet, pillows, covers and sheets as part of the package deal.  We were really happy to find our IKEA double duvet fits our queen size bed snuggly, which was something we were concerned about.  I think standard UK double duvets would be too small.  I managed to get some money off a matching chest of drawers too.  I also asked how long they are likely to have that particular furniture set.  They have had it for the past 10 years and are not planning to stop or change it, so I hope this means once we’ve saved up some money we can get more matching chest of drawers and dressers.

Another thing that is very expensive here are second-hand cars.  They hold their value very well.  I’ve only ever bought a second-hand car once and that was the 1977 Volkswagen camper van.  We had good times in that van, but also too many break downs!  I think it put us off second-hand cars for life!

We shopped around and decided to buy the cheapest new car available in New Zealand!  We have a Holden Barina Spark CDX (in cocktail green).  It’s definitely not in the same league as our old car but I do love my new baby :)  The salesman was just awesome and if you are ever looking to buy a new car you should find Richard Thomson at Schofield Holden in New Market and talk to him.  He reminded both Kane and I of Dick Van Dyke.  He is such a nice man, kept me updated with the progress of my car, I picked it up on the scheduled date and he introduced me to the staff in the service centre, made sure I was familiar with the car and then a few days later called just to check everything was ok and I was still happy with my new purchase.

I’ve found people in the service industry much nicer here.  Even I’m nicer here.  The other day a man dropped something and instead of giving him a kick when he bent to pick it up, I picked it up for him!

Anyway, the day I got to pick up my nice new car, I got offered a job!  I applied for a number of jobs and got replies back from 2 agencies which I registered with.  Colin Munro from MTR took me under his wing a bit and gave me some excellent advice on my CV.  CV’s here are really long!  In the UK you shouldn’t go beyond 2 pages, but for someone of my experience I probably should have a 5 page CV!!  I totally reformatted my CV and I now have a 3 pager.  This seemed to help and I had 2 interviews very quickly, the next week I had a second interview and started my new job almost straight away.  Colin and Andy at MTR are awesome!

I’ve also found a new pole dancing class that I go to on Saturdays and lately I’ve been spending the weekends sourcing new clothes for work.  I packed a small work wardrobe which was good for interviews but a bit too formal for work.  I’m disappointed that my belongings haven’t yet left the UK and I’m looking forward to being reunited with them … eventually.

It would seem that Tesco’s have ruined me when it comes to my price expectations of tights.  A single pair of tights here costs about … hey there’s no pound sign on my keyboard! and I thought it was just the @ sign, the “ marks and the \ that was in different places – I never noticed the absence of the pound.  Anyway, a pair of tights costs about 2 GBP and in Tesco you can get a value 5 pair pack for that price.

To provide some balance though; avocados, mangos, pineapples and the good NZ wines are all cheaper and tastier I think :)

So tonight, after work, I’ll drive home, have some dinner out on my deck with a nice glass of white wine and then later either watch the Event, go to the cinema or watch a DVD if a new one from Fatso has arrived.  So not too different from normal, but different enough for me.

Take care everyone xxx

The Big Move

We’ve been talking about it for so very long and have taken our time over the process of moving, it feels so good to finally be here in Auckland, NZ.

Prior To Leaving

Before we left, we visited Kane’s parents in Orkney for a few days.  It was nice to see them and Kane enjoyed being home for a few days.  Leaving was a little strange because although we all know it won’t be our last visit to Orkney it will the last for a while and we have become more regular with our visits over recent years (mostly due to having such a good car).

We then had a nice visit with Kane’s Grandparents, who made us feel guilty for leaving it to the last minute.

After we arrived back at my parents house we had a very short time to finish anything outstanding and then we sold our beloved car.

On the Saturday we had nice visit from our friend Craig followed by a fancy dress hallowe’en party at my sister Jacqueline’s house.

The next day we were frantically finishing packing our stuff before we went out for a big family dinner at the local pub.

We still had some packing to do after the dinner too and we had to make some tough choices about what goes and what stays.  We had phoned to find out about the excess baggage charges as we were only allowed 1 bag each of 23kgs and any extra on our Edinburgh to London flight would be £9 per kilo plus £10 per bag!  Additionally Air NZ would charge us £35 per extra bag.  We had 4 bags between us and had grudgingly accepted that we would have to pay lots of money to take these things so we spent some time trying to weigh up if each item was worth the money.

After we finished packing we enjoyed some champagne with my family before heading to bed for an early night.

Day of Leaving – Monday

We were up early-ish to finish up packing and to check we had everything we intended to have.  My nephew Sandy had come to give us a hand and to see us off (although I think he just forgot to adjust his clock for daylight savings and that’s why he was early!)

My sister Elizabeth, my BIL Jim and my niece Hollie then came to say goodbye to us at the house before we jumped into the car and headed for the airport.

At the airport I said goodbye to my parents and to Sandy and Hollie and it was a bit weird again because I knew I would see them via the computer and talk to them all the time and we would all visit when we could.

After they left, we got checked in and surprisingly we weren’t charged for excess baggage!  I even queried this (how honest am I?) and was assured we were allowed 2 bags each.  I’m not so stupid as to question it any further so we were very happy with that! Probably could have taken more stuff.

Then Kane’s sister Alison and her husband Ross arrived at the airport and we had a drink and a chat with them before we went through the final security checks and on to our gate.

Flight 1

Edinburgh > London flight was good and uneventful.  I think I dosed for a little while and was disappointed that they didn’t feed me.  We arrived a little earlier than expected in London and got ourselves to the next gate for our Air New Zealand flight to Auckland via Los Angeles.

Flight 2

London > Los Angeles was a very good flight and I tried to set myself to New Zealand time by trying to stay awake as much as I could during this flight.  I had the middle seat so Kane could have the window whilst it was daylight.  I watched plenty of movies!  We got given a snack of some vege crisps and I got an L&P and then a little later we got a nice meal and I had some white wine with my meal.

Someone near us, and I think it was the man I was sitting next to, kept farting every 20 minutes or so and it was disgustingly smelly.  I nearly choked once.  I started putting my nose and mouth under my jumper after a while.  I really hoped he was leaving us in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles In Transit

I have a love/hate relationship with Los Angeles.  They always seem to do their best to scare the crap out of me but this time it was really nice and easy.  We got our passports stamped and grabbed a packet of crisps and some juice and got the free wifi password and updated facebook :)

Flight 3

Unfortunately the phantom farter had returned aboard, however it did get less as the flight went on.  I had swapped seats with Kane so I could get comfier to have a sleep and after I finished watching my movie and had some more food, I had a nice long sleep.  I woke up a couple of times convinced that I had missed a meal but Kane assured me that I hadn’t missed any meals.  I was so glad to get my breakfast because I was so hungry but at the same time I was worried that this would start off the phantom farter again.

Arrival Day – Wednesday

We arrived a bit earlier that scheduled into Auckland we got our bags and headed through customs and bio-security.  I was disappointed that there wasn’t any Border Control camera crews about.

We got through and then we bought ourselves 3 mobile phone sim cards and top ups.  One each for Kane and I’s mobile phones and one for our mobile broadband dongle.  That was really easy to set up and we did that over some hash browns from McDonalds at the airport.  We then saw who I think was the rowing team do a haka at the airport before we grabbed a taxi to our B+B.

We checked into our B+B and had a cuppa and chat with our host Bryan before we headed out to get the keys to our rental house. 

We were a little disappointed with our rental place initially because it didn’t have any carpets down just some vinyl in the kitchen and bathroom, the power wasn’t working and the front and back doors weren’t opening and closing properly.  We did the inspection and our landlord said he would get the power sorted for us and get the doors fixed.

We then headed out to find the shopping centre where our bank is and on the way we were asked by a nice old lady to help her sort out her washing line.  She had a super friendly cat called possum.  We chatted with her for a while and then headed to the shopping centre.

We went to the bank to get our accounts sorted but the personal banking person wasn’t there so we made an appointment for the following day and we checked out the other shops that were in.  We then went to the library to use their free wifi and then checked out some other shops at the retail park across from the shopping centre before heading back to our b+b totally knackered.

Day 2 – Thursday

This was a very productive day.  We had breakfast at our b+b and chatted to the German couple that were staying there also.  Then we headed out to get a bus to Parnell to pick up our rental car.  The google maps app on my ipod touch is great, it told me which bus to get on and when it was due, everything!  We got to the car rental place picked up our little car and then I drove us back to the b+b.  We then got our cases and checked out and headed to the new house.  We were very pleased to find we had power and that the doors had been fixed and after faffing about with the water we found out how to get us some nice hot water too.

We headed back out to the shops and again checked the prices of everything we wanted to buy.  Farmers had a one day half price sale on so we bought a whole dinner set.  We got our appointment at the bank and got that all sorted out and I was amazed that they could give us bank cards right there and then that we could use in the shops!

Naturally we then went to the shops and bought lots of stuff!  We got an air bed, pots, cooking utensils and some groceries and then we went back home and sorted all this stuff out.  We then had dinner quite late, about 8.30pm and then we crashed out for the night.

Day 3 – Friday

We phoned our parents in the morning and then we set about getting more furniture.  We tried Target and the Salvation Army shop but we couldn’t see anything we really liked.  We then went to Noel Leamings and Dick Smiths to look at TVs and we bought a new TV from Dick Smiths and I was cheeky and asked for a free DVD player and I got one!!

We bought a fridge freezer and a washing machine from Noel Leamings and I asked for a free vacuum cleaner, but I wasn’t so successful that time.  We did get 3 pairs of socks for free though :)

We also got ourselves some chairs at Farmers that were on special, buy one get one free so were were able to relax in the evening and watch the Mentalist on DVD.

Day 4 – Saturday

After some initial set up hiccups, I had a very successful skype video call with the pickle party this morning.  And since then I’ve just bee lazing about.  There are road closures today because of the rugby match that’s being held at Eden Park and because we fall in the zone, we have 2 free tickets!  So we’re going to that soon.  It will be cool to go into the new stand that they’ve been working on.

What’s Next

I’m going to chill out this weekend and then on Monday start the job search.  I’ll let you know how I get on!