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.