September 29, 2006

Rack o' Spice

We'll be leaving for Melbourne in a little over a week (8 days to be precise). I'm excited, mainly by the thought of settling down somewhere. It's been close to a year that we've been travelling and I'm a wee bit tired. I've been slaking my nesting urges by looking at pictures of Melbourne rentals, even though I am admittedly getting a tad ahead of myself. While in Oamaru, we purchased a nice little print of a Kauri tree and I proceeded to amuse Z by pretending to hang it on an imaginary wall in our non-existent house while walking down the street. It will go nicely with the beetles we bought in Christchurch.

Back in Wellington, I stopped by the Med Food Warehouse to pick up some more cumin (for the fabulous four-dish Indian dinner I cooked) and was overwhelmed by the thought of actually setting up a house. When was the last time I really and truly started from scratch? Probably when I moved off-campus to Foster Court with K&K - then there were five of us with at least eight local parents willing to donate various items. That was in, let me think, 1996? Good lord, it's been a while! And now there are two of us and one local parent, two of us who currently possess exactly no furniture, no bedding, no pots, no pans, no utensils, no towels - not much of anything, really, except clothes, shoes, dive gear, a couple of laptops and some books of crossword puzzles (essential).

I imagine us signing a lease and moving in to our new home. It's the easiest move we've ever made, dragging in our four bags. There we are on our first night, sleeping on the floor wrapped in sleeping bags we borrowed from someone. We get up in the morning and don't even have the capacity to make ourselves tea because we have no pots, no spoons, no cups of any sort. Want some water? Better cup your hands under the kitchen tap. Want a shower? Too bad - we have no towels. The house is completely empty but for us and our four bags, which we stack into "desks" and perhaps a "table".

What triggered this thought? Spices (duh). I was thinking about what goes into making a working kitchen and spices are definitely up there. This got me thinking about spice racks which made me realize just how many essential kitchen items we don't have. Okay okay, so "spice rack" may not be essential, but there are plenty of things we don't have that are. I suppose we'll empty out mum's old jar collection and become depositories for all the crap various friends and acquaintances were going to throw out. And we'll scour the local Sallies and garage sales and whatever passes for Craigslist in Melbourne. And then, one day, we'll wake up in a bed and, after drying off with our own towels after a shower, we'll cook up a big spice-laden breakfast, which we'll eat sitting on chairs around a table that is not made of an old suitcase.

And one day there will be world peace and a solution to rapid global warming.

A girl's gotta dream, y'know.

September 27, 2006

Tour de Sud

We just returned from nine days exploring eNZed's South Island. Despite coming down with the flu about twelve hours before our departure, I had a grand time. Getting the flu was worth it for one reason: it's been a while since I've seen Z smile so largely when he started calling me Croakie. Croakie quickly gave way to Squeaky which passed its baton to plain old Stuffy. There's not quite so much smokey-piano-bar-alto glamour in Stuffy, but she's apparently here to stay.

But I digress from my stories from the south...

1. Franz Josef Glacier
We drive south down the west coast in pouring rain. The land is brilliant green and the steep rise to our left is shrouded in mist and covered in lush growth. Every now and then, the clouds lift a little to hint at the immenseness of the peaks they hide. We arrive in town and learn that the rain has closed all access trails to the glacier so we check into a hostel and sit in the lounge to wait out the drenching. Z drinks beer with some friends; I take a nap. At about 5:00, the time when my stomach wakes from its lunch-induced torpor to request more food please, Z pokes his head outside and realized that the sky has lightened from ominous to pale gray. We jump in the car and drive up to the parking lot at the foot of the glacier. We pant our way through the drizzle up the trail to a look-out. And all of a sudden we see it: a curve of ice that seems to be caught in mid-flight down the mountain. It seems a live, wild thing. Around us are lush forests snaked with waterfalls that are incongruous with the tongue of ice. The clouds rush by occasionally clearing to give us a glimpse of a jagged snowy peak high above. We are the only people present and the silence seems not so much peaceful as like the inhalation before a roar.

2. Milford Sound, Fjordland
The drive to Milford is jaw-droppingly awesome. We start out of Te Anau in the sun, though we can see where the clouds have gathered around the peaks ahead. We drive along a wide, U-shaped valley crisscrossed by a small river and carpeted in brown tussocks. The steep sides are covered in a lush beech forest that drips with moss and lichen. Slowly, the walls around us rise as does the windy road we drive. And then we are in high country where the walls are sheer black rock glistening with water falls, too steep to support anything more than the odd grass and brave shrub. All around us we see where avalanches have rolled down from precarious cirques of snow. I drive about 10kph so that I can lean over the steering wheel to stare straight up through the windscreen at the towering walls above us. Right before the tunnel, we see the avalanche that closed the road the day before. A solitary man in a small yellow tractor works to clear it. We pass from daylight into the dark tunnel. Water drops from the rocky ceiling as we bump over the barely-paved road which is inclined just enough so that our headlights don't illuminate it at all. I drive almost blind into the depths of the mountain, thinking suitably dwarfish thoughts and gripping the wheel tightly as neither of us dare to breath much. Out the other side we are greeted by fog swirling around a sheer rock wall that's easily 1200 feet tall. The canyon we drive down is wet and damp and it feels like the glaciers only just packed up and moved out. All is raw rock and icy stone and cold water. By the time we reach the water, the rainforest has returned to cloak the sheer cliffs in lushness.

3. Riverton, pop 1850
It's a long drive south from Milford to Riverton, a drive that begins by skirting the impressive peaks and wide lakes of Fjordland and ends in the pastoral greeness of sheepland. For no particular reason, we decide to spend the night in Riverton. The bar-tender and hotelier is a woman named Caroline whose purple and gray streaked curls don't quite hide the fact that she's in her 40's. She and everyone else we meet in town is exceptionally friendly. The folks gathering in the bar for their Saturday night out all say hello and ask where we're from and where we're going. I'm more used to locals ignoring us - Riverton is a welcome change. We have a large room upstairs at the back of the pub with a fabulous view over the wide river that turns into a maze of sandbars at low tide. Unprovoked, Caroline gives us a run down of dining options in Riverton - all five of them. One is described as the "second best restaurant in New Zealand" and another supposedly serves (gasp!) salad. We opt for the salad and are halfway to the bar/restaurant when we decide that we can't face another crappy pub meal even if it claims to contain vegetables. So we jump in the car and drive out to the best place in the South Island telling ourselves to hell with the money. We've been warned that we might not get in, it being Saturday night and all. However, it being Riverton in low season, we are of course seated immediately. We both get glasses of wine and delicious entrees (mains) that are not battered and fried and re-battered and fried again, and finish off with a piece of moist honest-to-god chocolate cake. Total tab? $70. That's Kiwi dollars. We actually check the menu to make sure they didn't undercharge us. We return to our hotel, turn on the hot blankets, take blissfully hot showers that come with decent water pressure and crawl into bed together happy and content.

4. Penguins - at Milford Sound and in Oamaru. Yellow-crested and Yellow-eyed, they all look ridiculous waddling on land.

5. Lambs. Everywhere. Including one that was probably less than an hour old with mum still in labour right by the side of the road.

6. Taking Sassyass's advice and eating a spectacularly good meal at Cook 'N' With Gas in Christchurch. Their tag-line should read: Stupid name; great food.

... And so much more! Check out our pictures up on Z's site.

September 06, 2006

Brought to you by the letter Yee

I have what is possibly the most boring job Ever. I am temping at the hospital, which seems like it could be vaguely interesting, but is in fact not. It is Boring. It is my job to wade through stacks of patient and doctor letter, enter addresses and other information into an Excel spreadsheet, do a mail merge, fold the hundreds of letters and stuff them into envelopes. Did I mention that it's boring? Even reading about bizarre diseases does not add interest, though it does make me realize how many people in this world are sick and how fortunate I am that those who are close to me remain healthy. Listening to my coworkers answer phone calls and schedule outpatient visits adds the only glimmer of anything to an otherwise dull day. Yesterday, I heard the following half of a phone conversation:

"Could you give me your patient ID number, sir?"
....
"W."
...
"Was that S as in Sam?"
...
"OK"
...
"What was that last letter, sir?"
...
"Could you repeat that for me?"
...
"One more time?"
...
"Yee? Yee???"
...
"I'm sorry sir. I don't understand the letter, yee. Could you repeat yourself?"
...
"Yee?"
...
"Sorry, sir. I still don't understand. Could you use the letter to spell a word?"
...
"What's that? Yee?"
...
"Could you try to spell something with it?"
...
"Spell something - like R is for Roger and robot and rolling and red and rabbit."
...
"No- No -- Can you spell something for me using the letter?"
...
"I don't understand, yee. Can you please spell something using the letter for me?"
...
"Can you please spell something using the letter, yee?"
...
"Spell something - like, G as in George?"
...
"No, sir. Yee is not a letter."
...
"OK. We'll go through this by process of elimination..."

And that right there was the highlight of my week, because photos of patients with massive lumps on their skulls do not count as highlights.

September 02, 2006

Quote of the century

We have known for some decades that the climate change we are creating for the twenty-first century was of a similar magnitude to that seen at the end of the last ice age, but that it was occuring thirty times faster. We have known that the Gulf Stream shut down on at least three occasions at the end of the last ice age, that sea levels rose by at least 300 feet, that the earth's biosphere was profoundly reorganized, and we have known that agriculture was impossible before the Long Summer of 10,000 years ago. And so there has been little reason for our blindness, except perhaps an unillingness to look such horror in the face and say, "You are my creation."

- Tim Flannery in The Weather Makers

I fear we will blow away

It is really windy today. Really. The gusts are shaking the house. The good news is that the wind is from the north - the mercury is not in freefall. That does not, however, mean that that I can feel my fingers or toes. But it's much warmer than it's been - in the sun and out of the wind, it's quite decent. On Friday, I was able to be outside with skin exposed - by skin, I mean my neck. And on Wednesday, I could have worn a t-shirt if I'd been smart enough to put one on when I left the house instead of the usual layers.

I think we may be nearing an answer to the question that keeps Z up at night and wakes me up early in the morning. There are still a few things that need to fall into place, so I'm certainly not going to broadcast any premature predictions here. I will, however, say that it is going to be one helluva relief to be playing house rather than playing ohmigodwhatthehellarewedoingwithourlives.