exactly

—Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

outfoxes the boxes

An obsession with moving. That's all you're likely to get round here for a while...

Today we get serious about cleaning. Not that half-hearted maintenance-style cleaning that we normally do from week to week (or in many cases, to be honest, from month to month). No, this is push-boredom-to-the-limits, rediscover-actual-paint-colours, polishing-matte-surfaces cleaning, designed to extract our £1800 deposit out of our landLord.

And “Lord” it they do, round here apparently. Actually being allowed to rent a flat here is hard enough—usually involving extensive reference checks and proof of income and all sorts. But moving out. (land)Lord forbid you should want to move out during a “rent month”—as we found out, this would require you to pay an entire month's rent, or in some twisted thinking this would be “letting you off” half a month's rent. The system here is archaic. In this country, landLords hold the deposit (NZ translation: bond) on your flat, not an independent government agency. And it is de rigeur as a landLord to state that you have had to have a property commercially cleaned, and keep at least £200 of the tenants' deposit.

Well, this flat has no carpets—it's parquet flooring throughout—which might help. However, due to a refusal by two landLords over two years to do critical maintenance on the bathroom floor for what must be a hidden leak somewhere, the bathroom and toilet floors will now need to be ripped up (actually could be scooped up with a spoon, at this point). This is in no way our fault whatsoever, but no doubt he'll attempt to schtick us one. A friend from church, a partner in a city law firm, has offered to represent us for free, should it come to it.

First thing though, I'm going to collect everything we own from around the house, and put it all in our bedroom. Since theoretically we are supposed to be able to fit everything we still have here into our two hiking packs, this should not be a problem, right? So here's the time where I'll be discovering what awkward items managed to outfox the boxes...

a ship off the old colder

The doorbell rang at exactly 8:00am. I'd just finished my breakfast, and was dressed and ready for work when I opened the door to truck driver. “You're right on time,” I said, as we started loading the boxes.

Except it didn't happen like that. It was, instead, 7:10am. I in my dressing gown. Bronwyn in the lounge, meanwhile, still wrapping the iMac G5 box in brown paper—I'd been using the computer up till the last minute last night. Eleven other boxes and two suitcases were ready to load, however. A quick change (for me) and then the driver and I load boxes while Bronwyn tapes the address label on that last box. And you'd been able to picture it now, in the picture just to the right of this, had I gotten round to photographing the pile of boxes last night... shouldn't have waited for that last box. Soon all fourteen carefully numbered boxes are on the back of his (open) flat deck truck, I've parted with a diet of pounds, and it's gone. We're shipped.

1.284 cubic meters is one hang of a lot of gear, it turns out. Sure, we came over with 9 items and we're going back with just 14; only a moderate increase? Thing is, three of the old boxes could fit into some of the new ones... We've beefed up a little here. As for shipping so much more, I could explain it all in terms of the variable vs fixed shipping costs, but suffice it to say it comes down to “you may as well take it back!”

So we're past the biggest hurdle for leaving. The next one surely will be remaining motivated for another 3.2 weeks at work (2.2 for Bronwyn), which will seem particularly bizarre for the final two weeks where we will have even already moved out of the flat. Instead, we'll be staying down the road with... previous housemates Nick and Hayley! We really can't get enough of a good thing. And Nick and Hayley are moving into what I shall call “Schröedinger's flat” for defying all probabilities of London geography by being even closer to my work than the current 20 minute walk. Bring. It. On. I can handle it.

Change is in the air. It snowed here today, for the first time this winter...

packing ourselves

As the classic kiwi saying goes, “we're packing ourselves”. In contrast to the usual meaning, however, it's not that we're in a heightened state of anxiety. Rather we're sorting and itemising and boxing for shipping. I even bought the expensive packing tape with the built-in dispenser. Oh yeah... it's the weekend o' cardbordic fun round here.

It's been quite a success. I pity the poor fool who has to lift the three large boxes that happen to be labelled “fragile”—a reminder for the truck driver of his human frailty, I fear, with the contents being mega-weighty rather than actually breakable.

We're already missing things we've packed. Chief among them would have to be the humble cordless phone, particularly in our relatively densely populated flat... there are just too many interjecting comedians passing by if you stand in the hall (I hear). My chef's knife has also been packed (in our “on plane” luggage, of course). Nick has already been shopping for replacements for both, though so far unsuccessfully!

Though we've well and truly broken the back of the packing, we've now run out of that stylie extra-strong packing tape, which has put a hold on the proceedings. That's actually given an opportunity to turn the lounge room back into an ordered living space again. Quite an improvement on the previous scene, a chaos of packed, to be packed, not to be packed, spare packing materials, and, being us, electronics.

In that vein, Nick and I managed to find the time today to repair exactly 1.8 Apple AirPort basestations. I'd been fearing the loss of wireless networking, with Nick's basestation too attached to London. There is a specific problem that has plagued the power supply of this particular model, something Nick and I had repaired on his one some three years ago. So a week or so ago I'd taken a gamble and bought a dead one off eBay. Sure enough, it had the characteristic hiss that suggested the capacitors in the power system had blown. Nick, meanwhile, had also acquired another dead one last week, to repair and sell. Now you have to buy the required capacitors in sets of five; each repair needs two. Being a man of foresight, after our repair three years ago Nick kept the remaining three capacitors and brought them here to London with him. So with a little of the traditional potion of solder, hold 'er, coil and trouble, and sure as eye of newt and leg of something else, I have a working wireless basestation! Rock. Nick being a generous soul let me use two of the three capacitors, leaving his recent acquisition currently one capacitor short of, well, capacity, I guess? We'll be rectifying that soon, I imagine. Meanwhile, like almost everything else, mine is already packed.

tock

Well, for a start you can take 1.1 weeks (base7) off all those numbers in the previous entry.

That would put us in a flat where partly-packed boxes now line the hallway, our bedroom is somewhat tidier than usual (with intent), and where an Andrew Purnell “To Let” sign competes with several others that have suddenly sprouted down the street.

It's a busy time, between sorting out home, work, and our social lives before we go, but we're on track. And in that vein, we elected to spend the evening catching up with Sonja, rather than me blogging, so for now, this is all you get! But tomorrow, I clear my office.

tick... tick...

7.2 weeks till we arrive in New Zealand.
6.5 weeks till we arrive in Sydney.
6.2 weeks till we arrive in Kuala Lumpur.
6.1 weeks till we fly out of Heathrow.
5.2 weeks till I finish work.
4.2 weeks till Bronwyn finishes work.
3.5 weeks till we move out of the flat.
...and 14 days till the freight company arrives to pick up our gear.

Tick...

31 days

We have 31 days to leave our flat.

Tuesday we contacted our landlord, giving him notice that all of us would be leaving the flat. In a time long, long ago, under a previous landlord of this same property, we actually had a contract, which stated that we had to give four weeks notice we wanted to move out. Well, we tried to give six. Our “rent month” runs from the 8th to the following 7th, if you follow. What we wanted to do was to stay on for another two weeks, through in this case to the 21st of February, paying a half a month's rent. We saw this as paying half a month's rent for half a month. Our new landlord, in contrast—who only bought the property in November—saw this proposal as “letting us off two weeks rent”. I still can't quite figure that one out. The English are quite irrational about Real Estate, and it would seem our new landlord is a true patriot. So we've exercised our other option: in four weeks we move out.

Well, actually it will be 31 days. It's most opportune that the fixed end of our rent month happens to fall on a Monday in February, giving us a good move-over-the-weekend option. It leaves us all in a kind of one-third off sale on our time to get ourselves organised, however. For Nick and Hayley the big deal is finding a new flat—they're not done with the big smoke. So it's up at 8am tomorrow and off to their chosen London district, a land of good sushi and better transport connections to both their workplaces. Smart as the Asgard, these people. (They txt like them, too, don't they bronwyn?) For us, meanwhile, it's a case of figuring out the best method for shipping our gear back to New Zealand, and deciding what to do with the deeply precious detritus we've accumulated in our 22 months here. What fun.

So another countdown begins...

disconcertingly familiar

I needed a new watch in 2002. Despite my criteria—relatively small and light, with both an analogue watch and stopwatch—I ended up with the Storm Digi Grand (my specific watch serial number 1082). This must be the world's heaviest watch, but... it glows blue! And that so rocks. I got it on sale too, which at half the recommended retail just getting into the top of my price range. Well, it was great but last year I started having problems with the digital part. (It's two completely independent watches.) I had the battery replaced three times by the local watch guy (only paid the first time, since he was clearly doing something wrong). In the end I gave up on him, no one else local would fix it, and for months and months I've just had the watch as an analogue watch. Well finally we took some more action. Fortunately, though I bought it in New Zealand, Storm Watches are a UK export. After some earlier investigations by Nick and I, Bronwyn took my watch into the Storm repair facility in London on Tuesday—a day off for her, though unlike New Zealand not a Bank Holiday here. Well, for half the price of the earlier battery replacement (ie. £5) they replaced both of the batteries in the watch, and it's all working swimmingly. (Here ends the first reading.)

The reason I'm telling you all that is because it is bizzare to have it working again! Every time I look at my watch now I'm surprised to see two time readouts looking back at me. It has been so many months the other way that I've grown accustomed to what was originally strange.

I was thinking on my way home yesterday of the parallel with our friend Sonja's Masters research from back when. She examined the psychological stress and adjustment reactions of New Zealand students returning home from International Exchange Programmes. It's not always a comfortable change. There are clearly parallels to others who have been overseas too. And from what I've heard, the culture shock when you go away often isn't nearly as difficult as the culture shock when you come back.

And so I wonder. Will arriving back in New Zealand in March be a bit like my watch experience? Will having things finally back the “right” way seem wrong? Will it all be somehow disconcertingly familiar?

I'm sure I've read that reverse culture shock is often harder than going overseas because the victim isn't expecting a culture shock at that point. (Can't recall if this was in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology or perhaps in Women's Weekly, so I'm unsure about how much weight should be put on this theory.) Well, we're prepared then, aren't we? Hmm.

Brace for impact.