Note To Future Self

Somewhere in the panic between the explosive failure of our stove and the arrival of our goodies, a friend dropped by for a visit.

Sadly, he needed a little help to find his way to the door.

But with a little persuasion he was able to let himself out.

Well, it finally happened. Our cra…. stuff arrived. Without further comment, here are some photos…

There have only been a couple of dozen “why the heck did we haul this across the ocean” moments. I expect a couple of hundred more.

So far the only truly absurd moment was when we dug through our kitchen breakables and found … a box cutter, carefully individually wrapped in brown paper. sigh.

Oh, and hooray! Bikes!

It’s a little sad (no, I’m not talking about the number of bikes shown above…). Out of all of this, I am most overjoyed to see my floor pump. I’m sick of inflating my tires with my little minipump.

On a lighter note, remember that joke I made a month ago about NZ fuseblocks?

Yesterday I managed to coax a six-inch flaming wrath-and-brimstone spark out of our electrical range. Still not exactly sure what happened, but I think it involved the pyrotechnic properties of miso soup. If the blackened, welded briquette left on the burner knew anything, it wasn’t talking.

Being a big stinkin’ fraidy cat, I waited for Anna to get home before I messed with the fuse block. Well, the hunk of wire in the block certainly fused, but ’tweren’t no fuse, if you get my drift. It was a piece of paperclip, happily distributed as a fine metallic spray all over the fuse holder.

We replaced it (yes, with real fuse wire), and gave it the proverbial shot, to no avail.

A little more investigation revealed this rather disheartening metallic massacre inside the fuseblock.

Copper everywhere, except in the terminal. For reference, here’s the other side of the fuseblock, with a nice fat bundle of household wiring.

Looks like we, uh, stress-tested our household wiring. And it failed. Does make me wonder about all the seventy-year-old wiring creeping through the walls. Sigh. At least we’re just renters. Electrician should be here any minute…

Update: Looks like my blame of miso soup was groundless. Here’s our old burner, with a very impressive looking hole blown in the back of it. Hooray for random component failure.

Oh, and the rheostat must have been destroyed as well, as the new burner won’t turn off. Another call to the electrician.

Which leads to your random Kiwi anecdote for the day. Electricians are called “sparkies,” which is just a little funny. Our landlord previously said his brother-in-law is a “chippie.” We have no idea.

A letter to the editor from the Christchurch Star for you,

There is one thing I am getting really sick of in this politically correct society we are living in — the constant blame on drinking and speeding for the road toll in this country.

… Yes, alcohol and speed are part of the problem, but the main cause is the very poor standard of driving. … Some people just don’t care how they drive — they don’t indicate, they run orange and red lights. … It even shows in the way they park their cars, even push their trolleys in the supermarkets.

But I am sure in the end they will lower the [drunk driving] limit, spoiling yet another normal pastime. Nothing will change but those bad drivers will still be there, just a lot more sober.

Ah yes, drink and driving. Normal pastimes right next to mom and apple pie, er, mum and citrus slice.

There have been a couple of high-profile auto-cides recently, and quite a bit of sturm und drang about “boy racers” (aka young men with Japanese imports), but very few discussions about the general pathologies of Kiwi motoring. Anna and I have some theories, which we’ll share if they turn out to be interesting. I think the summary is “you can’t drive like New Zealand is the Wild West anymore.”

On the plus side, we drove the South Island’s 8 kms of divided multi-land road (aka the Northern Motorway) this weekend. There were offramps and everything. Brings a tear to my eye, just thinking of the great Bay Area freeways we left behind.

Two Saturdays ago we decided to finally drive all the way over to the eastern edge of the Port Hills. Hey guess what – we live near the ocean!

With the whole day to waste, we set off on a circumnavigation of Godley Head. Our newly purchased guide to the walking and biking tracks of the Port Hills said this should take 3- 3.5 hours, as the kiwi runs. Applying our usual conversion from standard kiwis to mortal pace we figured it would take at least 4.5 hours. We packed a lunch, snacks and extra jackets, but figured we could probably get away with leaving the tent behind.

The ocean here looks quite different from the sea at Birdlings Flat. It looks like a tasty cuppa blue-green tea that you just topped off with a splash of milk. The camera seems to have been utterly befuddled by it and none of the photos really captured the contrast of startling aqua of the water and the golden cast to the tawny hills.

The brown stuff in the water is a large-bladed kelp-like algae. Eventually, we will go to the right natural history museum and learn if it is in fact kelp.

The base of the cliffs are honeycombed with coves and caves that are used as roots and rookeries by several species of seabirds. We saw plenty of gulls and pied shags (which look a lot like cormorants. Yet another avenue for investigation) but, sadly, no penguins. It’s possible that noon is a bad time to look for animal returning to their roosts for the night.

Once again we were amazed at the presence of grazing on open space near a major urban center. I’m gradually getting used to the idea of it being okay to follow a trail over a stile and across active grazing land, but I’m still really nervous around smooth-wire fences. I keep looking for the electric junction box. I guess if you expect trampers to clamber over your fences you can’t really use barbed wire, but I’m still kinda jumpy.

Despite all that we had a lovely walk and were shocked to find ourselves back at the carpark a mere 3.5 hours after we started. We couldn’t have possibly been travelling at Kiwi pace.

We rallied, though, and headed into the “beach town” of Sumner, which appears to have been recently visited by the gentrification fairy, for a spot of tea. Maybe next weekend we’ll go back to watch the sunset and have another go at spotting penguins.

[With our zeal to catalog the entire New Zealand power system, we've fallen a bit behind in sharing photos from our weekend rambles. Here's the first installment in an occasional series "Places of New Zealand" - ed.]

Just south of the Banks Peninsula is a long spit of land that cuts Lake Waihora (aka Lake Ellesmere) off from the ocean.

Lake Waihora used to be a premier breeding ground for eels and flounder. That was before it’s entire watershed was converted to sheep farms. The lake held on for a while but finally “flipped states” after a strong storm 5-10 years ago. Apparently the locals were surprised to discover that the rules of nutrient cycling that govern the rest of the world apply in “godzone” country as well.At the fat end of the Kaitorete spit, on the ocean side, is an area known as Birdlings Flat. A colleague recommended it to me as a place to find “treasures” and watch the sunset. When strong storms roll up from the south a phenomenon known as “longshore drift” sweeps material up the coast. The Port Hills force the current to bend sharply right and as a result all sorts of interesting tidbits get left on the shore at Birdlings Flat.

When we first got our car and were desperate to stretch our wings, we headed out to Birdlings Flat and were richly rewarded.

There were hundreds of these guys washed up on the shingle. According to a sign at the carpark they are either a nasty invasive tunicate (Styela clava) or a gentle native tunicate (Pyura pachydermatina). it depends on whether they are pink-to-brown colored or white-to-rose colored. The sign failed to specify what color each tunicate turns when dried by the sun for several hours.

We’re not quite sure to whom this once belonged. Careful investigation with a stick (it seemed a little to fresh to touch with bare hands) indicated that the long projection on the front of the skull was cartilagenous. speculations as to it’s identity are welcome.

After all that excitement we had to just go right home and go straight to bed.

On May 6th our stuff arrived in Lyttelton Harbor, the nearest deepwater port to Christchurch. The dockyards are just visible in the photo below. As you can see, Lyttelton is on the other side of the port hills from ChCh, which caused the first colonists no end of grief. Fortunately for us, they bored a tunnel under the port hills sometime in the last 150 years which has vastly shortened transit times.

Transatlantic voyages being what they are, we had known for several weeks (ever since the Santa Frederica left Oakland, that is) that our stuff was arriving on May 6. We sort of figured there might be some paperwork involved with bringing 300 cubic feet of assorted goods into the country, but the kiwis are not ones to be rushed into things. So, the moving company on this end sent us the customs forms on, oh, May 3th.

A flurry of paperwork later, all 57 boxes are sitting in a warehouse in Christchurch waiting for customs to determine that we didn’t bring any spiders, snakes or other “objectionable material” in with our bikes. Once that’s taken care of, they will be delivered to our door. Actually, I’m hoping they will deliver not just to the door, but all the way into the living room.

We’ve done pretty well so far without the stuff in the container. We’re a little fearful that once our stuff arrives we’ll wind up just throwing half of it in the garage, unopened. However, I am counting the minutes until I can cook on a cast-iron skillet and weigh out ingredients. Converting from volumetric units to weights has been complicated by the kiwi refusal to package goods in easily divisible quantities ( a 270 g bar of baking chocolate ?!), but that’s another post.

We’re well on our way to a domestic routine here at Rancho Marburg, so the excitement level is down a bit from the first month on the ground. On the plus side, the weather has been wonderful. In place of any real news, or a post about the proliferation of sliding glass doors in Chch (oh believe me, I’m saving that one for later), here’s a bike two-fer.

The skies have been clear enough to keep the trails dry, and the Port Hills have beckoned. On Monday I made my usual trek up, up, up the Rapaki track, then along, along, along the Summit road singletrack. After my previous experience with the downhill runs in the Bowenvale bike park I decided to go back, back, back to Rapaki to get back down, down, down.

I’ll just let the pics speak for themselves. Click on any of them for a larger version.

Looking south towards Lyttelton and the Banks Peninsula. This picture is actually taken at the same place as the previous one with the bike in it, just facing the other direction. Yes, it’s at the top of the Rapaki climb, I always need to stop and rest there.

Looking down in Christchurch (and sheep!)

A bit further along

Part two:

Thursday, after a two-month hiatus, I returned to riding on the road. Well, it was my mountain bike with slick tires, but it was kind of like road riding. Mostly I was doing grunt work for Anna, scouting the route from our house to her work. The one-way distance is about 20km, mostly quiet country roads with a few short busier sections.

The real highlight, though, was lunch in Lincoln with Anna at Hillyers, the local purveyors of all that is tasty and wonderful in NZ cuisine.

Anna had the lamb and kumara (sweet potato) pie. I meant to take a picture of the pie, just to give you an idea of the flaky bakey wonderfulness of a good pie, but I was too slow and instead all I got was a picture of destruction in progress:

I went for a spot of quiche, the real man’s recovery food

And for dessert, of course, a slice. In this case chocolate peppermint slice.

(In case it wasn’t obvious, the pie and slice lunch is my nomination for the quintessential Kiwi experience and national cultural treasure.)

And finally, to scare the kids, here’s a picture of your intrepid adventurer in his stupid sunglasses.

I’m scowling because that’s what you do when you’re a bad bike rider and you’ve got your big stupid sunglasses on.

Ta for now.

[For the curious, the container full of all the worldly goods we couldn't live without arrived in New Zealand last Sunday. Customs is rifling through it looking for flecks of mud left on bike tires and taxables, and we'll probably see it in, oh, a week? Hooray!]

It’s been a rainy and generally uneventful week around the ole’ Marburg world HQ.

No better time to go a little stir crazy. Let’s put up a blog post about electricity in New Zealand!

Power in New Zealand is 230V AC at 50Hz. Which is to say, completely different from US power. If you bring something from the US and plug it in wall here, there’s a good chance you’ll get some fireworks and let all the magical white smoke out. Some of our electro-gadgets with power bricks were sufficiently multi-lingual to make the switch, but there was little hope for the crock pot and the rice cooker.

Here’s a NZ (and Australia) plug.

Yawn.

As a watt-counting power-nerd, I can’t help but appreciate that every power outlet

has a switch

right beside it. We have switches for our water heater, refrigerator and stove. On the surface it seems like a subtle holdover of a time when electricity was neither as omni-present nor as inexpensive. What’s surprising is that switched outlets are still being installed in new houses. Either it’s a very durable cultural tradition or there’s a secret meaning we have yet to grasp. Shouldn’t complain, those little switches are quite handy in a modern world where everything has a stand-by mode, burning power just waiting for you to pick up the remote control.

In a nod towards safety, the house’s mains panel is in the hallway, up high to keep prying fingers out of the high voltage. No safety cover, of course. Why would you need that? Ours is right over the door to the loo. Don’t read too much into that.

Plug-in fuses and circuit breakers are a bit of a novelty. All of those little white cases at the bottom of our mains panels are fuse holders, into which you cram some of this…

Yes. Our landlord did in fact hand us this bobbin of wire and say “here are some replacement fuses.” Apparently this country has run out of pennies to put in their fuseholders.

One concept that’s vaguely interesting is that we have two power meters, one for “normal” and one for “nights.” At 9PM, the power company sends a signal over the powerlines which switches everyone over to night meters, with night power billed at a cheaper rate. This isn’t a totally crazy idea, as power usage is naturally higher during the day. In the US I imagine this excess is just sopped up by heavy industry running night shifts (and of course industry does get a price break on the cheaper power) but it would be so totally impractical to start wiring US houses for day and night power meters that it’s simply not done.

One quirk of this system is that the night meter actually feeds different circuits from the day meter. We have yet to find a circuit that’s only on during the day (night power is 9PM to 6AM), but there are a couple of notable circuits which are only on in the evening.

(I’ve moved on from taking badly backlit pictures indoors to attempting flash photography of shiny objects. Not a huge improvement)

One is this unit, the night store heater. It’s an electrical heater full of some sort of thermal mass. I’m guessing a big ceramic plug. It isn’t very large but weighs a ton. It hots up at night then radiates heat all day long. Neat concept, though I do find myself making excuses to walk through the hallway just to pass through the nightstore’s heat island.

The other major appliance which is on night circuit is our water heater.

Yep.

(yeah, that’s right, I just posted a pic of my water heater)

Which makes perfect sense. Heating water uses a lot of power, might as well run it at night when the power’s cheap.

Until the fateful day you decide to do a couple of loads of laundry and wash the dishes before taking a shower, and you’re left with a big tank of tepid. Good incentive to take showers in the morning. It does lead to a certain paranoia about hot water usage, though.

[As a side note, we just got our first electric bill, and we actually use more power at night than during the day. Thank you, night meter!]

Thank goodness for the electric kettle. It never runs out of hot water.