Garden...

Yes, I know it has been over a month since I last posted; life has been incredibly busy, and (work-wise), just a little bit stressful (two major projects with drop-deadlines in the same week, on top of my day job...). I've not been sitting down at the computer so much on a general basis, as evenings where we don't have our usual social activities have been spent playing with my new toy.

Just before Christmas, the orchestra acquired a bassoon, and spent a month or so using contacts to try to find someone who could play the instrument, didn't have one of their own, and, far more importantly, wanted to come along on a Monday evening and play for us. Unfortunately, there was no-one in the neighbourhood who wanted to join, even with the lure of a bassoon, and so I volunteered. There were slightly selfish reasons on my part; I am one of four oboes in the orchestra, one of whom is ex-professional, so the chances of having anything 'stand-out' in the near future are slim (and, to be honest, the tone that our lead oboe gets from his instrument is just stunning, and there would be no reason for him *not* to have the solos); four oboes is a huge amount for the size of our orchestra anyway (we are not a quiet instrument at the best of times, and four of us does tend to rather unbalance the woodwind section); and, when I was 11 and choosing my instrument, I had originally wanted to play the bassoon, but circumstances meant that I ended up with the oboe instead. Not that I am unhappy about my choice, far from it, but the chance to have a go at the instrument I'd always wanted to play was too much to pass up! So, I have been putting in long hours learning a new set of fingering (fortunately, I can already read bass clef), ready to play Rachmaninov's third piano concerto and a concert version of Cavalleria Rusticana. So - hopefully, I've not bitten off more than I can chew; I've got till May to get it right!

I've also had to spend (oh, the pressure!) a lot of time pottering in the garden. Summer is definitely on its way out now; the days are getting shorter, and the temperature is starting to noticeably drop. But the garden has thrown up a lot of surprises; every time I've gone outside, there seems to be a new set of flowers there, and I'm being very careful not to dig up very much until I know exactly what is already planted (whether deliberate or not). But I am starting to get a picture now of how I'd like the finished garden to look; it's going to take quite a few years to get to that position.

EDIT - Thank you to everyone who has emailed me or posted with answers to the anonymous flowers below - I have updated to show the identified ones :-)

This is the back of the house; there are trees along the back fence, including a magnolia, what I am assured is a young kauri and a kowhai. I am really looking forward to seeing the kowhai in Spring; our neighbour over the fence has said that the bright yellow flowers attracts at least six Tui every year. I'm planning on putting our main vege patch here, too, as a raised bed.

This is looking along the side of the house. There are flower beds all along the fence, and the tree in the background was covered in bright red flowers when we first moved in (I'm still not sure what type of tree it is, either - I've not been able to find it by searching online).

A profusion of the flowers which have surprised me over the summer. I'm aware that people would probably classify all of these to be weeds, but they are far too pretty to pull up!

Dahlias

These bright pink flowers are stunning. The individual blooms don't seem to last for more than a few days, but they keep on flowering.

This is our decking, which gets a huge amount of sunshine. I'm planning on seeing if I can train some grape vines up a trellis against the wall.

This will be the flower-patch. At the moment, it is mainly weeds, and those stunning orange flowers. There's a rhododendron bush, plus a couple of others that I can't name, and I'm still mulling over what else to add. My lemon tree already has its home there.

Crocosmia / Montbretia
A close up of the orange flowers. Again, I know that these are technically weeds (you can see them all along the road embankments at the moment, too), but they are simply gorgeous, and they are attracting the bumble-bees to the garden, which makes them alright in my book!

A different type of Dahlia
Another flower which completely surprised me - the bush that it is growing from really didn't seem like anything much!

The front garden. There are little shrubs planted by the previous owners on the other side of the fence, as well as an agapanthus and a flax (again, more Tuis when it is flowering), so I'm hoping that we'll be able to build up a bit more of a hedge around the fence; good for the birds, and will give a bit more privacy in years to come.

Pineapple Lily
This is an interesting plant - again, completely unprepossessing, then it suddenly sprouted these flowers and actually became quite pinky/purple for a short while!

One of the unknown bushes - it briefly flowered with these very delicate yellow and white blooms.

Japanese Anemone
These are all round the garden, particularly up against the house. Again, they are probably weeds, but very pretty!

Bears Breeches / Acanthus
These, too, are all along the back fence. I already know that I'm going to need to take a lot of these out, as they really are taking over.

So - a brief tour round the garden at least; the inside of the house is a bit messy, so photos of that will have to wait! If anyone is able to identify any of the plants from my photos, please let me know - it's one of the areas where my Google-fu has let me down; there are just too many pictures of flowers on the internet, and as I don't know whether any of them are NZ native or not, I can't even narrow the search that way!

Busy times

Happy New Year!

It has been a busy month and a bit, and I have rather neglected the blog... After moving in, we had a week to clean out the old flat (no issues with the final inspection - huzzah) and then get the house ready for the arrival of my parents for Christmas. The week also included the last orchestra committee meeting of the year, an evening tea with the ex-landlady, the last Sci-Fi meeting of the year and the wedding of our ex-next door neighbour's son.

We had a fantastic time with my parents - we were incredibly lucky to have 10 days of glorious sunshine before we got caught by the tail end of a cyclone. This meant that we were able to spend Christmas Day on the beach as well as do all the tourist sights of Wellington with the sun shining and the sky blue. We started our Tiki Tour on Boxing Day; travelling first to Napier, where we had supper overlooking the harbour,


got to see some fantastic Art Deco


and took a wine tour (no photos of that - the wine was too good!).

We spotted black swans and ducklings at Lake Taupo



We stopped by the Huka falls


and then saw some amazing geothermal pools at Wai-o-tapu, near Rotorua.



(we have a room which is painted the same colour as that last pool...)

We had a slightly damp time in Auckland, as the cyclone was settling in for the long haul, but enjoyed catching up with family, and also introducing my parents to the Parnell Chocolate shop.

New Year's Eve was interesting - we spent it in Te Kuiti, which is just outside Waitomo. It was not the most exciting of towns, particularly if you are looking for somewhere which will serve food (that isn't just a takeaway)... So, we spent the last hours of 2011 at the motel room, eating a microwave supper (the motel rooms only had microwaves, rather than fully functioning kitchens) and playing silly card
games. An absolutely perfect way to spend the evening!

Unfortunately, because of the amount of rain that had fallen, the Black Water Rafting that I had booked was cancelled; instead, we went on a walking tour of Ruakuri Cave, with a very entertaining guide, who on his own admittance had partied very well the previous evening. He certainly needed his flask of coffee!

Our next stop was Mount Taranaki; we were incredibly lucky with the weather, because we arrived there on the first day that it hadn't rained. Whilst the mountain was still shrouded in cloud, we were able to go on a couple of walks, one which was certainly damper than the lady at the DOC site had led us to expect (full blown fording through streams which were now gushing rivers...). But it was well worth it when we climbed the side of a waterfall at Wilkies Pools and saw the cloud clearing above us:




We then headed back to Wellington, a round trip of 1779 km!


Our final excursion was to Kapiti Island - I'd been looking forward to this trip for months, and wasn't disappointed. We got to see loads of birds, and hear even more:
North Island robins followed us all the way round


Saddlebacks were incredibly noisy in the trees as well as popping over to see what we were doing


The Weka were everywhere, particularly when they thought there might be a chance of getting something to eat!



And, best of all, whilst waiting for the boat to take us back, we got to see the Takahe, with their chick; there are less than 250 of these birds remaining, so to know that the conservation work on reserves such as Kapiti is working is fantastic.



Then it was back to earth with a bump as we took my parents back to the airport and got ready for the first day back at work after three weeks off. Since then, we've mainly been focussed on the house; doing DIY (I got to climb all over the roof painting the rusted areas with a solution designed to turn the rust back into iron; I was then supposed to paint it with a primer to stop it rusting again, however, it has either been raining or blowing a gale ever since), fixing the dud battery in the house alarm (we thought it might have been a bit of a bad introduction to the neighbours to have the alarm go off during a power cut, particularly if it was on one of the evenings that we were out) and turning the garden back from a jungle into something that looks a little bit more respectable.

I know I owe photos of the new house - will get them up at some point - promise!

Yay!

As of about 2:00 this afternoon, we joined the ranks of those who are in debt by really rather a huge amount to the bank - our house purchase went through with only one last minute hitch; the bank didn't fax the solicitor to say that the mortgage had been paid into their account, which meant that they couldn't confirm the transaction with the seller's solicitor. All sorted out before I could get *too* twitchy about it, though!

All I can think of at the moment is this xkcd comic (click to make it readable!):

When one door closes...

Buying a house in New Zealand is interesting to say the least, compared to the UK.

For a start, there is the phenomenon known as the Open Home (I am aware that they are prevalent in the States, too, but not at all in the UK). This is where sellers throw open the doors of their houses for half an hour to an hour, usually on a Sunday afternoon, and allow people to look round. Usually the sellers are not on the scene, but your local friendly estate agent is there to greet you - you look round on your own, rather than having the 'here is the kitchen, here is the bathroom' experience. These open homes are advertised in various property press magazines, and on a good day, you can daisy chain five or six of these together. Whilst the agents also hand out little pamphlets on the houses, a notebook is essential to keep track of the salient points of each house and to stop them all blurring into one big property by the end of the day. (I have filled up over half a notebook, one page to a property, with the houses we've looked round since early September!)

Estate agents do also show you round properties, but most of them seem to focus on the open homes as their way of getting many people through the door for less effort on their part.

Then there is the process to actually buy the house. In NZ, your offer is made as part of the contract, which means that, once you have negotiated the price and any conditions (usually checking council documents, building inspection and arranging finance, though you do also usually go into the offer with a pre-approval on your finance, so this is a case of sorting out the paperwork and getting a valuation on the property if required), it is a binding contract. You then have a set period to fulfil those conditions, usually five to ten days. If you confirm to your solicitor that you are satisfied in those conditions by the end of that time period, then the contract goes unconditional, and you pay your deposit (which you then lose if you end up pulling out of the contract for any reason). Then, on the agreed settlement date, you pay the balance (or get the bank to transfer the money to the solicitor - for some reason they won't even let it touch my bank account...) and take vacant possession (unless you are buying the house for renting, in which case you may opt to keep the tenants). Then you get to move in!

We've managed to go through a couple of interesting variations to this process whilst house hunting.

The first house that we looked at was owned by a lady who had put her house on the market because she'd seen another further up the coast that she wanted to buy. Unfortunately, she hadn't put an offer in on it, and by the time we put our offer in (three days after it had gone on the market), the house she had fallen in love with had sold. Rightly or wrongly, the estate agents persuaded her to go ahead with the sale anyway, and she signed the contract, inserting a clause that stated that she had to put a conditional offer in on another property in ten business days before we could go unconditional. However, over the next two weeks, she had a change of heart (possibly pushed by her teenage son, who wasn't as keen on moving as his mum was...), and ended up not putting in an offer. We had a suspicion that something was going wrong when, five days before the deadline, she was still quibbling over the property that she was interested in, concerned that it was in an earthquake zone and at risk of liquefaction. Given that her current place was just two streets away from the main Upper Hutt fault line, we couldn't really see what the fuss was about. But, she failed to meet her condition, which meant that our contract was void, and she took her property off the market. All very disappointing, particularly as I'd already relandscaped the garden in my mind...

That was on the Wednesday. Our estate agent doesn't work on a Thursday, but on the Friday, he took us round three properties, two of which we liked, one of those very much (great location, recently refurbished inside, small but usable garden, large enough for our book collection *and* guests - it ticked all the right boxes). On the Saturday, the agent called us to say that someone else was putting in an offer on the house that we really liked, and did we also want to put in an offer? At that point, we said that we would wait until we'd been round the open homes on the Sunday as we didn't want to tie ourselves down and miss out on other properties (there was at least one other which I was very interested in from the internet details). After the open homes, the one from Friday was still our favourite, so we asked the agent whether it was still possible for us to put in an offer. He said yes, and came round that evening with the paperwork.

Because we were now in a multiple bid situation, we now hit something slightly new again compared to the UK process for buying a house. We had to put forward our best and final offer, which would be presented to the seller in a sealed envelope. The seller would then open the two offers, and choose the best one to proceed to contract with - no playing each buyer off against the other to get the highest price (and therefore no gazumping, either).

On Monday evening, as I got in from work, I had a call from the agent to say that our bid was the preferred, and, because we hadn't had anything tricky in the conditions we wanted to put forward, they were proceeding straight to signing the contract, which would be lodged with the solicitors in the morning.

So - slight panic mode, as we had five days down for our conditions. I called up the builder who we had already contacted as part of the work we had done on the previous property. He had space available on the Tuesday, as someone else had cancelled, and so I took a half day off work to be able to go up to the property to receive the verbal report (the written one followed over email in the evening). There were a couple of issues, but nothing major, and we were able to use those to get a slight discount on the property price.

On the Wednesday, the valuer went round to appraise the house - his report came through on the Friday, and by some strange coincidence, it was exactly the same amount as we had offered for it... We were then left hanging over the weekend to find out whether the bank was going to approve the mortgage - we already had the pre approval, but needed them to give us the go ahead on this particular property. We had to have everything sorted out by the Monday evening to meet our five day deadline...

The bank kept us hanging on until almost the last minute - with 50 minutes to go on the Monday, they approved the finance, but we still then had to get the documents over to the solicitors and then wait for them to tell us that we could pay the deposit to the estate agents. We were able to go unconditional just after 5.00 on the Monday - a week and a day after sitting down with the estate agent to put in our offer.

We now have two weeks to get ourselves ready and to formalise the mortgage paperwork before we complete the contract on the 8th December - from viewing the house to moving in will have been four weeks. Quite a bit to do, particularly given that we have two Sci-Fi social events this Saturday, plus an orchestra concert next Saturday. But I'm starting to work through the tick list - ordered the removal van and handed in our notice on our rented house today... Calm, orderly, and I'll try not to panic at all!

Two years in...

I'll try to get a bit better at blogging - a month is really too long between posts...

Last night marked two years since taking off from the UK, tomorrow morning marks two years since we landed in New Zealand. Tomorrow, I take my lunch hour to go to the Wellington branch of Immigration New Zealand to apply for our full blown Permanent Residency visas which will allow us to enter and leave New Zealand whenever we like. (confusingly, they've changed the process since we landed; under the terms that we got our visas, we have Permanent Residency, but needed to apply for our Indefinite Returning Residents visas; now, under the new rules, we are only Residents, and need to apply for our Permanent Residency visas...)

I still have days when I have to pinch myself to convince myself that we are really here. It just seems so surreal that we are walking around half a planet away from where we were born and raised. And I still have days when I walk round with a great big grin on my face, usually those when the sun is shining and the the wind is blowing enough to stream out the various New Zealand flags around the capital city.

The last two years have gone by so quickly, and I really feel that we have settled in completely. We have a fantastic group of friends, particularly within the sci-fi community, and I believe that our very active social life is one of the reasons that Wellington truly feels like home, and this has been mirrored in conversations with other migrants; those who have settled and don't spend half their time looking back 'home' are those who get out and about, meeting people and making friends.

I have been incredibly lucky to land a job that I enjoy (well, about 80% of the time, which is far more than most!), and the likelihood that this will turn into an ongoing career (helped a lot by a very supportive manager and overall head of department, both of whom are as ambitious for me as I am for myself!). Given the number of jobs that I applied for, and the near miss with the job that collapsed just after we arrived, I believe that I have really fallen on my feet.

We are currently house hunting, so will shortly be setting down further roots when we in-debt ourselves to a bank. The area that we are looking in is further away from Wellington, but the longer commute is offset by better property prices and some lovely houses.

Of course, I miss the UK, but for me, it is always going to be friends and family that I miss, not anything material. The internet has been a brilliant way of making sure that the friendships that we have can continue, despite the distances between us. Skype is a great modern invention - free video calls anywhere in the world? Even the concept was only a Sci-Fi idea twenty years ago (a quick look on Wikipedia states that the first webcam was developed in 1991...), yet the weekly call home to both sets of families is now an integral part of our life - I would hate to think what it would cost if we actually had to pay over and above our monthly internet charges!

The last month has been busy, not only with the usual social activities (plus a few dinner and play dates with people from the board-gaming group), but with house hunting. New Zealand has a great tradition of Open Homes, where people who are selling houses have public viewings for a short, advertised, period of the day (usually about an hour). This means that, with a bit of careful planning, you can get round five or six houses in an area in a long and slightly exhausting afternoon. You do get to know all the estate agents, too - there's quite a few that we are on first name terms with now! The process of buying houses is slightly different to the UK, but that is a whole new post, and will wait until we have reached the end of the journey (I don't want to jeopardise anything - superstitious much?).

Superstar!

Regular readers of my blog will know that I really do love my wildlife. And here in NZ, that primarily means birds.

One of the rarest birds here in NZ is the Kakapo. There are just over 130 of them left in the world, and are all on two colony-islands off the coast of New Zealand. They are flightless, nocturnal parrots, and are incredibly engaging, intelligent and full of personality.

Viewers of the BBC Natural History Show 'Last Chance to See' (Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine following in the footsteps of the radio show of the same name which Carwardine and Douglas Adams did 20 years previously) will remember the episode of their encounter with Sirocco, a male Kakapo, who, after being nursed through an illness as a young chick, imprinted on humans, and now is not interested in other kakapo at all.

For those who haven't seen it, this is the relevant clip (the title says it all!):


Because Sirocco really doesn't seem to find other kakapo attractive (he even has his booming bowl by the pathway between the conservation volunteers' sleeping quarters and the outside loo!), he is now the spokesbird for the conservation programme, and he is currently "on tour."

He's spending a month at Zealandia, and John and I went to see him last week. Sadly, because he is nocturnal, they had to have dim lighting; good enough for us to see him, but we weren't allowed to use flash on the camera, which meant that I didn't get that many photos which weren't either blurred or black.

However, if Long John Silver had had a kakapo as his parrot, I suspect that he might not have been taken as seriously:



He is just as engaging in 'real life', constantly hunting for the next macademia nut. His handler was in the enclosure to talk about him and to introduce him to his visitors; she is an excellent show-woman, and was able to give a fascinating talk about Sirocco and the kakapo in general. His enclosure has a live stream from the web cam thanks to Three News. It's only available from 8.30 pm NZ time, probably running till about 10.30-11pm (I know that my colleague had to change the time that he was going to visit because poor Sirocco isn't getting any sleep - Zealandia is just too noisy with all the birdsong during the day!)

It was a fantastic evening - hopefully not a 'Last Chance to See' (Kakapo live for 80 years naturally), and well worth the visit.

Geek and Proud!

This is my blog post for the Speak out with your Geek Out week, a movement set up, initially in reaction to the latest (well, it was the latest, but that was a couple of weeks ago, so I'm sure there's been another one since) geek bashing post on the internet. I'd link to it, but I've since discovered that the lady who wrote it gets paid per person who clicks onto the page, and suffice it to say, I don't want her to get any more money!

(I had intended to do multiple posts this week, but as this is the first night I've had in so far, and I'm not going to have another evening 'off' until Sunday, I think it's just going to be the one!)

The week is designed for all of us geeks, of whatever flavour, to consciously post about our hobbies and to show the world that we exist. Whilst there are enough of us who are loud and proud about being a geek, there are also plenty of people, children, teenagers and adults, who think that they are the only ones. There are also plenty of people, children, teenagers and adults, who still think that being geeky, particularly if it is to do with Sci-Fi / Fantasy, is a legitimate target for mocking. I had an example of that this very week, where a friend was very disparaging of the fact that I was going to be staying in on Thursday to watch the NZ broadcast of the first Doctor Who in this second-half series. If I'd said that I was staying in to watch whichever Rugby World Cup game was on at the same time (quick Google later - Russia vs USA), would I have had the same comments? Fortunately, I have a good enough relationship with my friend (and a thick enough skin) that I could take his attitude in the tongue in cheek manner in which it was obviously intended, but I was a little bit disappointed that the comments had come up in the first place.

I was fortunate in that my parents had plenty of sci-fi and fantasy round the house when I was young; I look back on the bedtime stories that I was read, and the majority of the ones which stood out seem to have been sci-fi or fantasy of one sort or another. That didn't stop me from being teased about it at school, but it meant that I always knew that I wasn't a complete outcast - if my parents liked it, it had to be ok!

From that young age, with the discovery of (amongst many others) John Wyndham, J.R.R. Tolkien, Douglas Adams, Robin Jarvis, Roald Dahl, I moved on to Terry Pratchett, Ursula Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clark and so many more. I read the school library out of sci-fi and fantasy books - it was a very proud moment when the head librarian asked me for recommendations for more books to get in. As a family, we watched series such as Red Dwarf, Robot Wars, Neverwhere, Crime Traveller and Scrap Heap Challenge. Now, as an adult, my primary reading material is either sci-fi or fantasy (though at the moment, my bedside book is called Cooking for Geeks, all about the science of cookery, and I'm reading a business book on the way to and from work), I very rarely watch anything that doesn't have some form of sci-fi or fantasy content, I go board gaming once a month (and occasionally have friends round for 'in between' gaming sessions), I belong to two science fiction clubs, as well as an orchestra (slightly classical-music geek, too) and I'm starting to turn into a bit of a craft geek, just because I don't have enough things going on (I am teaching myself to crochet, and really rather loving it). So - I may be a 'scatter gun' geek instead of a one-hobby, in depth geek, but I'm still proud of my obsessions.

So - why it is important that those of us who are loud and proud about our geekly ways are able to shout about it? We need to show those who are being teased, whether it is gentle mocking or outright bullying, that there is nothing to be ashamed of, and that they are not alone. The internet is a great socialiser for this - there is a world of knowledge and connections at people's fingertips that just wasn't there when I was a teenager, but there are still people who feel alone, or ashamed of not being 'normal' in what they enjoy.

However, I have news for them. Anybody can be a geek, about pretty much any subject - it isn't just those of us who have the entire Terry Pratchett collection, or who can quote whole chapters from the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or lines from the Goon Show). How is the football fan, who plasters his bedroom wall with posters of teams through the ages, goes to every game he can, sleeps under a team duvet and has replica home and away strips hanging in his wardrobe any different to a Star Trek fan, who has posters of the stars hanging over her bed, watches every episode when it comes on TV, sleeps under an Enterprise duvet and has a replica uniform hanging in her wardrobe? It just takes knowledge and enthusiasm to be a geek, whether you recognise that's what you are or not.

I sign off with one of my favourite quotations from The Divine Comedy (MasterMind) (another latent obsession of mine): "So tell me what the hell is normal, and who the hell is sane? And why the hell care anyway? The dreams that we have had are gonna prove that we're all mad, and that's OK."