s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

You’ll never catch me coppers! Stephen is on the lam! Running, hiding, moving from state to state. Woo!

Last Thursday I sold the house. That was a frought (bording on traumatic) day. There was so much to do in the end, from returning the borrowed futon to pink house to getting to the lawyer’s place on time, and a host of other things in between. Our neighbor Tom took the refridgerator and washing machine the day before, so when I got up Thursday I went down to Dunkin Donuts to get milk and juice for breakfast. Thursday was also trash day, so I was hauling a huge pile of remainders out to the curb for removal (thankfully the trash men took the couch).

By far the most distressing part was the environmental services people. Since the place is going to be demolished it needed to be checked for asbestos, which in the past was used in everything from roof paper to wall board. So these two guys went around the house with a hammer and chisel, knocking chunks out of walls, ripping away parts of the siding, tearing off the corner of the roof. A distressing sight to say the least, especially when I was still there! Not quite an Arthur Dent “here comes the bulldozer,” but still quite a bit more destructive than I was led to believe.

I ended up being late to the signing, as I got slightly lost in Stoneham. (The Salvation Army turck was 2 hours late, arriving just as I was preparing to leave anyway, leaving them a ntoe that the doors were unlocked and to go on in and take the clothes dryer.) So I was late departing, and to make matters worse I ended up in the wrong lawyers office, but that nice fellow (who knew all the lawyers in town, of course) simply called around while I was on hold with my relator and found out that I was literally across the street from where I needed to be (I was at 272, not 271 Main street). After thanking him I dashed across. As the seller I did not have to sign many forms, but those I did sign got extra long signatures. Both “Stephen Mulholland” and “Tamara Duran by Stephen Mulholland, attorney in fact”. Writing that a dozen times took awhile!

After the closing I was totally brain fried, so I headed down to Natick to meet up with dancing ladies for dinner. Tennessee’s BBQ. Mmmmmmm! And then we went to Ben and Jerry’s for Ice Cream. Not good for us, but very yummie! At dance we learned the last bits of Talakik, a mind bending dance I look forward to inflicting on Tamara and Judith at the earliest opportunity. Bwahahahaha! At this point I was both brain fried and physically exhausted. I followed Beth home (through a maze of dark and twisty streets that I would not be able to retrace), and and found a few hours of blessed sleep up in the attic bedroom. I hope my ravings were not too incoherent. My dreams certainly were.

And then, in what turned out to be an excellent plan, I drove up to Vermont to spend a few days with Chris and Sarah. They live way up in NE vermont, near the town of Rygate. A place that could be quite accurately and literally described as “where nobody can hear you scream”. In two days I heard a dog bark in the distance once, and late one night we could see headlights 5+ miles away across the valley. That was it. No lights, no noises. Of course it is a 20+ minute drive to the nearest place to get a gallon of milk, but wow, wonderful silence. I am sure winter there would be a hoot. You know how all work and no play makes Chris a dull boy? :)

After that I spent another 1.5 days in mid-Vermont near the town of Weston with my co-worker Pascale and her family. I am sure people will be surprised (if not shocked to a near-death state) to find out that I spent 6 hours at church on Sunday. Well, actually the cool Benedictine Priory down the road was having its 50th anniversary party, and a few hundred of us were there. Pascale and family are well known to the brothers. Their house was alse quite remote, but they were only 5 minutes from a small town (not 20). They also had a great view, with Terrible Mountain rising up behind the house. The dirt road they lived off of was a bit larger than the one in Rygate, but it didn’t get that much traffic.

Considering I am about to move to NZ and get looking for a semi-rural house, it was quite interesting to spend a few days in two quite different but interesting house designs, in two different rural settings. A good way to get my brain processing what sort of features I would like to have in my next house. I plan to visit them both again before the summer is done. Escaping the hubub of Boston is nice. After 4 days it was strange to have to share the road with other cars again!

For now I am house/cat sitting in Waltham. I don’t know where I will be tomorrow night. Ahhh, the exciting life of the homeless!

Today was a good day.

Chris and Natasha (who was pulling an all-dayer) came into town to have lunch with me at Great India (the best Indian food you’ve ever had, and if you like Indian at all, quite possibly the best *food* you’ve ever had). Natasha’s birthday is this weekend — yay ! Fun !

Then I made myself Mexican for dinner with supplies I’d gathered Sunday (the apartment, which continues to smell “funny” — I think it’s whatever the landlord used to steam-clean the carpets — now smells “funny”+Mexican). In my exuberance, I got a little carried away with the chili powder (plus I haven’t found the measuring utensils), so there was a good endorphin rush to be had off dinner (will be cutting it with more beans and cheese until the leftovers are gone).

Then after dance class… Beverley asked me to join her troupe !!!! Eeeeeeeee !!! They’re doing tribal & they think I’m “a natural” or something ! Hee ! And all those years of playing “I went to Pennsic” with Bad Raqs has apparently made me quite good at following people out of the corner of my eye. Heh.

And then, I asked Beverley how she felt about men dancing (’cause Stephen is looking forward to a new group to terroriz– I mean entertain), and she said she’s actively *looking* for men to recruit ! She’s got all kinds of funky fusion ideas and she wants men to play with. Yay ! May have to break the idea gently to the rest of the class, but Beverley’s all over it.

And then, after class, I went out drumming ! The guy at the Kwanzaa shop on Courtenay Place told me about the Full Moon Drum Jam at Zebos at the top of Cuba street, and tonight was the full moon, so I brought my drum to class and went up to Zebos after. It was cool ! Zebos (which is apparently a sort of student bar usually, with bands and stuff) has this big courtyard out back, with trees and colored lights and flaming braziers, and tonight it was full of drummers — mostly African drummers, from dredlocked students to ageing hippies, but a few people like me banging away on dumbek, plus a scattering of girls swinging flaming poi balls, or long polynesian batons (also on fire. Some guys, too, with the batons).

It took me a little while to settle in — I started with a little bit of zilling, actually — but eventually I screwed up my courage enough to take a chair in the circle and start banging away with my new drum between my knees, African style (yes, I bought myself the drum I was coveting. It positively sings). Luckily, the guy sitting next to me, Michael, thought I was cute and chatted me up — we introverts need extraverts to make us feel welcome, really (must remember to return the karma and be nice to a nervous-looking newbie next time I go to something like this). The place really filled up as it got later — loads of drummers and a lot of people just hanging around and grooving. A passle of long-haired blonde guys with beards tried the “I’m an extra in the movies” line on me. Hah ! “You and my housemate, and just about every male Kiwi’s brother’s cousin, mate !” Hee.

So I hung out, I drummed, I chatted, I watched fire swing in pretty patterns around pretty college girls. On the way out, an older guy stopped to ask about my drum — it was Glen, the guy who’s organizing the Hossam Ramzy gig. He recognized the drum because it was one of two he’d special ordered to try out himself. He bought my drum’s sister, and offered to help me tune it (mine, that is) and maybe give me a lesson or two. Kewl ! He also reassured me that Ramzy wasn’t some fire-breathing prima donna, all fussy about people’s drums. It’s just that this is a seminar aimed at beginners, and he’d had bad experiences with those in the past when students had shown up with “decorative”, not really playable drums. I promised to talk up the seminar in class, since I think a lot of people have been scared away (I know Chris and I were !).

So now it’s really late, although not as late as I was expecting it to be when I was walking home, but Yay ! I had a good day !

I have decided that when I sleep, I really do prefer to do it horizontally.

The train was perfectly comfy, as trains go, and I had the little inflatable neck pillow thingy I’d wisely bought before the long flight here, and yet. I envied the backpackers, snug under their grubby down sleeping bags, asleep on each other like they do this twice a week, which they probably do.

Auckland has a spiffy new underground train station:

..which they call “the Britomart” for reasons I don’t really understand. It’s all shiny and new, and in the way of all shiny new modern underground mid-city construction is wreaking havoc with local traffic patterns.

I was supposed to pick up my rental car on “Beach Road”, so I asked some of the train crew how to get there. They laughed and told me Beach Road had been torn up for the Britomart, and didn’t exist anymore. I told them I was told to go and pick up a rental car there. They shrugged and pointed to the less-used exit from the platform. Once I’d gone up the escalator and wended my way through the maze of chain-link fencing off the construction site, I asked the station guard posted outside for directions to Beach Road. He pointed out some buildings that looked like they were probably around a mile away, and told me concernedly that it’d be a 20 minute walk. Ehn. It was a nice morning. I walked the direction he pointed for maybe a couple hundred meters before I came to an intersection with my rental agency on the other side of it. “Beach Road” was clearly marked on street sign — the road I’d been walking on. Clearly, all the construction had addled the locals’ geographic sense pretty badly.

My rental car was, of course, a shiny red Echo hatchback. Takanini, the place where the quarantine cattery is, is just off the southern edge of the free map of Auckland they had at the rental place. Luckily, a woman who was not enough of a local to have her sense of direction affected by the Britomart construction knew where it was, and showed me and the guy renting me the car which highway to take.

Car and directions acquired, I headed up a nearby hill that the guy at the rental place assured me had cafes that would serve me breakfast. I paused to snap this pic of the morning cityscape:

then perused my options among the just-opening cafes. I found one with a rainbow flag stuck prominently on the door and ordered up a bowl of porridge as big as my head, with sultanas and apple chunks, brown sugar and fresh cream. Mmmmmm…

Takanini was maybe 20 minutes south, and I stopped and got serviceable directions to the road I was looking for from one of the ubiquitous Indian-run dairies (dairies are something between a Quickie-Mart and newsagent), with the result that I drove past the Quarantine place something like two hours early. So I drove around the countryside (it was countryside around here), watched the little planes take off from the local aerodrome, and wandered through a gigantic nursery/garden center thing that made Mahoney’s look understocked. At some point, I will have to do some kind of lengthy post on local gardening. Most of the plants — even the non-natives — are unfamiliar to me, in part because of the different climate, where begonias grown in bushes, rosemary is a hedging or container plant, and there are calla lillies blooming in Auckland right now, and in part because a lot of the garden plants are things brought over from South Africa, which we didn’t see a whole lot of back in New England. My first couple weeks here, I kept trying to take pictures of different plants, just because everything here seems to have a different *architecture*, but when I’d look at the photos afterwards, they’d just look like pictures of bushes, or leaves.

Anyway, I went as far as the next town down the road — this being the bustling metropolis of Clevedon (which had two evidently competing dairies, a chemists, and a feed store, but no traffic light), where I took this pic, just so y’all could see what the land around there looked like:

Managed to get myself on the wrong road coming back & had to ask directions from some nice ladies at the Kennel Club, who despite their street finder seemed to have a touch of Britomart syndrome, as they could find the road I wanted, but not the road we were actually *on*. One of them seemed to have a seat-of-her-pants idea how to get back to the garden center, though, and that got me back to the Quarantine place.

Where I saw my cats !

They *did* remember me. Slow Top, especially, did his best to lick all the skin off my nose, and was definitely up for some social grooming. Azami took some petting, but was mostly interested in climbing me so she could see if there was a way out of their enclosure higher up. (She’s standing on top of the scratching post in the picture above — you can totally imagine her rattling a tin cup along the fencing.) Rasputin, poor thing, was pretty clearly unhappy — he kept his tail tucked for most of the time I was there, and only after I’d hung around for an hour or so did he start acting more like himself, picking at my shoulder and chirping. I can’t wait to get him to the apartment so he can settle in. They *all* fully expected me to let them out. “Great ! You’re here ! You can work the door ! …Um, the door ? Hello ?”

It was great to see the cats, but also weird and jarring. I haven’t been talking to them on the phone, or emailing them. So it felt kind of like there was this part of the life I had, the life I don’t have anymore, that had suddenly appeared here, in the middle of my new life. Later in the day, I’d remember visiting them and it would feel unreal. It still does. In a couple of weeks, they’ll be here with me. A few weeks after that, Stephen will finally be here. But… I miss my old life. I wish the rest of it could come here, too.

Visiting hours only last until 1:30 (which was just as well, since the cats, having gotten over the excitement of my visit, and having determined that I wasn’t going to be letting them out, were piling into their cosy heated bed to continue their interrupted flob), so I drove back into Auckland to hang around and maybe see some stuff. My dance teacher suggested a couple of places to shop for shiny things, which I did indeed find, despite the fact that they were on what was described to me only as “K’road”. (Stephen and I had found K road — which is short for Karangahape — on our last trip. In fact, we bought a sari for Maura at one of the shops my dance teacher pointed me to.) Also found this open air market in one of the civic squares:

It’s not as obvious in the photo as it is in person, but that shiny building at the back with what look like retro space rockets on the front of it is a cinema. Also took a spin ’round Victoria Park Market, which I vaguely remember wanting to check out the last time we were here:

After that, there was a lot of driving around in search of dinner. I really wanted a sit down dinner in a proper restaurant, but I couldn’t find where they were hiding the proper sit down restaurants. (I *did* drive past the New President hotel, where Stephen and I stayed when we were here.) I ended up back on K Road, and ate at a Turkish kebab place for the sole reason that one of the guys who worked there was smoking a shisha out front. (He admired my hat — thought it was Kurdish, in fact, which is funny considering a guy at Victoria Park earlier had decided it was Thai.) Then I took the car back, and found the entrance to the Britomart solely because I’d walked out of it that morning and marked where it was — not much for signage. Still had a couple hours to kill before the train, so I walked out the other end of the station and found myself on Queen street, at a little shopping mall where Stephen and I had eaten breakfast at “Muffin Break”, waiting for a brief shower to pass. Stuck my head half-heartedly in a couple of tourist shops (greenstone is cheaper in Auckland, I note), then wandered back to the station where the guard (who’d seen me go out) asked if I needed help, since I seemed to be wandering aimlessly. Told him I was just bored, then he and I helped a Japanese exchange student and her host mother haul her luggage down the steps into the station (since the entrance wasn’t complete and only had stairs for the first flight down).

The train back was largely uneventful, except that I seemed to be the only person on the platform interested in helping young Japanese girls with too much luggage (another one showed up with a gaggle of overburdened friends and a very large cardboard box). Definitely good to get back to Wellington (which is lovely in the morning light — must try and get pics), and to my horizontal bed.

Went up to C&Ns & found the spreaders for the futon frame (which did fit in my car just fine, despite the chopped-off back) and an assortment of baking pans. No luck with the casserole dishes, spices, or silverware. Something tells me the smaller non-stick frying pans got left with Stephen.

Driving my new car is sort of like driving a right-handed cyborg version of my old car. It’s *very* comforting to be back driving a vehicle I have a concrete feel for the dimensions of, even if I’m sitting on the other side of it. It’s amazing how thoroughly your car becomes a physical extension of you and of your awareness of your body space. When I was driving Chris’ Windom, I was nervous of the edges of the road, even on the relatively wide roads, but driving the Vitz I can whiz along even the twisty narrow ones and feel like I know exactly where my tires are. Whee !

This weekend, I’m off up to Auckland to visit the cats. Should be interesting. It’s school holiday here, and all the flights were pretty well booked, so I’m taking the overnight train — twice. Friday night train up, arriving Saturday AM. Pick up a rental car, play with cats during visiting hours and bum around Auckland the rest of the day, then night train back down to Wellington Saturday night. I expect to be thoroughly skanky by the time I get back in Sunday AM. It’s supposed to rain on me, too, and no, I haven’t found a raincoat yet. Maybe I’ll find one in Auckland. Can’t wait to see the cats.

Living the bachelor life in the new apartment — clothes & half-empty boxes everywhere, a carton of milk, a brick of cheese and a half-dozen eggs in the fridge. Finally accumulated enough dirty dishes to run the dishwasher yesterday, though it still seemed kinda silly. I have to wash the spoon and knife every time I use them; I may as well wash the mug and bowl while I’m at it.

I discovered tonight that the Ghengis Khan Mongolian Barbeque is literally just around the corner from the apartment — think I’ll save that ’til Stephen gets here. There’s also Wellington’s one and only Caribbean Jerk Shack up there. Hmm.

C&N&I are going to see Eddie Izzard in a couple weeks. Yay ! See, if I were cul-chah’d, I’d go see Pete Postlethwaite in Scaramouche Jones. But I ain’t.

So now that I am living in the city and don’t need a car, I’ve bought one. Spent pretty much half of today test driving various things and settled on — what a surprise — an Echo. Actually, it’s a Vitz, which is what they call them in Japan, which is where this one is from (2000 used, 45K Km, which works out to ~28K miles — it’s got the sweetest teeny little pic of a young Japanese couple stuck on the vanity mirror, which I hope they miss when they’re giving it its final spruce-up). Here’s a photo I took of it while I was out test driving it, along with a partial pan of the view from Seaview, where the pic was taken — Seaview is at the top (north end) of the harbor, near the mouth of the Hutt. Wellington is the patch of dandruff in the middle right. The darker blob of green in the foreground middle left is Soames Island, with the harbor entrance just left (east) of it. The hills at the far left have the expensive “suburb” of Eastbourne on the harbor side of them, and Wainuiomata and the Coast Road on their far side.

So as you can see, it’s a silver hatchback — sedans are like hens teeth here. The models that come new to NZ are like the one I had back in Boston, with manual everything and not many bells and whistles (no passenger side airbag !). The Japanese imports like this one have more features — power mirrors and windows, ABS brakes, rear wiper, automatic climate control, etc. It’s also got this wacky digital display (still in that center mount, of course) that looks like it’s set waaayy down far away, so you don’t have to change your focal length as drastically between it and the road. Weird. We’ll see how well the digital display holds up — the one in the Taurus gradually faded into inscrutability (but that was an LCD, and this looks like it’s an LED, so.) The hatchbacks don’t seem to have rear speakers, which is a pity, but the sound out of the front ones is nice. It’s a 1.3 liter engine (sedans are 1.5), but it had no trouble billy-goating its way up Horokiwi, so that’s cool. The hatches *do* have frikkin huge blind spots, but the wing mirrors are good, so I can get used to that. They’re quite a bit shorter than the sedans, so the less-than-ideal rear visibility doesn’t hamper parallel parking at all.

Just an aside: as I was sitting in the car there at Seaview, eating a piece of carrot cake and drinking some tea, an old guy in a ball cap and a purple jacket walked in front, walking his dog, and he looked so much like my grandfather (although I don’t recall Grampa ever wearing purple) that I started to cry. Funny how these things hit you of a sudden.

Anyway, I’m supposed to pick the car up tomorrow, provided I can do the money dance on my lunch hour and get the cash for it into my account.

Finally, for the heck of it, here’s a night shot from my balcony:

Right, so half of the groceries are still sitting on the kitchen floor, but I’ve got Stephen’s desk put together, with my computer on it, and the ADSL modem all hooked up and happy.

Although it was nearly sixty degrees yesterday, there’s supposedly a record-setting Southerly on the way — Chris & Natasha may get snow up in the Hutt Valley — so I went out on my lunch hour and bought myself a heater. As I think I mentioned, most places here don’t have anything like central heat or radiators or anything like that. People either have some kind of wood-burner, or they’ve got stand-alone plug-in heaters of one sort or another (or a gas heater or fireplace — C&N have one of the latter, in addition to several different electric ones).

Electric heat comes in a variety of flavors, the most common of which are:
– fan heaters — basically, a heating element with a fan in front. These are like the little portable heaters you’d get for, say, your office or something.
– convection heaters — what you probably think of when you think of an electric heater, except with more variety.
– oil heaters — these are like radiators on casters, except instead of water, they’re filled with this special oil that’s really efficient at holding heat. These are slower to heat a room, but they’re more energy efficient, because the oil keeps radiating heat for a long while after the current has switched off.

I got an oil heater, and I sprang for one with a timer, so I could have it switch on before I get up to take the chill off the place. The way the apartment is laid out, it should be able to heat just about everything but the little bedroom, which is pretty cozy anyway.

In other news, C&N&I went out to Johnsonville to watch the FotR extended version on Chris’ friend Trevor’s gi-normous flat/wide-screen uber-high-definition TV with surround sound, etc., etc. Wow. It was cool to get to see so much detail in the props and costuming and sets and stuff — a lot of things you just couldn’t see either on the big screen or on a regular TV. Verra nice. Plus, the story has all these new little depths that I can pick up on now that I’ve read the Silmarillion (and am almost done with Unfinished Tales). Neato keen.

I did discover that I must be geek-interaction-starved. I took one look at Trevor’s action figure/statuette and DVD collections, and I just started babbling. “Did you see this ? What did you think of that ? I heard this other thing was X…” Man, I hope I didn’t make a complete ass of myself. Next thing you know, I’m going to stagger crazy-eyed into the comic shop on Cuba Street and start blathering pathetically at the poor yutz behind the counter about various comics and movies and stuff. Wouldn’t that be the deepest irony ?

I’ve successfully moved into the new apartment. Yay ! The bed fits in the little bedroom, with room for one of the nightstands for the clock to go on. Not sure if I’m going to leave the bed in there or not, yet, we’ll see. It’s put together, though, and I slept on it last night and everything. Quite cozy under my comforter and Stephen’s down duvet.

Dishes are found and put in the cabinets. No sign of the silverware, though — had to buy a knife a fork and a spoon at New World (there are several shopping options in walking distance of this place; New World is the most expensive, but also the closest and with the most stable selection). Haven’t found the frying pans, either, or the box labeled “casserole dishes and spices” (though I think I saw that one towards the front of the garage) — need something to shake salt out of. I have six chairs, not counting the as-yet-unassembled futon, but no table. Ehn. It’ll get sorted.

Chris let me take the car into town with the movers, so before I brought it back, I used it to do that first big the-cupboards-are-bare shopping run (took me two trips to carry it all up from the car — good thing there’s an elevator). The cupboards are *still* bare, but that’s because anything that didn’t need refrigeration just got bunged down on the kitchen floor, before I took the car back to Silverstream for dinner (and a spot of rugby — Canterbury *pasted* North Otago, like, 70 to 12. Makes the All Blacks/Wales game look positively close). The train I was aiming to take back to town doesn’t run on Fridays, so between getting home and building the bed, I got to sleep kind of late, but when I woke up on my own at 5AM I gave the clock the finger and went back to sleep for another hour. Huzzah !

Ok, first of all, no Chris, because he’s working tonight at the Lighthouse (remember that cool cinema ?). Second, recall we did veilwork in class last night, ergo, low arm juice. (Parents, do your daughters a favor and encourage them to do the same sorts of upper body strength building activities boys do, during their formative years, when it will make a difference. Let them climb trees and swing on monkey bars and play kendo or whatever.)

Right, so everything that I need to get to tonight — the futon frame, and the bits of Stephen’s desk primarily — are buried at the absolute farthest backest corner of the garage. A survey expedition Sunday revealed that the bureau is blocking any access to this corner from the front of the garage. That leaves the sneaky route along the back wall, where the removal of the anvil stand and the big red rolling tool chest (and all of the things stacked on top of and around them) looked like it would clear a narrow alley between the big brown Fogg cabinet and the back wall.

This it did.

However.

The pieces I wanted were still behind a small stack of items made up of one of the many bags of armor, a coleman cooler (aside: they call them “chilly bins” here) full of, of all things, folded up air mattresses, and (upsidedown, at a rakish angle) The Chair.

Y’all remember Stephen’s chair ? The one that only Stephen could sit in because it would try to tip you over backwards, and y’all were wondering why he was bringing it to the other side of the planet, but he insisted that he liked it ? Well, Stephen’s affection aside, it seems clear to me that that chair came to NZ in large part to help me work off some of my accumulated bad karma (clearly, I had some).

Because, you see, The Chair is too wide to fit down the little narrow alley behind the cabinet.

Once the armor and the cooler and the two little unfinished poplar tables (with the stool still taped inside), and the little rugs and leather and etc. and etc. were out of the way, I could safely set The Chair upright on the floor, where it no longer threatened to fall and break something (or me). However, this still left it squarely in front of the pieces of futon frame, which were far too heavy for me to lift over it. To get them out, I’d have to make more space in that back corner to push The Chair out of the way.

What else is in that back corner, that I can move to make room for The Chair, to make room to get out the futon bits ? Why, the massive stack of particle board ! (That would be the thing the TV and stereo were on, all of the shelving out of the basement, assorted bookcases, Stephen’s desk (huzzah !), the workbench (plain pine), bits of the dining room table (also pine), and all of the flat pieces of my desk, which is *not* made out of particle board, but is in fact made out of neutron star material.)

All of this would have to be shifted, piece by piece, down the little alley and into a new stack along a newly cleared bit of wall in my bedroom. *And*, of course, it too was all trapped behind The Chair. Which means that I had to lift every single one of those pieces of particle board (and neutron star material) over or around it.

Welcome to Hell.

I am pleased to say I conquered, with only a few breaks to sit on The Chair (conveniently located, right there where I was working !) and wallow in lonely self-pity. And I *think* I’ve found everything I need to take with me to the new place (except for the little bookcase from Stephen’s office, which I am remembering as a solid piece, but which may well have been more particle board). Go me !

Must fall over now.

Help me out here.

Hossam Ramzy is coming to NZ and teaching a drum seminar. The hitch(es)?
1) I’d have to buy a new drum
2) I’d have to take two days away from work

I’m already going to be dropping a wad on Serena Ramzy’s two-day dance seminar, the Friday night show, the Saturday night dinner, and the (I think) Sunday night video presentation. I shouldn’t drop yet another wad on a new drum and a drum seminar. I sort of need a new drum, in that my ceramic one that I love makes me nervous with its fragileness, and I’ve been wanting to get one of the Egyptian style metal bodied tablas that I can bang around. So I *have* been wanting a drum. However I’m not in love with the silver tabla at Drum City (although it might grow on me, I don’t know). It’s got a great sound, and I’d probably not find the “perfect” drum unless I went back to Cairo, and who knows when that’s going to happen ? And if I did find the perfect drum, I could sell this one, or give it to someone… But I don’t *need* either the drum or the class, and it’s a not-trivial chunk of change to drop, when I should be buying appliances and stuff. But how often do you get to study tabla with Hossam Ramzy ? Argh…

I can’t believe no one wants the dryer. It’s a nice dryer ! Poor little Toyota. It served you well. Or at least, to the best of its limited abilities.

Yesterday (Monday) was dance class & there was this neat chick from LA there showing us some moves she learned from Aisha Ali. Fun ! We bonded over the whole “Damn, but isn’t NZ kewl?!” thing. We were remarking to each other how NZ seems so astonishingly dickhead-free. Tusiata and Silvia offered to introduce us to a few, and we were forced to allow that there *are* some around, just not in the concentrations one finds in, say, Boston or LA. So class was cool, except that after Jamie showed us her stuff Beverly started teaching a veil choreography to Loreena McKennet’s Marco Polo — Wahh! I miss Bad Raqs !!! *sniff*

This week instead of spending the three hours between work and class wandering the streets (or flobbing in the library), I picked up some take-out sushi and ate it in the empty apartment. Got some cleaning supplies, too, and did a bit of cleaning. The place was pretty clean already, and I’m nothing like a clean freak, I just figure if there are going to be fingerprints on the lightswitch plates they ought to be *my* fingerprints, you know ? Marking territory, I reckon.

After work today, I need to excavate the futon frame and hopefully Stephen’s desk — both of which I think ended up in the far back of the garage behind absolutely everything else we own — because tomorrow afternoon a couple of burly guys from Shift-A-Flat are coming with a truck to take stuff to the new place. Thankfully, Chris seems to have largely gotten over the novelty of standing around in Gondorian armor for 12 hours a day, and will be home to help me shift stuff (and rescue me if any of it tries to fall on me). Yay !