Posted in travel on 05/06/2003 08:32 am by Stephen
So, this past weekend was a Bataan Death-March O Fun, but the house is clean. The open house was on Sunday, and about 10 couples came through to look at the place. I vamoosed with the cats, parking in the shade for 2 hours while the house was open. The cats were very interested by the concept of a “different outside”, and exploring the interior of the car (though Slow Top remained quite suspicious). They did not like driving around, even when free of their cages.
One nice thing about the Real Estate agent we are using is that she had cleaners come over on Saturday. They scrubbed places that have not seen the light of day since before we moved in. The even scrubbed behind the stove! I am glad they came, even so I have 12+ hours of cleaning Saturday, and another 6 hours on Sunday. I am tired, but at least the palce should be easy to keep clean for any subsequent open house days.
Posted in Life in NZ on 05/06/2003 06:04 am by Tam
The girl at the sandwich shop had to ask me to repeat it when I asked for it on my turkey sub. You can get cheddar, or swiss, or “smoked”, but not provolone. I guess it goes along with the Insufficient Italian-ness that makes it so difficult to find frozen ravioli and lasagna-sized tubs of ricotta. On the other hand, tasty little mince pies are ubiquitous. They can’t quite match up to the Scottish bridie pies, but they’ll do, and they’re usually only around NZ$2 — even less for the “savouries” that just have the gravy inside.
In other news, we got our first frost last night, and Chris went out today and picked up four hot water bottles. Ah, our Toasty Friends. I hope mine don’t leak.
The wide-angle shots, by the way, are taken with the Canon’s “Stitch Assist” — you turn the dial to the stitch setting, and then take a series of regular pictures. The camera saves them off to the side of the LCD in a way that makes it pretty easy to see where each one leaves off so you can lin up the next one. Then you run a little wizard on the computer that puts them all together with the overlaps just right and evens out the exposure and stuff. Pretty sweet !