tallpoppy

onward! let 'em have it!

professional means they get paid January 27, 2006

Julian Dean (New Zealand's pre-eminent professional road cyclist, based in Spain and currently riding for Credit Agricole) managed to get a late entry in this year's Wellington-Wairarapa Cycle Classic. Cool, our favorite overseas son (no other Kiwi has ridden the Tour de France, to my knowledge) is going to have a stab at one of the good tours in his home country. But halfway through the race, he's had to pull out - due to appendicitis. He must be gutted.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

So London got the grand departe for the 2007 Tour de France, eh? I feel a trip back to the UK to , um, see friends coming on.

bulletin, chain letter January 26, 2006

The WCC finally signed off the building works on our house. This time next week, it will be ours! Thank goodness.

Ordinarily I abhore such things as this, but since one of the people I respect most in the world tagged us in, what the heck. Though I won't go through all the viral stuff about adding my URL to the end of a list or something like that - I'm a dead end street, and have been for some years now. Old joke: memes don't exist, tell all your friends.

What were you doing 10 years ago?
I was mooching around Beijing, about to head back to NZ and start my honours year at uni. I was spending my time working at the NZ Immigration Service during the day, and hanging around at Cafe Cafe in Sanlitun of an evening. There was no humidity and it was bloody freezing. I was fairly unaware that the harmless fling that my partner of the time was having with a mutual friend was escalating somewhat beyond the original design spec, and would shortly lead to her leaving me, rather a lot of unnecessary drama, and the eventual establishment of a much better status quo. Funny old world.

What were you doing 1 year ago?
Living in Cambridge, merrily making lists of stuff that we had to do in our last year in the UK. Planning. Getting ready for Rebecca's first birthday party. Cycling through snow. Drinking myself insensible prior to going on a two month booze sabbatical. Implementing a CM system for unwilling users on a separate continent. That sort of thing.

What were you doing 1 hour ago?
The dishes.

List five creative things you want to achieve this year:
Hell. Creative stuff? Um...

Do a bit more leisure writing - do nonfiction essays count as creative?
Write a few bits for Wikipedia - you can make up any old rubbish for that.
Put together a fixed-gear bike for winter. Trust me, it's a fairly invention-intense process.
Write the odd haiku, as the mood takes me.
Get another tattoo. One of my goals from last year that I never quite got around to.

List five snacks you enjoy:

Bananas.
Cookie Time biscuits.
Bagels.
Braeburn apples.
Beef jerky.

List five things you would do if money were no object:

I'd own several more bicycles, for starters.
I'd spend a lot more time looking after Rebecca. I got to spend much more time with her during our translocatory hiatus, and it was great.
Have a small bach by a lake somewhere down south.
Do a lot more epic bicycle rides - not just John O'Groats to Land's End, but Cape Reinga to Bluff, the Trans-Canada ride, etc. Cycle through interesting places and take my time.
Learn to kayak.

List five bad habits:
Assuming that this is referring to bad habits that I actually possess:

I tend to shy away from confrontations.
I tend to fall into habitual eating patterns, and eat when I'm not actually hungry.
Related: if I'm offered food, I tend to eat it, regardless of whether I'm actually hungry.
I'm surprisingly lazy.
I'm pretty sure I don't do enough housework.

List five things you like doing:

Playing with Rebecca.
Marital activities.
Cycling.
Listening to music.
Reading.

List five favorite gadgets:
I'm a surprisingly un-gadgety person these days.

Topeak Alien cycling multitool.
Leatherman Squirt P4 mini multitool.
Tomato corers. Seriously: they are the singlemost useful kitchen 'gadget' I can think of.
Our portable cot. It's well whizzy.
Parker fountain pen. Fountain pens make you look serious.

Name one thing you like about yourself:
I'm quite happy with my calves.

daredevil on a budget January 23, 2006

Tonight, we put Rebecca to bed at 7pm as per normal. At 8, she was still quietly singing to herself. We stuck our heads around and looked, to find her quietly flipping through her copy of "Counting Rhymes" and looking happy. She's not yet two and she's already reading in bed after lights-out. We are terribly proud.

Still no joy on the house. We'd rather been hoping that we could move in this weekend, as it's a long weekend (yay Wellington Anniversary day!). However, the house still isn't quite finished, so we're not quite there yet. Knock on wood, we'll be in next weekend. Or the weekend after that. By Valentine's day, almost definitely. It's doing my head in a bit, I'll admit.

Mind you, all our stuff is in there, so in some metaphysical sense I suppose that we're already moved in. It's all in boxes. NZ Van Lines dropped it all off bright and early on Monday morning; they were quite pleased to have an unloading that basically consisted of them moving the boxes out from a big pile in the van to a big pile in the garage, and me then signing it off. Morning's work done by 9:45am. It's also very tantalising having all our stuff just sitting there and being unable to open it for the meantime. I spent ten frustrating minutes in the garage today (popped past the house to scope out the garden), and managed to locate both my bike (easy: it's the package that looks like a bicycle) and a box labelled 'bicycle helmets'. Now all I have to do is find one labelled 'shoes', and I'll actually be able to ride mmy bike in to work. Clipless pedals can be a bit of a bugger sometimes. Of course, I'd have to also find the box labelled 'bike parts' to find my lock, too. None of this is easy with all the boxes just stacked in a big pile: if it ain't on the outside, I don't have a hope of finding it. Roll on moving in date, is all I can say.

Rebecca has taken to pointing us out to other people when we're in public. She'll get the attention of some kindly old lady or other toddler, point to Heather, and say "Mummy!" in an explanatory tone of voice. In her mind, she's saying "Ladies and gentlemen, may I present my mother." She does it for me ("Daddy!") and my mum ("Nana!"). The other day, we took her to Staglands for a trip. Among a variety of other animals, she met a clydesdale. She was understandably quite nervous, and preferred to stand a few feet from the pen, watching me pat the clydesdale's nose. Another small child toddled up and stood beside her. She stood, half-turned, grabbed the other child's arm, pointed up at the clydesdale and carefully enunciated "Big horsie!" Just in case, y'know, the other kid wasn't sure what it was. This incident then lead her to refer to me in public as "Big daddy!". Nice.

For those interested, it turns out that cycling is one of the five most dangerous sports in New Zealand, as measured via injuries claimed with ACC. Is it always a sport? So my ride to work in the morning (when I can do it, damnit) is like playing a football match? It's time-efficient, if so.

Ways you can tell that we're back in New Zealand:

The bloke who sits three desks across from me lives two doors down from our new house.
The partner of the bloke who sits behind me has a bach fifty feet from my mum's.
The manager of our daycare centre was delivered by my grandfather.

I'm particularly proud of that last one. The Tuatapere connection comes back again; my grandfather spent his entire career as a rural GP in Tuatapere, a small logging town in Southland. He delivered a heck of a lot of babies (Tuatapere had the local maternity hospital, covering a lot of rural Southland), and was pretty well known. So every once in a while, I get asked if we're any relation to old Dr Elder from Tuatapere. Big source of pride.

go hard stripey January 12, 2006

Few weeks ago, we were wandering around Oriental Parade. A couple of cyclists passed us - one on a rather nice Avanti, the most common marque in NZ, and one on a very nice Condor Italia. Condor are a London bike shop who make a tasty variety of their own frames, and are generally considered to be one of the better choices for the discerning roadie in the big smoke. "Fair enough," I thought to myself, "bloke bought a bike back from the UK. Nice one." A couple of days later, I saw an old bloke in a Condor cycling cap. Power to the lad, must have got it on a trip over. Then I saw another Condor, underneath a fit-looking bloke in full USPS strip powering up the Old Hutt Road. Then another. "Crikey!" I expostulated (mentally), "I guess that a lot of people who've done their OE were based in London and really liked Condor's stuff."

Then, of course, I went into Capital Cycles and discovered that they specialise in imported European bikes, and that Condor are the affordable end of the Continental (from here, anything from the UK is Continental) bling on sale (all parts by Campagnolo, De Rosas on the walls, etc). They've even got a composite carbon/aluminium race bike running Mavic's Mektronik cable-free electronic shifting system (complete with infrared links between the shifter and rear derailleur). Nice the house. I ended up buying myself a Condor cycling cap (tres Euro-chic), which lasted about ten seconds after I got home. "Daddy hat!" Rebecca proclaimed, holding out her hand - and then slung the hat on her head and refused to give it back, voluminously spreading mashed potato on the sides during her dinner. It's in the wash now.

The house buying process is moving along apace. We're actually not particularly further forward than we were immediately prior to Christmas; we're still waiting for the city council to have a look at the place and to confirm that it's all been done right and nothing's likely to fall off/down. Since this is an iterative process, and they've already confirmed that the bulk of the work is unlikely to fall off/down, we're really just waiting on a couple of minor tick-list items. So it's all a bit frustrating, but it's getting there. Of course, it's not as frustrating as it'll be once the inspection has actually been passsed, and then we're just waiting for the city council to issue the bloody certificate. Still, the appropriate wheels are in motion, and with a bit of luck we should be in within a couple of weeks. Of course, this is making somewhat of a mockery of our proud claim that the NZ house buying process is like lightning compared to the UK - we're running on four weeks since our offer was approved, and still not bloody in yet. I'm told it's usually quicker, and that Christmas just derails things a little.

This is quite notable across the country as a whole. While the UK is characterised by service industries running at a desultory rumble more or less continually, NZ has a very binary attitude: normally excellent, and then absolutely nothing from late December to mid January. Everyone you might want to help you get anything done - lawyers, estate agents, banks - all pack up and head off to the beach for a fortnight or two. Before and after, they're great, can't do enough for you. During, well... it's Christmas, isn't it? Sunscreen?

back at the coal face January 05, 2006

Reasons why we moved home, an interminable entry in a series that threatens to extend well past its use-by date: at the precise time of midnight, New Year's Eve in the UK (=13:00 local time NZ), while all you lot stuck in the UK where drunkenly hooting and vaguely wondering how to get home through the foot-deep snow outside, I and my lovely wife were frolicking naked in the Tasman Sea in brilliant sunshine.

Not that I'm rubbing it in, you understand.

Ahem. Not that it was for long, mind, due to the dangers of sunburn (the average burn time in NZ in midsummer is now down to 8 minutes!). But it was bloody good fun all the same.

I should say that we all had an excellent Christmas and were actually rather overwhelmed by the number and size of packages that arrived from the UK. Thank you to all; far more detailed letters of thanks to arrive shortly. Rebecca had a great time, and is still trying to work out quite why she got so many presents in such a short time.

After a three month hiatus, being back at work is actually quite a shock. Still, ACC seem OK so far - the office is half-deserted, due to the Christmas holidays, but everyone I've met seems nice. OK, so I have to wear "business casual" to work, but it's a very convenient location for town (as in, it's in town), it's got covered cycle parking and multiple showers, and the money's OK. Anyway, business casual's no worse than school uniform, isn't it?