windows on the world

I am off through the slanting morning light to town again. The train—the last of the rush hour trains—is more full than the one I usually take just 40 minutes later. The train riders are a varied set: high school kids in school uniforms, business people with official-looking papers, university students highlighting text books, lots of people reading the relatively awful newspapers available here. The fellows behind me are talking about their common interest which seems to be collecting antique sound-making devices: jukeboxes, old telephones, old record players. I’ve turned on my ipod to get away from my weird eavesdropping curiosity about how much the last thingy sold for on ebay and how much it cost to ship it around the world.

For those of you looking for a house update: The saga of the windows continues today. How have the windows gone wrong? Let me count the ways: they have the wrong general look (we’d wanted one look for the front of the windows and they did it a different way). They open wrong (we’d wanted windows that swing open from the sides; most of these siwng open from the top). They are dribbling in with a new couple of windows arriving every day (when we were told they’d all get here on the 18^th). And, er, there is mostly no glass in the windows at all.

So, after a Saturday meeting with one of the window fellows, on Monday, Michael called the window place, irritated. The two people he’d been working with had different opinions about when the glaziers would come and who they’d coordinate with. One fellow said it was our builder’s responsibility to contact glaziers and the other one said it was the company’s responsibility to coordinate that with the builder. In any case, both were surprised that the glaziers hadn’t been in touch with us. Michael, frustrated with all this talk, said, “I need you to get someone to my house to put glass in the windowpanes!

“What do you mean?” the window guy said, confused.

“I mean that there is no glass in the windows!” Michael told him. “All the fixed panes of windows are open and the house is totally unprotected!” The fellow still didn’t understand quite what Michael meant. Which windows were missing glass? “I want you to get in your car and drive by my house,” Michael told him, “and then I really want you to find a way to get glass in the windows before the next storm.”

A couple of hours later, Michael got a phone call from the window guy. “There’s NO glass in your windows!” he said. Michael agreed. “Your house is totally unprotected against the elements!” he said, upset. Michael agreed. “I’ve never seen anything like this!” the glass fellow continued. Michael allowed that he had never seen anything like it either. There were promises made and, allegedly, there will be glass in our windows by the end of the day today. We’ll see how that works.

Windows by today, skylights finished by tomorrow, the kitchen finished next Tuesday, floor sanders in next Wednesday. We think we’ll move 10 March. Zowie. And now we'll be able to remember why we bought this house in the first place!

PS The windows look excitingly good--they're still wrong, but SO much better than plywood!

Don’t feed the natives

On Sundays, my friend Karen generally comes out from Wellington. We go to the beach to talk and hang out and boogy board, and then she tends to come home for dinner. Karen is one of my Kiwi friends, a category I expected to be a higher proportion than it turns out to be. Of the people who eat regularly at my house, fewer than half were actually born here in New Zealand; most have come here in the last ten years. Karen, though, serves as a cultural attaché to the Kiwiberger home. We have pronunciation practice (“wah-tah—not warterrrr,” she tells us), we tell stories of our youth, we talk about love and 80s music, and we eat food.

Last night we talked about foods that don’t qualify as food outside your own cultural orientation. Root beer seems to be a key example of this. I don’t drink sodas under nearly any circumstances. But if I were going to drink one, root beer would be one of the key sodas of choice. I love the tangy start with a creamy finish. In our early days, Michael and I used to drive far and wide in search of the perfect root beer float. Kiwis do NOT like root beer. I discovered this in the US with a visiting Keith. He didn’t just find himself not particularly fond of root beer—he hated it. I asked Karen about that. Her face crumpled in total disgust. “Root beer is one of the few things that my body hasn’t even recognized as a food item,” she explained. She told us stories about the two times she tried to like it on visits to the US. “My body gave a big tremor as if to say that this was not an edible object, and I just needed to get it out of my mouth,” she explained to peals of laughter from Aidan and Naomi. Thus began a category of foods-that-aren’t-foods.

I told the obligatory vegemite story of my first encounter with that non-food which is my most clear recognition of the notion that there might be a food that some love that others absolutely don’t recognize as edible. Karen told us about two trampers (=hikers) who were sitting with her around the fire one evening swatting mosquitoes. She told them that vegemite (or marmite) was great for keeping the bugs away; it turns out to be filled with all those B vitamins that make your blood taste bad to the mozzies. What she neglected to tell them was that the brown gloop in the jar was meant to be ingested and not applied topically. She heard from them again several days later with stories of their deep humiliation when they rubbed the slimy spread over their arms and legs, to the great mirth of their fellow trampers (alas, Karen doesn’t know whether vegemite applied topically also works to keep mozzies away although it’s clear it keeps other trampers away).

And then it was time for the true test of our friendship. After conversations about other American combinations that are just wrongwrongwrong to the kiwi palette, the kids and I sprang into action to make chocolate and peanut butter cookies for dessert. Karen was horrified—why would you ruin chocolate by putting it near peanut butter? I had made these cookies—unknowingly breaking the cultural divide—for my friend Robyn once, and Robyn had gamely managed to get one down. It was clear then that it was her first and last attempt at that oh-so-yummy combination. (Note that Keith, with decades of living with an American, happily eats these cookies and that my dad, who has been an American all his life, doesn’t like them much.) What would Karen—who doesn’t much like sweet things anyway—make of this?

The kids tried to tempt her with dough-covered spoons to lick (chocolate yes, peanut butter a horrified no) and laughed as she collected herself quietly a few minutes before The Eating of the Cookies. Aidan, who has some experience eating things he doesn’t feel good about eating, coached her from the side. “You have to believe you’re going to like it or else you don’t have a chance at liking it,” he told her knowledgably. His careful coaching disintegrated, however, when he popped the cookie into her not-quite-ready mouth. And…she liked it! Enough to have two more and happily take a stash home for the rest of the week. Now this is the real reason I have come to New Zealand. Sure the work is excellent, the scenery spectacular, but it’s the conversion of some of the natives to the chocolate and peanut butter combination which will prove the bulk of my work here. Look out New Zealanders—there are bottles of root beer coming to a fancy import store near you.

(Pictures today are obviously of Karen and the cookie--and of Aidan standing in front of his new window this evening, on a night when there should have been much more to photograph than a single new window, but there wasn't. Argh!)

Dreaming of next

I try to thank Dave, our builder, every day. He's amazing, astonishing, all manner of good things. Today I said, "Dave, thank you thank you thank you for doing all this work for us."

He shrugged, Davelike. "It's just my job."

"It's not just a job, Dave, it's the creating of a wonderful place for us to live."

"Aww, it's just another house and I'm just another builder," he said, classically kiwi.

"You're my dream builder, Dave--and this is my dream house," I told him. And I think that both things are literally true.

We will move into the new house soon. Each day I try to calculate how many more days, notice the Last-Time-In-This-House things. Did we change our sheets for the last time in this house this week? Surely this is the last time we’ll fill up the LPG gas tanks for the gas hob. Do you think this was the last bread I’ll bake here? And so on.

And, along with the lasts, I get lost in the upcoming firsts. I walk through the new house in my mind, unrolling rugs, placing furniture, unpacking boxes into as-yet-undesigned wardrobes. As we were working on the design, I moved into the possible designs in my head and lived life there. Looking at blueprints, I imagined living in the finished spaces, saw parties there on hot summer days, tea with Melissa on cold winter afternoons. I watched the movement patterns when Aidan was zooming through the house like a maniac, saw where I’d need to go to wash the sheets and comfort children during a stomach flu. Because we weren’t utterly pleased with the architectural design help we got, it was really important for me to sweat the details.

And now the details are coming to life. The Keith room upstairs—which requires the dropped ceiling in the kitchen—is magnificent, the dropped ceiling a feature rather than a utilitarian blemish. The lofts in the kids rooms turned out to be both very expensive and also extremely cool. The house feels airy and lovely with the soaring high ceilings which Dave has plastered and topped with lovely cove moulding.

Each day brings another set of joys, another set of disappointments. The bathtub is the wrong size—too short for me to stretch out in. The heart remu doors are so beautiful I can hardly believe they’re newly made from recovered wood. The windows are wrong in several different ways. The lighting looks like it’ll be spectacular. And so on. And so on.

Is this my dream house? In this house each detail is mine, each step familiar. By the time we sleep our first night in the house, I’ll have lived there in my mind for nearly a year. The first time I grope for the light switch in the middle of the night I’ll find it just where I think it ought to go—because I put designed it there. But is that really good? As I was rounding the house last night, coming from the working back door towards the front of the house (where the front door—still undelivered—is boarded up), I was tallying the mistakes in the windows for the conversation with the window guy in the morning. I was thinking about laying tile and how we’ll ever ever afford even a hint of a front deck (we paid more than expected for the piles to hold up the deck and now can’t afford the wood to put on the piles!). And my heart did not soar as it used to when I reached the space where the sheltered back of the house gives way to the sweeping vistas and drumming sound of the roaring sea. I stopped at the front of my driveway and watched the full moon reflect on the big beach and wondered how I could ever get so lost in detail that I could miss this view, the very reason for the house purchase in the first place. I thought about my grandmother who didn’t believe anyone should live together before marriage--not so much for religious reasons as because it took all the fun out of those first few months of married life. My new dream house is, in some ways, my pre-loved spouse. I’ve seen her early on the morning and looking at her worst. I know her warts and imperfections, and I have paid dearly for each flaw.

So, as I continue the countdown (how many more blogs do I write in this house?) I wonder what it will be like in our new house, whether it will really be wonderfully worth all of the angst (and cash) it took to get us there. In 12 or so days when we lie down in our new bedrooms for the first nights sleep, will it feel like the beginning of a honeymoon or just a ho-hum continuation of a sometimes-flawed relationship? I think it’s a good sign that my heart beats faster just contemplating the question. Dream house, here I come!

(pictures today are of one periwinkle wall glimpsed from the beach, the view out of the bathroom to the sea, the LAST glimpse of the old windows in the bedroom, and the full moon reflected in the glassy sand)

Rocks and hard places by the sea

The sky was a brilliant blue yesterday and utterly cloudless, but still we were caught in the perfect storm. The current house isn’t selling; the market here has gone dead quiet. The new house, however, is still merrily acquiring new expenses; yesterday we came home to $13000 worth of bills. Careful readers will notice this as A Bad Combination. The kitchen is in and nearly finished: the final bill will come when it’s done. The windows, which were supposed to be installed yesterday, will likely be installed today: the final bill will come when they’re done. The plumbing/ electricity/ painting/ pick-your-service are all nearing their completion. They will soon be finished—as soon as the next two or three weeks. The final bill will come when they're done. The old house is still not sold. Last time it went on the market, it sold in a day with three offers. Ahhh, that was a nicer world to sell a house!

We are watching the emotions move through us: hope, panic, despair, resignation, regret. Which choices would we go back and undo if we were given a magic wand? Which moves would we unmake? I cannot yet bring myself to regret the purchase and renovation of the new house; I am still too head-over-heels in love with it to imagine wishing it not mine (even with the renovation at twice what we had expected). Instead, I wish the old house away. I can point to the day I wish we had back, the day when I thought I was getting out of the purchase of the current house but wasn’t. I have gone back and unpulled that thread in my mind, imagined waking the next morning to find that the house had gone to the second-highest bidder, sighed and resigned myself to finding another place, maybe renting for a while. What would happen if I could go back and unwind that part of my life’s tapestry?

I keep bumping up against Buddhist principles and stories about good and bad outcomes. At which point do you decide which decision is good and which is bad? This morning, talking it all over with Michael, I said, “Well, it’s easy to tell which decisions were the right ones in hindsight.” But which hindsight? How far back do you need to go to decide which ones were right? My father’s father, as a young man, decided against getting a job as a writer because it paid $10 less (a week? A month?) than the job he took—which was less interesting and at which he was less good. He regretted that decision for his entire life, talked about it into his 80s, handed it down in family mythology as a warning: do not do this terrible thing. At his 80^th birthday, he stood in front of family and friends with a huge smile, aware that he had never reached his potential in his career—and that he had lived a life with seven children and 19 grandchildren who adored him. What would have happened if he had taken the job? Maybe he’d have been a failure at that one too. Maybe he would have begun to drink more often and more violently, as journalists sometimes do. Maybe he’d have been so successful that he’d have not had the last four children, sticking with only the first three—eliminating not only those children but their children and their children’s children. Or maybe he’d have done just fine, been relatively unchanged, chugging adequately along at the newspaper job and then moving on to something else, and the only difference is that he’d never have told the story in the first place. His not telling that story would have changed my life. Who knows how.

If we had not bought our current house, maybe, when it was tough to sell the house in DC and I was beginning a serious panic about moving, we wouldn’t have sold that one, would have pulled back on the whole move-for-a-chunk-of-time thing and rented something here. Maybe, when times were much harder in the early lonely days, we’d have scurried back for the (emotional, at least) safety of the US. Maybe we’d have tried to sell the DC house now in this terrible market there. When you pull at a single thread, there’s no telling what unravels.

Which is why the Buddhists tell us to live for today, to take happy and sad as simply what happens to be experienced at the moment. Today we are cycling through many emotions. Shall we feed the panic and regret? I think instead we celebrate two houses which can be filled with people we love, a beach with sugar-fine sands, and healthy and happy children. And we will look out of our new windows at a new horizon, and give thanks to whatever forces in the world have brought us to this moment, with these people, and inside these four (or, if you want to count all of our property, eight) walls. Breathe in the air around you and rejoice in it all. As the rancher in the South Island told us last month: you’re a long time dead.

Full weekend

It has been one of those utterly full times--but full of laughter and delight. Carolyn and her family are fantastic additions to our life, and we spend time at her house and at ours. F came out and we ate at Carolyn's (to save our house, clean from a showing on Saturday, to be clean for the open house on Sunday). We sat in Carolyn's beautiful lounge and talked about life the universe and everything and watched the sun sink into the sea. The joy multiplied around me: here I was with these dear friends from such different parts of my life, all combining together. And here we were, in one of most beautiful spots in the world together. AND my house will be quite like this, magnificent views over after-dinner tea. These are all wonderful things.

So, the pictures today are from the Pacifika festival in Wellington on Saturday, where Carolyn and her family got to try the drums (and so did my kids), and the new house, inching towards greatness. (Note that the two pics of the inside of the house are taken of walls the same colour--one bathed in the light of the setting sun and the other a few minutes later with a flash. This is going to be one really fantastic place to live! Everyone wish for a buyer for the house we live in now!)

Bits and pieces

Ahh, there are many things to be said about this week, about the work I did at NZCER, about our worries about whether this house will ever sell, about how lovely it is to have Carolyn and the kids here. There is this funny echo in her arrival and her kids' first day of school at this time of year that shows me myself at this time last year. There are serious things to learn in that. But tonight, with all the children over at Carolyn's and all of us heading to a Pasifika festival tomorrow, there's just cleaning and cleaning for a showing.

Here are the pictures of the first fully periwinkle wall of the new house, and--even better--the new kitchen (semi-installed). The house is coming along, and suddenly I think that maybe it's my actual dream house--all the walls painted the colours I want, all of the cabinets where I want them, all of the appliances big enough to keep a household constantly filled with people eating and happy. This is not such a bad life...

(pictures today: the periwinkle back of the house, and the kitchen emerging: empty shell with Michael and Eddie, cabinets stacked in the lounge, the cabinets partially-installed in the kitchen)

For Jim

A day of arrivals! Today my friend Carolyn and her three kids arrived from the US for a 4 month sabbatical. Her husband Jim (for whom these pics are posted) will follow in a couple of weeks.
And the kitchen arrived, too, although it doesn't get installed until (hopefully) tomorrow.
With all these arrivals, I'm a happy camper, but with five kids at dinner (three of them bundles of energy from 30 hours traveling), I'm tired!

(pics today are of the walk to Carolyn's rented house from ours and the new cabinets stacked in the lounge)

Colourful kiwis

New Zealand, as you may have heard me say, is a magnificent country. The soaring green hills plummeting to turquoise seas are not particularly shy about their beauty. The landscape here is hardly subtle.

The creatures in New Zealand, however, are much more subtle than the land, as if to show that they know they will always be second fiddle to the beauty that rises all around them. New Zealand has none of Australia’s rainbow-coloured parrots—or even many of the brilliant and garishly flowered plants you see in other places. Here the parrots—where we have them—are green without a look-at-me flash of blue or red. The most showy bird I know—a tui—is garbed in a simple yet sophisticated black with a subtle tuft of white at the neck. Even the kiwi, the national symbol, is a hidden wallflower of a bird—brownish green, nocturnal, shockingly shy. Each creature seems to be saying: No, don’t take your eyes off the hills/sea/mountains to look at little old me.

The people here aren’t worlds different from that. They look out for “tall poppies”: those who stick their heads too far above their crowd of peers. Tall poppies get their heads lopped off, goes the warning. The dominant colour trend in Wellington is a palette of grey-to-black, with the cream, khaki and colour I usually wear marking me as different before I even open my mouth. The four colours people tend to paint the outside of their houses are: grey, white, beige, and pale yellow. Inside their houses, most people like a cream on cream palette. This is not a look-at-me place. Be subtle, be regular, fit in, the English genes call out.

I am an Irish-American. I have come to New Zealand to be swept away by the beauty here and by the various wonders the people have to offer. I have not, however, lost my love for colours. And, as you may also have noticed, there is a house I now own that needs a paint job. It is a house at the top of a hill in the centre of the village, a house that is so obvious from nearly every point in town that it is distinguishable from miles up the highway, even from an airplane on the descent to Wellington. What to do about that?

The first choice we made was a roof colour. We stood in the back yard of the house with potential house colours on little chips and looked at the placement of the house, the colours of the other roofs nearby, the surrounding on the hill. Grey would have been the safe colour—and I have had grey roofs in nearly every place I’ve ever lived. But this particular house is a whim, a folly, a pure expression of joy and delight; we left safety behind when we signed the papers on it in the first place. So we picked a green roof, which we thought would mirror the tree canopy around the house, help it blend into the hillside, and also give a playful counterpart to all kinds of interesting colours for the side of the place. The green, when it arrived, was less green than we had hoped, less the colour of a tree leaf and more the colour of the first shoots of spring. But it is a common colour on both houses and trees here (roofs are generally the brightest part of a house) and so we sighed and hoped a wall colour would bring some life to it.

I had wanted a house like the landscape: green like the trees and blue like the sea and yellow like the sun. I wanted to use only those colours which were found right near the house, in combinations that were natural. When I mentioned my hopes (for a blue house under my green roof—maybe with yellow trim), kiwis were horrified. “Wow—that’s really out there!” they would exclaim. “You sure have extreme taste!” The only one who was fully supportive (other than our family and Melissa, who basically counts as an internal family member) was Robyn’s husband Rob, a Scottish artist who paints with brilliant colours because New Zealand is such a bright and magnificent place after a dismal Glasgow childhood. “The colours will be beautiful together,” he assured me in his lilting accent, undimmed from decades in this county. “And you’ll sure give the locals something to talk about when there’s nothing else going on!”

Armed with this semi-vote of confidence, we picked a variety of test pots and painted swatches on the wall. These swatches horrified Dave, Johnny, and the rest of the builders. “You people are WILD!” Dave told us. “Those test colours on the wall—are you thinking of painting those on the OUTSIDE of your house?” others asked us. A friend who had offered to lend her colour sense blanched when she saw the six options. “Have you thought of something much more subtle?” she asked. “Green roofs mostly just go with white walls,” the painter muttered.

We were faced with a seriously difficult position. I am clear that I don’t want to live in a white/beige/grey house. And at the same time, I don’t much like to stand out in a crowd and seriously dislike giving anyone any reason to talk about me behind my back. I might be Irish in my colour sensibility, but I’m still an introvert. And this house was at the top of a hill in the centre of town; there’s a way it belongs to the town as well as belonging to us. I didn’t want to do anything to totally out of character with the other (all yellow with one outlying pale green) houses on the hill.

As I struggled between the palest blue and the palest periwinkle, I realised that while I liked the periwinkle better, the blue was more fitting because it was found so often in nature. New Zealand wasn’t much of a periwinkle country. Then Rob walked up the side of the house, and he picked a single agapanthus flower. The green was the colour of the roof; the periwinkle the colour of the walls, with a deep purple running through the centre. Right next to our house, we had our sign. Periwinkle it was.

Dave tried to tell us that he thought the paint would cost twice as much because of the boldness and the amount of pigment, and that I would peel much more quickly. I, desperately trying to get a handle on the individual construction of colour, explained that we were looking at pastels, all of them, and that we had eliminated the darker or brighter colours already. “Are you kidding!” Dave told me, “every colour up there is a shocker. You get a deep colour—like the colour of your shirt there, and it just costs more and it doesn’t hold up. The conditions here don’t support it. That’s why white or cream is the best way to go.”

I looked at my royal blue shirt, one of the brightest colours I own. “You think the colour we’re talking about is in the same family as this?” I asked, incredulously. “I would call this a deep colour; I would call the colour we’ve chosen a pastel.” Dave snorted at my language. I went to get the test pot and opened it, the pale periwinkle blue nearly white against the dark shirt. Dave laughed, abashed, “Ok, maybe it’s not quite as dark as I remembered,” he told me. “It’s your house anyway.”

And with that, as the biggest vote of confidence I would get, I had them buy paint and being to paint the walls. And I adore the colour. I love the way it is blue in some lights and lavender in others. I love the way it matches the strength of the green roof but contrasts in colour. I love that it blends in with the yellows, creams, and greens of the other houses on the hill and is also distinctly itself.

The house painting has stopped with just one wall painted while the painter moves inside to prep for the kitchen which arrives next week. But the glimpse of periwinkle on the side is still bringing attention and still raising controversy even in its semi-finished state. We ran into people we know on the beach as we gazed adoringly at the colour. “So have you picked a house colour,” they asked. We nodded and pointed delightedly at the wall we were so clearly admiring. “So that’s the FINAL colour?” the wife asked. We nodded, impervious to the doubtful tone in their voices. “And that’s the new roof there, too, the green?” asked the husband. I looked right at him and smiled, his unvoiced critique thick in the air between us. “We took all the colours straight from the garden,” we told him as he looked baffled. “The house is painted for an agapanthus,” I told him. But it could have been a hebe or an iris or a violet. His face broke into an actual smile. “So it is,” he said. “So it is.” And if he still doesn’t like the colour, that’s ok. At least now it makes sense in the New Zealand landscape: a pale periwinkle flower facing an azure sea in a cerulean sky and surrounded by deep green trees. Let the villagers talk!

(the pictures today are of the house with the swatches, the house being painted its lovely periwinkle, and a Kea--the silly native parrot we met on our journey south)

jumping for joy

I am on the lovely train home, but tonight it mostly just feels long and dark—no view here after 10 pm. I’m returning from a seriously long day. I left on the first train of the morning, walking through the dark, starlit sky to the train station. Now I’m returning on the almost last train of the night, and will walk again in the starlit night home. The moon must be newish because it wasn’t out this morning and isn’t out now as far as I can tell on this train. That’s something I’d never have noticed in DC.

Today I did a day of presenting about the interface between leadership development and adult development for a group at the University of Auckland. Again and again, the group I was working with asked me about what I was doing here in New Zealand. “Do you have mostly governmental clients?” “Do you do much work in Auckland?” “Where are most of your clients based?” And I don’t have the heart to say that now, more than a year after I moved to this lovely place, I still don’t have many clients—certainly not enough to notice trends about anything. I am still just a very beginning consultant here, and I haven’t actually worked all that hard to get work. In fact, what have I been doing, anyway? When is the last time I had a networking meeting and attempted to make the connections that might get me new clients? November? October? I can’t even remember.

Still, it’s all part of the journey, right? As I answered again and again that I didn’t know what I really do in New Zealand, a letter was waiting in my in-box. When I finally opened it, I learnt that I have passed the second and most difficult step on the tenure journey. It is possible that the dean or provost would decline a candidate who had such unanimous faculty support, but it would be unprecedented. Since I don’t think of myself as a particularly unprecedented person, it was this tenure step that had me the most nervous. And now, on this day when I presented at the University of Auckland, my home university has put me one giant step closer to tenure.

Let’s look at the contradictions, shall we? I loved my career in the US, loved my colleagues and students at the university; loved my colleagues and clients at Kenning. Here, in New Zealand, I love my colleagues at NZCER and enjoy the work there—but it is a partial fill for the many pieces of work I love and I have not been able to round it out yet. In a single week I’ll get the letter that takes me most of the way towards ensuring that I’ll have a job for life in the US and I’ll install my dream kitchen in my dream house in New Zealand. Anyone else out there noticing the key disjuncture?

But here I’m working on little sleep and have been up for nearly 19 hours, so let’s just stop right now and celebrate. I got a lovely tenure letter today, a letter I’ve been thinking about since I began my doctorate in 1996. It was lovely receiving the letter in a university setting today, with American academics even, who explained to the kiwis present that this was A Really Big Deal. And it’s a Really Big Deal that all the walls are up in the new house, that the painting has begun, that people are hustling to get things primed before the kitchen comes next week. It’s a big deal that Carolyn is coming next week. It’s a big deal that I had a really excellent conversation yesterday with someone at a consulting firm who is interested in forwarding my name to folks who might hire me for serious and high-level work. In case that weren’t enough reason for delight, this week Michael and I celebrated the 20^th anniversary of our first date. And home from the train station, Rob and Michael and I stood in the moonless night and watched the milky way. I stood in awe of the billions of stars scattered like handfuls of glitter across the sky and my breath caught at the sight of a shooting star I don’t know where anything is going, but I know that even in the confusion there is ample reason to jump for joy.

House tour

Here is a house tour of the renovation progress. We figure we'll be moving in just about one month from today. You might compare this to the last video of the house--before we took it apart--here .(Watching the video, I see that I never showed you the downstairs portions of Naomi and Aidan's rooms because it was too loud in there with the jibbing. You'll see those eventually--they look like all the other rooms, small and with a window that looks at the sea.)
The tour that will be the biggest thrill might come in about 6 weeks, when I show you the house with our things in it! (And, hopefully, I'll show you a picture of a SOLD sign on the house where my things currently live!)

jumping for joy

We had come to Queenstown with high expectations, having heard (admittedly, by Americans) that it was the most beautiful place they’d ever been. After the walks and horse back riding in sleepy Te Anau and the cruise through Milford Sound and the “not bad” drive to Queenstown, we were ready to be wowed.

And wowed we were. As we stood blinking on the beach at the shores of the lake, we (well, at least the grown-ups) had the most surreal experience. There were lovely young things sunning themselves on the sand in elegant bikinis. There were coiffed and polished couples meandering through the park or sipping cocktails at the lakeside café. The place was packed—and mostly with European faces and accents (not Pakeha, the European New Zealanders, but serious European—people speaking French, German, etc.). “Did I get a stamp on my passport?” Michael said looking around. “When did we leave New Zealand?” I asked. “Welcome to Lake Tahoe,” Rob answered.

This was the most touristy and American place we’ve been to in our time down under. We heard few kiwi accents, saw very little of the rumpled and beautifully casual kiwi style, and passed shop after shop selling either over-priced clothes or adventure activities like bungy jumping. All of this took place on a backdrop so magnificent it easily compared with the other spectacular landscapes of the trip—several different ranges of lovely mountains reflected in a massive and icy cold lake.

After dinner and a good night’s sleep, we got used to the hybrid NZ/US experience. We headed out to wineries where we sampled the smooth and full pinot noirs, stroked ripening grapes and toured a wine cave. We sat in a winery courtyard and ate a spectacular lunch, each bite a jewel. We crossed a gorge and drove through fruit orchards, fresh peach juice dripping down our faces. We visited a historic town centre (from the mid to late 1800s—very late for here) and panned for gold in the hills. In each of these non-Queenstown places, we were firmly in New Zealand. Then back to Queenstown and, without any marking of the country borders, back in the US.

On our last morning, we gave into the Queenstown mystique and just decided to be tourists there. We climbed to the top of one of the mountains in a gondola and rode down again and again in a luge, the track snaking down the mountainside with a breathtaking backdrop. We lunched at another, more posh winery where a snooty (British) waitress looked down her nose at us as we ate yummy food and listened to bees in the lavender hedges. And then, wishing we were speeding in a luge again, we hurled our crammed rental car southwards to catch our plane. We got more and more tense as the minutes ticked until pulling into the airport exactly 2 minutes before the plane boarded. In the Atlanta airport, this would have been disasterous. In Invercargill, this was no worries, mate. Michael scribbled a note to the rental car folks apologizing for not filling the tank, Rob grabbed the bags, I grabbed the kids, and we walked calmly onto the plane (no security in the tiny New Zealand airports).

It wasn’t until we got home that we discovered the Great Tragedy of the trip. Naomi had left her stuffed Pooh bear—the bear who was Michael’s when he was a little boy—behind. Wednesday morning, I began making phone calls to every place we stayed—and to the rental car agency—to see if the bear had been found. Lovely, kind, sympathetic people, but no deal (although, in typical kiwi style, the rental car agent hoped we had a lovely trip and explained that since we had been in such a hurry and left a nice note, they wouldn’t charge us the refueling fee and would only charge us the retail price of the petrol). Melissa and I, running over all the possibilities together, were stumped. “The bear has to be somewhere,” she kept saying. “It must be in the sheets.”

So yesterday, I made one more call to the last hotel to ask about the sheets. Had they done the laundry yet? Well, they don’t do the laundry, they send it out. Could I have that number? Yes. One more phone call and finally a hopeful voice. “I think we did get an old bear in the last day or two. Could you hold on while I check?” And so I held on, and when he came back with a “Yes” there was such whooping and delight at this little house, that he laughed and laughed with us, all the way from the deep south.

And so, the pictures from yesterday were of joy and new vistas, which has been the theme of the week. Naomi, jumping on the trampoline outside a vineyard, Melissa, the first to peer out the brand new window in my study at the new house, and the new stairs to lead us up to the upstairs room which will house happy guests. The pictures from today are Aidan on the sign of an old New Zealand town, where a dam has flooded the river (with some serious protest) and the historic buildings have been moved to a different place; Rob, Aidan and Naomi panning for gold (all we found is a chicken egg); the kids on the chair lift to the luge--and then coming down again.