Death to the unbelievers 7 March 2001
First it was kind of amusing, in an annoying way. Then it was just annoying. Then it was fucking annoying. Now, we're trying to get our psychotic neighbours evicted.
So Sunday seems like a nice enough day. Warmish, bright; I go to the gym, cook a little lunch, chill out a bit. Varnish our new shelves. Read. Sort of thing. Then, at about 4:30pm, Heather (in the front bedroom) calls out to me that something's happening out in the street. I pop down, and lo and behold, the neighbours' youngest kid (Diego, 5) has put a stone through the rear window of our car. Some of the other kids in the street saw it and were making a fuss, which Heather heard. What do our neighbours do? "It wasn't him." But these other kids all saw it. "He didn't mean to." Fair enough, but I'm not paying because you guys can't control a five-year-old. Is Della (the mother) in? "No, she ain't." Like hell.
To sum up: the neighbours' kid breaks our rear window. They then refuse to a) admit it happened and b) take responsibility. Fortunately, our insurance is pretty damn comprehensive, so we can get the window replaced without too much bother. But I'm damned if I'm paying for it. The other thing: this isn't the first time we've had a window broken on the car. About three weeks ago, we came out to head off to the supermarket and found the passenger side window with a large hole in it. Nothing missing, glass not smashed out to get access to the car, just a hole in the window. We put it down to random vandalism and got it fixed. I didn't put it up here in case Rodger got inflamed with fury at the thought of The Mighty Audi (which he sold to us) being desecrated by the local kids. Obviously, having had another window broken, we're now pretty damn suspicious about the first one. But we can't prove anything about that occasion.
We can, however, prove stuff about this one. Monday morning, as I was about to go off to work, one of the other householders in the street comes up to me and says that he saw the whole thing and is quite willing to support me in court. Apparantly Diego was throwing stones at a couple of cars that afternoon, and this guy was watching to make sure his car was OK. So we're bang to rights, and are looking to take it as far as we have to.
In a way, it's given me a pretty interesting insight into how local councils work in the UK. We rang up the local housing authority to complain about what a pack of irritating, intimidating pigs our neighbours have been since we moved in. Ten minutes of polite ranting later, the guy is sending me out an information pack. Including pre-packaged sheets for writing down anything the neighbours do that could be actionable. Now, this came as a bit of a surprise to me. This sort of thing happens so often, and can end up in court so frequently, that the Cambridge City Council have their own bespoke forms for gathering evidence that can be used in a future prosecution? Wow.
So at the moment we're busily complaining to both the police (who are pretty sympathetic) and the city council (less so, but still not dismissive) and seeing what happens. And trying to get our money back for the window. I have a nasty feeling that small claims court is heading our way at speed.
It never rains but it pours. My company (Geneva Technology) just got bought out by a much larger US company, Convergys. It actually looks like a pretty sweet deal - and it means that we now know exactly what our stock options are worth (bye-bye IPO). What I want to know is, do we get t-shirts out of this?
A good day in purgatory 2 March 2001
We listen to Radio 4 in the morning. It's one of those things you do when you're slowly waking up. We've got it down to the point where the alarm goes off at 7am, we roll over and turn the radio on, then doze for forty minutes. I always used to do this back in Wellington, but with the National Program. Back there, this tended to be about 9:30am. I used to have hideous lucid dreams about Kim Hill ripping people to shreds. These days, the 7am beat on Radio 4 is normally John Humphries, who's much more avuncular than Kim Hill ever was. My lucid dreams are now much more pleasant, unless Anne Widdicome or WIlliam Hague are interviewed.
Anyway, there we were, lying in bed yesterday morning. Dozing gently and hugging Heather, I heard one of the presenters mention that since it was the first of March, it was officially the first day of spring. Winter has now officially finished, we can all prepare for a new summer full of peace and happiness and, above all, warmth.
My ass.
It snowed yesterday. Snowed a lot. None of it lay (at least not in Cambridge), but we had to bike home through a snowstorm (see below). And today, while we were trudging around the town, buying shelves, we started losing sensation in extremities from the cold. I found myself seriously thinking about walking around with my hands tucked into my armpits. Ice in puddles was still frozen at 3pm. The temperature can't have been above 2 celsius.
We've got a way to go before spring, I'd say.
Mind you, we did get shelves. We're now slightly more organised. We can once more alphabetise our CDs. Did I mention that I'm an organisation freak in certain limited contexts?
Freezing our little tits off 1 March 2001
I love the UK. Hugely contagious cattle disease all over the country, half the countrside closed as a consequence, it's the middle of winter, and lo! Snowfalls. This sounds picturesque. And it is indeed pretty cool to be in at work, and look at all the lovely swirling snow outside the window. Then you realise that you've got to bike home through a medium-grade blizzard. Woo hoo!
OK, so it wasn't that bad. Still, it was pretty unpleasant. I'm also having some knee trouble at the moment, so cycling's not the barrel of laughs it usually is. Ah well. It's the weekend.
So our motto for this weekend is 'shelves or death!' We reserve the right to alter the slogan in line with events, but we're determined to get some bloody form of storage together. I mean, come on. We've been in this house for over six months, and we haven't even got bookshelves yet. We have about ten boxes of books, about ten metres of shelf space in total (I measured before we left the last flat - Captain Anal, that is me!), and they've been bloody sitting around in the living room for six months. But no more! We have decided to get off our arses and get it sorted this weekend. Or at least, to get _some_ of it sorted this weekend. If we don't get some bloody storage space we're going to go spare. But we've got a number of good leads, and we're going to troll around Cambridge's myriad second-hand shops (OK, there's five of them) and see what we can find. If we get desperate we can always head down to Ikea and get some new stuff on Sunday.
So that's our exciting lives in the suburbs. The style.
Mad props though: Orbital are touring in two months, and playing at the Corn Exchange! _Nice_. We saw them there just after I first arrived in the UK, in early 1999. It went off then, and I'm quietly looking forward to a repeat helping. Yeah baby. And the new album even includes their cover of the Dr Who theme tune. Oh the pleasure.
More photos 19th Feb
Righto. A bit more time with the scanner, and a few assorted piccies can grace the world. So here we go.
The debris left behind after our neighbours' couch-burning exploits. I mean, come on. They had a plentiful supply of accelerants, they had time, and they had a nice large area to burn the damn thing in. And they still can't manage to burn a perfectly flammable rotting couch properly. My god they're a pack of idiots.
The intrepid party about to tackle the Abel Tasman. This picture taken in the courtyard of Awaroa Lodge, which is actually in the middle of the national park. L -> R: Alison, Alex, Martyn, Heather, and Jack.
The middle of Wai-o-tapu (Sacred Water) geothermal area, just outside Rotorua. The lake in the foreground has huge amounts of rather impressive chemicals in it, hence the arresting colour. In shot are Heather, Charlotte, Alison, and Alex's leg.
The view from the observation tower at the top of Kapiti Island. Buggered trampers (us) and occasional weka can be observed in the foreground; a precipitous drop (500m more or less straight down) to the left.
So there's a teaser for you.
Seeing the country 11th February
So we've just bought a car off Rodger. What do you do when you've got a car? Go on daytrips around the country, of course. For starters, we kicked it up to Norfolk. Specifically, Hunstanton. Surprisingly fun. Despite it being freezing cold, we wandered around the waterfront. British seaside towns are weird in winter. Half the stuff was closed. Specifically, the tourist tat. This probably helped the general taste level skyrocket, though I did manage to get a stick of Hunstanton Rock for Sharron from Work.
I was actually really impressed with the Sealife Aquarium. Didn't look like much from the outside, but well cool on the inside. Excellent aquaria, including one of the coolest ray pools I've ever seen. The pool was open-topped, about four feet deep, and had a number of rays (including a couple of stingrays) and some small dogfish in it. The display was highly educational, and taught me one important thing: small rays quite like doing a bizarre limbo-like maneuver, rising out of the water so their bodies are nearly vertical and their snouts bob up and down in the air. Very bizarre looking, and I wish I'd had a camera. Still.
Also popped into Fat Birds Don't Fly, one of the best cycle shops I've been in. Friendly, competant, and a great array of stuff. Highly recommended - if you can be arsed getting out to Hunstanton, mind.
The daytrip was a great success overall. Roll on the next one, that's what I say.
Minor delays... 28th January
Just back from our holiday in NZ. Minor ISP problems (Corpus web server feeling very unhappy) just prior to Christmas/New Years meant that this page didn't get updated before we left for NZ, and I've had no web access for the last four weeks (time in NZ). Sorry about that.
Damn, but it was great to be back in NZ again. Sun, summer, old friends, new friends; a few weeks away from the hustle-bustle of work in Cambridge and back in the Old Country. The overall fun-&-games motif was dampened somewhat by extremely heavy family vibes in Wellington, but otherwise we had a great time. It was good to be back on the ground. It's amazing how much you can miss a place and not realise. Not that we're not enjoying life in Cambridge; just that it was great to be back home. The UK is a blast, we're having a lot of fun, we've got great friends over here and we don't want to leave any time soon... but it really made us realise that we definitely want to live back in NZ at some point. And hey, the way the real estate market is looking in Wellington at the moment... ;)
Speaking of real estate markets, a house three doors down from us is for sale (via Tylers, if anyone's interested). We're in a terrace, so I can say without fear of contradiction that it's pretty much the same as our house. Main differences seem to be that we don't have double-glazing, and that they've partitioned their main bedroom into two small, poky ones. How much are they asking, we wonder? Precisely 10K more than we paid for this place five months ago. The Cambridge property market is blossoming again, methinks...
Back to work again tomorrow. Oh well.
ObOtherApology: I'm having problems getting the scanner to work. More specifically, I'm having problems getting the drivers to install correctly. So: pictures of absolutely everything as/when I actually get the damn thing working. Expect something over the next couple of days, then. I can feel another session with the driver disk coming on.
God bless us all, every one! 23rd December
Merry Christmas to all. To watch for: I'll soon be putting a photos page up. Heather's getting me a scanner for Christmas, and so you'll all finally get a chance to see the insides of Stately Elder Mansion. Thrill to the original purple bedroom! Gasp when you see how many bloody coats of paint it took to get it livable! Shudder at what we found in the loft space (total disarray)! Or, alternatively, gasp in awe at how long my beard's got. Your thrills, kids, your thrills.
Ah well - us and tha posse is doing the triumphant return thang in one little, hectic week. Yes kids - a week today, and we're departing. Man, are we going to be glad to get some proper bloody weather.
Psychotic neighbour update: they've started taking the piss. Over to use the phone, on average, three times a night last week. Bugger it - we're sworn they're never going to use the damn thing again. And they haven't even had the grace to burn anything particularly amusing recently. Ah well.
Our life recently: edited highlights 1st December
So it's all been a bit interesting recently. The pre-Christmas rush has started - wild kid Sharron From Work put up the tree today - and we're well aware that tempus is merrily fugiting as fast as it can. So we're getting some mad wicked pre-Christmas styles on at the mo. At the moment, we're basically running on a pretty volatile mix of christmas shopping stress, pre-trip-home stress, work stress, and general existential malaise. At this point, I find it helps to concentrate on my mantra: life is good. Yeah.
About two weeks ago, we decided to have a housewarming. After all, we've been in the damn place for about three months; might as well show some of our mates the place. Being as how surprise is nine-tenths of the law - or something like that - we had it at about three days' notice. This combined nicely with the fact that we're three miles from the town centre [aerial photo] to thin out the numbers, but we still had a good thirty people or so show up at various points in the evening. We arbitrarily chose a start time of 8:30pm. Fine.
On the day, we cleaned the house a bit and then hit the local supermarket to buy some cheap continental lager and good old British crisps. Back home by about 5:30, we put our feet up for a bit and have a cuppa. Come 6:30, we're cooking a bit of dinner. And then we hear a few noises in the garden.
A few loud noises.
A brief bit of background: when we moved in, we noticed that our neighbours had a rather old and grotty three-piece suite sitting on their back lawn, on some old paving slabs. It didn't look that shit-hot to begin with, and the wettest November on record certainly didn't do the remaining sofa cushions any favours. In short: decrepit furniture has been mouldering in our neighbour's garden for quite a while.
But no longer.
The loud noises we could hear were some of the local kids manhandling the suite into a rough pile, breaking bits off where appropriate to try and get a reasonable stack. This was followed by the ceremonial pouring of petrol over the pile. Lots of petrol. Like, lots and lots of petrol. The phrase 'a metric shitload' leaps to mind.
About 7pm, they threw a match on the pile. It took pretty fast - as I said, lots of petrol. Tyger tyger in the forests of the night had nothing on that rotting lounge suite. I think they used so much petrol to try and counteract the fact that the whole thing was pretty soaked with water - in fact, it was raining at the time. Regardless, it burned pretty large. Flames looked to be about eight to ten feet up, and the smoke was incredible. Remember, at this point they're not just burning wet (varnished!) wood, they're also burning the sofa cushions. That foam rubber certainly makes vile smoke, I'll say that.
But from where we were sitting, this was hilarious. Here we are, having a party. There our neighbours are, burning old furniture in their garden. Alright! Street theatre! Something to show the guests! "Hey guys, see what our mutant neighbours are doing!" And we weren't even being hit by the smoke! It was all being blown into the neighbours' house! I mean, from where we were, this was pretty much a win-win situation. We weren't even particularly worried about the danger of the fire spreading - what little wind there was was blowing towards the neighbours' house, the fire was in the middle of a large patch of old paving slabs, and it was raining. Cool.
We had, however, reckoned without the powerful force of accelerants. At 7pm, they put a match to a pile of furniture about four foot high and five foot across. By 7:30 they had 8ft flames. By 8pm it was totally burned out. I'm not joking. Completely dead. Burned right up and died in a hurry. They burn brightest who burn shortest and all that. By 8:30, when the first guests arrived, all we could do was bemusedly tell 'em what'd just happened (much as I'm doing now).
So we had a good party and got pretty damn drunk. Lots of people fronted, lots of booze was consumed, and we even had Jez & Andrea show up at 1:30, shortly after everyone else had left. Fortunately they were as drunk as we were, so no problems there. A good evening.
The next morning, I got some photos of the debris. It proved one thing: our neighbours aren't just a pack of mutants, they're also some of the most inept pyromaniacs that I've ever seen. At age eight, I could have build a better fire than that. There's still a huge amount of scody-suite-debris in the garden. But now instead of a couple of pieces of rotting furniture, they've got a large pile of blackened ash with large pieces of charred wood. Nice one, guys. I've got some photos, and I'll put 'em up here as soon as I can scan them in. So there you are.
On a lighter note: a week before we moved in, we signed up to get our power & gas through Scottish Power. After a saga too long and exhausting to relate, we got the last bill from British Gas yesterday. Three months after we'd signed up to the competition. Makes you think, really.
A fair bit of other stuff has been happening as well, but it tends to either fall into the categories of a) stuff I don't want to talk about on my web site, or b) stuff I can't be bothered typing in at the moment. The fact that we might be buying a car, for example, would be b). For obvious reasons, I'm not going to give an example of a).
We're still looking for a housesitter, btw. Anyone interested?
It all gets interesting 30th November
Life has just got rather complicated. Work is pretty insane at the moment. My family is getting complicated. And my RSI is acting up again. All in all, the latter half of November wasn't that great. Unfortunately, the first half of December doesn't look to be shaping up to be much better.Ah well. I'm really looking forward to the trip home in January now. It'll be stressful, but at least we'll be back home and seeing the families again. Four and a half weeks, kids; four and a half weeks.
She's back 15th November
Heather arrived back the other day. Life is good. A hard yet fun time in Montreal, by all accounts. It's good to have her back. Of course, it's raining like hell, the river's flooding, and the trains are all off. Still, can't have everything.
We've booked & paid for our tickets home. Rock steady. The tour of NZ is definitely a goer. Current plans for while we're home include catching some sun, getting some decent food again, seeing family and mates... should be well top. Now we just need to find a housesitter and we're cool. Yeah.
Tour of NZ, 2001
Advance warning: we're coming home. Only for a visit, mind. [details]
The story so far: 13th October
Well, it's been an interesting week. Heather zoomed off to the US/Canada on Thursday, so it's going to be Jack alone in Cambridge for a while. I plan to repaint things.
We got to spend two days in Reading before Heather left, courtesy of me attending a course in Continuus, our software change management tool at work. It's fun seeing what training you can get if you ask politely enough. The course was in Bracknell, and we stayed in Reading for two days. Nice enough place. The course was fairly interesting, though I was still spotted falling asleep at one point. This is perfectly normal for me; I fall asleep in meetings/seminars at the slightest oppurtunity. I'm used to it now. Courses with clear handouts get points as a consequence.
And it was my 25th birthday last Sunday (8th). Another milestone gone. I had one of those "if you'd asked me five years ago where I thought I'd be at age 25, I'd never have said..." moments on the evening. But it wasn't any big deal. I realised that although I'd never have picked it right, I'm damn happy with where/how I am right now - and that's the main thing, innit? ;)
And a big shout out to Sizer Size for the postcard - cheers, man.
Is this thing on?: 7th October
All is well, man.End 2000, start 2001.