Alan's Rambles

Its spring! We went to the Botanical gardens a few times which was nice.

One evening Sabine and I went and saw Sirocco Kakapo at the ecosanctuary. They finally have him there! This was a birthday present from Dad, as the ticket prices were kinda expensive at $50 each. He's a big birdie parrot, about the size of a large cat, or two footballs.

On Wednesday 19th we visited Glenfalloch’s Night Garden. It was really magical with good weather. It was like walking around an Animal Crossing garden at night. The weather was perfect, the lights were spectacular and the artwork was incredibly unique. Even the creepy stuff had a place with its creepiness.

21 Fri-
Work 1st anniversary.
I had a meeting with my managers this morning. They told me that they will be ending my contract early. They don't think I'm good enough for LIMs training so they are bringing in a new temp to replace me. This new temp will be working for 6 weeks. 6 weeks. Matt, the guy whose job I'm filling in for, is coming back in 6 weeks. The kick in the teeth is that they want ME to train this new temp. They will ditch me once they feel the temp has been trained. This is utter utter bullshit. Evil. They said its nothing personal, but I don't believe them. After the meeting, they let me have a few hours walking around town and clearing my head. I phoned Sabine who calmed me down and also found out today that her manger and lab will close because he's decided to work in the UK. So Sabines job is absolutely ending in August. She's applying for jobs all over the world again. I went to Select but Liz was busy, but she phoned me as I was walking to Campus Temps. Liz calmed me down, but I still don't have any job prospects from her. Finding Campus Temps took me on a journey. I was going round and round from building to building. I even ended up in the main uni library which looked amazing. Sigh. If only jobs would turn up here. I found campus temps, though they only moved there last week, with no signage. No wonder I was bloody confused. They said to just email through my request. I ended up eating at Re:Burger, drowning my sorrows on loaded chips. Back at work I wasn't interested. I still did my work but used every opportunity to disappear for long periods. After work Sabine picked me up directly from work. The cats are in the cattery, and we are off to Christchurch for the weekend. We stopped off at Oamaru's McDonald's. I was impressed at their organised chaos, yet Sabines chicken burger looked flat.

22 Sat-
This morning we woke up to the birdsong of song thrushes. It's a sunny day! We drove to Akaroa, the very big mountain range just south of Christchurch. Not sure, but I don't think I've ever visited (yes i have!). The village of Akaroa is in the heart of the mountain range, which has a harbour. This area is known for having a french presence. We had a nice salmon and cream savory muffin type things, with flaky pastry. With had these with a hot chocolate, sitting outside in the sun. In fact it was so nice we ordered two more. So tasty and different! The village had many gift shops, all worthy of visiting. Sabine booked a boat trip for us to see the Hector's dolphins. This was a pretty awesome trip to me, even though she was kinda disappointed. The dolphins were shyer than the Duskys. I think we had the better deal just staying put on the boat. Everyone else was swimming with them. After that, we had Akaroa salmon for lunch. The waitress forgot about us, when returning she insisted on a free drink on the house. I ordered a wine. It was very nice. We sat outside near the waterfront. It was very relaxing and thoroughly enjoyable. On the way home we stopped off in a few places. One was an estuary with 9 heron's, next was an area with blossom trees around, and lastly was Lake Ellesmere, where we went for a walk and saw 11 Royal Spoonbills around. 11!! Walking back to the car we even saw a white heron. The insects were immense here. They were everywhere. Once back home we had to both phone our parents and tell them what's going on with our jobs. We were going to watch a DVD using the BD player we got from Smith City, but the disk isn't recognised. This means that the guy that was supposed to turn it into a multi region player didn't do so. Instead we watched Sky High which was on TV.

23 Sun-
Just before 6am we were awoken to a knocking at the door. A guy was there, asking if 'there were any available girls he could take for a job', with his wallet wide open. We managed to have him repeat what he said, but after he realised we have no idea what he's on about, he skedaddled back into a taxi. Is this some type of prostitution thing? We contacted the owners and they came over. They were a couple our age. They couldn't understand why something like this would happen. They showed us the history of the AirBNB to prove they don't have repeated bookings here, and were shocked at what happened to us. They let us use their driveway for the day, so just after they left, we packed the car and walked to town. It was a straight walk into the town centre. About a 45min walk to the botanical gardens. The scenery was a mix of the old and new buildings, with ruins in between. We had brunch at the botanics cafe, then looked in the tropical indoor plant house which opened at 10am. The outside gardens was just as boring as I last remembered them, but I'm pleased the trees were all still there none the less. The cathedral is almost completely dilapidated. There is a new shopping district, complete with a brand new H&M, one of the most basic of clothes store worldwide, and yet not in Dunedin. Its a very nice big store too. I joked with Sabine the other day saying that Christchurch could possibly have one. Dunedin is a shit city which is too isolated even for the most basic of clothes store such as H&M. We asked someone for a Vodaphone store, and a guy said we could check out a shopping mall down the road. Turns out NZ also has the system of topping up your phone from within a newsagents. We saw a Ramen restaurant and decided to give it a try. My god it was good. They had really good Takoyaki and Karaage. The Ramen was okay but at least better than Dunedins. After that we went back to the car and drove home. Sabine drove an hour, I drove the next 2 or 3 hours until Oamaru, and then we swapped.

This is a long overdue blog post.

When it became winter we didn't have much to do in the weekends, so we decided to start looking for a new place to rent. It ended with buying a house.

We started with seeing a house which was on 3 floors, accessed by a lift. very weird. The weirdness continued with seeing properties that were not heated correctly, like big places with only one heat pump to apparently heat the whole building. How about no, no it doesn't. not even close.

Nearly everything on the market is rents of which are cold, damp and in need of bulldozing and starting again. So of course we only were looking for something comfortable to live in, AKA double glazing and fully insulated. A heated place was our highest priority.

We also saw a place in outer Outram which was in the middle of nowhere with weird landlords. Also this house was stone cold.

It was becoming obvious that the only option left was to buy something. This, and the fact that no rent was pet friendly.

We started looking to see what the money could get you. some small, others old, and some stupidly designed (who needs a kitchen the size of a conference room, or a place with high ceilings).

We also thought it an idea to build ourselves. There are options out here to do so, with show homes dotted around to give you an idea of what you can build. We couldn't do this in the end because this option is only available for citizens of NZ.

We put an offer in for a home in Mosgiel, which was a nice place, but we were blown away the next weekend with a much larger house that we ended up buying, and this place had radiators in nearly all the rooms.
It was incredible for a build of 2004. The radiator heating is done via coal. It was so very nice coming into a home with radiators! It was a massive home for a decent price. Sabine and I were walking around flabbergasted.
After seeing this place we quickly withdrew our offer on the one in Mosgiel and placed one on this house instead. Its in Abbotsford by the way, on a hill.

After the offer was accepted it was a case of telling our landlords about it and trying to organise a way out of our current contract which was due to end at the end of September.

We started buying furniture after that, buying a bed, a couch, 4 bedside tables and another spare bed for which we have decided to convert the downstairs bedroom into an AirBnB room, for an extra income.

We cleaned the rented house for house inspections, and after a few weeks of people looking around, a young Chinese couple accepted our terms of a move in date at the end of August. Still some ways away at this point.

The move itself was straight forward. We gave ourselves a weeks grace between owning the new house and moving out of the rented place, so 2 weekends to do things in.

On the weekend of the 18th and 19th August we moved most things out and into our new home. We also got Fibre internet installed in the new house. We rented a van and did something like 6 trips using it to move our things.
Also our furniture arrived on the Saturday.

The next weekend was cleaning the rented place and we also had our final inspection from the landlady. She gave us our full deposit back and was thankful for the effort we put in.

Its taken another week or so to feel settled in. I have just stated using the bus service to and from work which is a new thing. I was driving Sabine to work last week and hanging around work in the staff room for a few hours. Sabine likes starting work at the super crazy hour of 6am if possible. She compromised for my sake and was going in for 7am.

Its nice living in a home where I can have easy access to my things which are no longer in boxes. The cats love running around too, so its a better space for them too.