Moving In

Well, we have had our last day in the caravan park! Thursday was a day of spending - $1240 on our bond and first week's rent (rent here is paid weekly, which is good in a way in that it is a steady, small amount coming out of the bank, but bad in that it would have been nice to have had the money in the account for a little longer before it started disappearing!), and $1372 on a new fridge/freezer and a washing machine (plus a kettle and surge protectors – this was something we hadn't realised – apparently Wellington is very bad for power surges, and these can fry electrical equipment; having just spent a heck of a lot on white goods, we decided to buy the “insurance” - $115 for two double sockets and a single (the doubles also therefore act as a comm-block – very handy!)) Money is going a little faster than I had anticipated, but it should get a bit cheaper now that we aren't paying by the day for accommodation, and we can also buy in bulk on the food. Plus it isn't as though we don't have money sat in the UK – I'd just rather wait a bit for the exchange rate to get better before I transfer some more(at the moment, with the cut that HiFX take, we'd be looking at less than $2 for the £, which is a bit scary! The news also talks about the exchange rate – it isn't just us that it is affecting, but the exporters here as well, which isn't good news for the economy).

Angela, the lady that I met on the forums (and who put me forward for the Defence Services job, but who has now left her recruitment job), very kindly gave up pretty much a whole day on Friday to help us move from the caravan park to our new house, and has lent us a mattress, bed linen, cutlery, crockery and pots and pans – everything (aside from the mattress) that is coming over on the boat, but won't be here for a while yet! She also drove us over to a big shopping complex in one of the towns to the north of Wellington, so that we could pick up other things that we needed. She also took us on a hike round most of the second hand furniture shops in the area, so that we could start furnishing our place (the previous tenants left us two garden chairs, but we needed something a bit more comfortable to sit on, and to eat off (whilst we do have a small table coming on the boat, we didn't really want to eat off our knees for the next month or so). We did find a glorious dining room table (the type which has a middle leaf that you can fold out to make it larger), but when we came back (after going round a number of other shops), there was a “back in five minutes” sign on the door. That stayed there for the next half hour, and indeed until after we gave up and left...

We also got an excellent demonstration of the changing mood of the weather round us. The morning was gloriously sunny, and we were able to take a trip our to a beautiful inlet, and have our lunch in the sunshine. As we moved back towards Petone (the district where we were doing the furniture shopping), we could see the black clouds building up over Wellington, and the wind started to pick up quite strongly. Then we were actually able to see the storm rolling in across the bay, and we got into a coffee shop just before it absolutely hammered it down! I think, from our first week here, the forecast for Wellington is always going to be “Changeable”!

The interview on Wednesday went ok. The job is for a company which was initially set up to sell environmental consultancy (behind the green image of NZ are some incredibly poor business practices, and there was a news item Friday morning where a journalist from the Guardian has pointed out how poor NZ is as a country on the environment, and showing how this will hurt tourism in the future), but in order to raise some revenue, they are also selling those gel pads which have a metal disk in them, which you click to heat up (not just the pocket warmers, but also ones for the neck and back, and also bottle warmers for babies), and also are a franchise (on a separate stand) of the Calendar Club. James (the MD) took me out to one of their stands, (and I was right, it was a stand in a shopping mall), so that I could see how they operated. We then had a long chat (well over an hour), some of it about the company, and the rest about general stuff. He's a good salesman, and he genuinely believes in what he is doing. I also know that I could sell his products, but I don't want to be on commission only for the next couple of months until an office based job became available. Our situation is a little too precarious for us to gamble on a non-standard amount of money coming in each week. He said that he needed to talk to his business partner, as he wasn't sure, either, and he'd let me know at the end of the week. So I think that I probably haven't got the job anyway. But I still have more irons in the fire, so I'm not too despondent. It would have just been quite nice for it to all fall into my lap, really! However, on a positive note, he did call up and asked me to babysit his “Calendar Club” stall as his aunt was visiting on Saturday, and he wanted to be able to spend the day with her. As it was $100 cash in hand, I wasn't going to say no! So I spent Saturday in a shopping mall getting a teensy bit bored and occasionally selling a calendar. I did have a brilliant conversation with a Deaf lady, which showed me that BSL and Auslang are not that far removed (and was probably the longest conversation I'd had with someone who was Deaf in a very long while – far longer than the chatting that I did at the FCDC!)

Whilst I was out earning us a bit of money, John spent the Saturday spending it... We are now the proud owners of the dining table that we spotted on Friday, plus some fantastic dining chairs (which, though from a different shop, look like they could have come from the same set), and also a couple of wicker lounge chairs (probably the only furniture we'll have in the lounge for a while!). We have also had our fridge/freezer delivered, and our washing machine, so the house is looking more like it is being lived in now (even if it is a teensy bit bare, and will be until our furniture gets here), and definitely is starting to feel like home. It will be even better when I can pick up some plants and get working in the greenhouse! Plus possibly a bird feeder – we have a number of birds which already come into the garden, and it would be nice to start enticing more of them in...

Next plan is also to see if we can get the internet sorted out for the house so that we don't have to keep going to the library! (fortunately, it is open on a Sunday...)