One month in and I've already fallen off the pace. Is bound to be wife's fault, despite not having given her address or credentials to post blog entries.
Looks like my whirlwind-reaping title may have been somewhat premature, as the activity levels didn't decrease markedly post-nuptials. Flying visit to Mount house full of Goldsacks was peaceful compared to what awaited us back in the big (ugly, poorly-designed, architecturally-bereft) city...
We moved out of Karaka Bay
This was tough, on a number of levels:
- Karaka Bay is a mighty cool place, and an even cooler place to live (the picture is the view from our house);
- There are many cool people who live at or are associated with Karaka Bay, who we will miss;
- It's at the bottom of a cliff-face footpath, and we're both stuff-accumulators.
We rented the place furnished, so we didn't have couches and etc to lug up the cliff, but I lost count of the number of wheelbarrow-loads of (all very useful and necessary) stuff I hauled up the path while wife packed more stuff and cleaned. In the end we had to (temporarily) abandon some stuff downstairs in the boatshed because a) the car was full to the point of bursting and b) we were going to miss the Waiheke car ferry. The sum of these factors was a hair-raising blast through Glendowie/Pt England/Glen Innes and then Pakuranga/Farm Cove/Half Moon Bay in a car so over-full that it was handling like my old Morris Minor van the night I loaded 14 people into it, but with added traffic, and a mightily unimpressed tiny cat. We made it though, which probably defied at least one law of physics, and certainly defied several laws of New Zealand.
We were not long safely-ensconced aboard ship when huge clouds of smoke started billowing from the starboard engine. This had me calculating which items I could safely leave in the car in the event that we had to repeat the whole exercise in reverse. Given that some scoundrel stole the roofracks off our car a couple of months back, I was torn between "I'm not carrying anybloodything back down that path" and "I really like that [painting/item of sporting equipment/Meat Club t-shirt] and I'll be damned if I'm going to leave it in the car overnight for some rapscallion to heist." Luckily it turned out to be a plume of steam born of water hitting a hot engine component, and we made it to the island without further issue. Getting the car off the boat was a fraught exercise, given the failure of the car's suspension to cope well with the demands being placed on it, but the grinding noise made by the towbar gouging a rent in the boat's loading ramp was almost drowned out (for us, at any rate) by the awake-and-unimpressed tiny cat and his maelstrom of complainy noises.
Our first on-island conversation went something like:
"Ummm... do you have a key to the house?"
"Me? No, I thought you did"
Marital harmony ensued.
Eventually, Hampton was prevailed upon to bring spare key round (bribed with promises of wife's cooking, if I remember aright), and process of unloading car while disallowing tiny cat escape artistry commenced. We finally finished unloading late the next day, which meant it was time to turn attention to rendering the place fit for the retiring librarian...
Looks like my whirlwind-reaping title may have been somewhat premature, as the activity levels didn't decrease markedly post-nuptials. Flying visit to Mount house full of Goldsacks was peaceful compared to what awaited us back in the big (ugly, poorly-designed, architecturally-bereft) city...
We moved out of Karaka Bay
This was tough, on a number of levels:
- Karaka Bay is a mighty cool place, and an even cooler place to live (the picture is the view from our house);
- There are many cool people who live at or are associated with Karaka Bay, who we will miss;
- It's at the bottom of a cliff-face footpath, and we're both stuff-accumulators.
We rented the place furnished, so we didn't have couches and etc to lug up the cliff, but I lost count of the number of wheelbarrow-loads of (all very useful and necessary) stuff I hauled up the path while wife packed more stuff and cleaned. In the end we had to (temporarily) abandon some stuff downstairs in the boatshed because a) the car was full to the point of bursting and b) we were going to miss the Waiheke car ferry. The sum of these factors was a hair-raising blast through Glendowie/Pt England/Glen Innes and then Pakuranga/Farm Cove/Half Moon Bay in a car so over-full that it was handling like my old Morris Minor van the night I loaded 14 people into it, but with added traffic, and a mightily unimpressed tiny cat. We made it though, which probably defied at least one law of physics, and certainly defied several laws of New Zealand.
We were not long safely-ensconced aboard ship when huge clouds of smoke started billowing from the starboard engine. This had me calculating which items I could safely leave in the car in the event that we had to repeat the whole exercise in reverse. Given that some scoundrel stole the roofracks off our car a couple of months back, I was torn between "I'm not carrying anybloodything back down that path" and "I really like that [painting/item of sporting equipment/Meat Club t-shirt] and I'll be damned if I'm going to leave it in the car overnight for some rapscallion to heist." Luckily it turned out to be a plume of steam born of water hitting a hot engine component, and we made it to the island without further issue. Getting the car off the boat was a fraught exercise, given the failure of the car's suspension to cope well with the demands being placed on it, but the grinding noise made by the towbar gouging a rent in the boat's loading ramp was almost drowned out (for us, at any rate) by the awake-and-unimpressed tiny cat and his maelstrom of complainy noises.
Our first on-island conversation went something like:
"Ummm... do you have a key to the house?"
"Me? No, I thought you did"
Marital harmony ensued.
Eventually, Hampton was prevailed upon to bring spare key round (bribed with promises of wife's cooking, if I remember aright), and process of unloading car while disallowing tiny cat escape artistry commenced. We finally finished unloading late the next day, which meant it was time to turn attention to rendering the place fit for the retiring librarian...
No comments:
Post a Comment