Note To Future Self

Now everyone knows that fava beans go nicely with Chianti, but did you know that they can turn water into wine?

magical fruit, indeed!

I’ll be doing some maintenance to our website over the month of September, so there might be some broken moments coming up.

Hello 2009!

No, I don’t have anything constructive to say. I just wanted to take advantage of my esteemed position as the, uh, closest to the international date line.

It’s the little things in life.

(Much belatedly) thanks for the ‘frigerator art starter kit.

And the other stuff, too.

Without much fanfair, my ten year college reunion passed me by this past weekend.

Where does the time go?

Hi Jenny (and Peter and Owen and Sara),

Thanks for the Christmas presents! Perfect for the rainy west coast.

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.

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.

As Nancy commented our last week in California wasn’t all strapping tape and cardboard boxes. We did manage to escape down to Pinnacles National Monument for a day.

Sadly, we didn’t see any of the introduced California Condors on this trip, but we did get a nice hike in and saw the beginnings of spring: wildflowers, songbirds, hummingbirds and one rather obstinate wild turkey.

By way of contrast, here’s what we have to put up with now:

The distinctly un-Pinnacle-y river Avon just getting from Indian summer into fall.

After a little over 24 hours in airports, we’re here. Well, the first five-ish hours were our own fault, believing we could drop off luggage for an international flight early (see below). Our two flights and customs stop in Auckland were uneventful. Duane (Anna’s new boss) met us at the airport, took us out to lunch and dropped us off at a hotel. Now all we need to do is to get Netbank to finish #$%$# wiring our #@$%$# money to us so we can rent an apartment.

For now, though, nap time.