I'm reproducing two entries today, one from before we moved into our house, and the next from just after.

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View of the back of our house, the day of our house warming party


January 18th, 2010 - twenty-three

3:04 pm
I woke up this morning, with one thing finally sinking in about buying the house: New roots. I did the roll call of every place I've ever called 'home.' My number is twenty-two. That's every place I've lived with my parents, that's counting the trimaran, and every dorm room I've lived in, every apartment rented with friends, and the two apartments rented with Loren. Every place I've ever hung my posters on the walls, learned the quirks of the kitchen, every place I've ever love, and lived in, made new friends and lost track of the old, investigated the cupboards and figured out which wall to place my bed against.

I loved them all, my little 'hobbit hole' in Oakland's Dimond district, our beach house on Harbour Island, my little bunk above the kitchen table in the boat. I embraced each completely as my own, even as I knew that on some level it was always temporary. The longest I have lived in one place, is a few months shy of four years.

I guess I just started to feel the permanence of this thing we are doing, the buying of a home. And not just in the scary commitment of a 30 year mortgage kind of way. But in the finally being able to relax all the way. Embrace a place all the way. See it as yours all the way through. Paint the walls any colour you like. Plant whatever you like in the garden. Pull up the lino and put down some tile. Install a coat rack without worrying what the landlord might think. Plan on renovating the kitchen some time in the next ten years. Turn the garage into a guest room some time down the road. That kind of time scale. I don't know. It's a type of 'roots' I've never had. Ever. The first time my parents bought a house, was mere months before I moved out.



Our sunny little lounge (aka living room)

February 24th, 2010 - A sense of place

7:04 pm
I heard a radio interview once with this lady who had written a book about how to connect with your house's history. Like genealogy for your house. I thought it was a silly idea. One more way our transient generation, feeling disconnected from a sense of community and a sense of place, try to create a sense of connection for ourselves.

But here I am, slowly getting to know my new home. I still think it's a silly idea, and yet... I have become obsessed with these vintage light shades. These house is 1950's, but the current decor is all over the map. The light shades in question, though, are so clearly from another era. There's two in the kitchen, one in the older bathroom. Then there's some anonymous modern stuff, and a bare bulb in each bedroom. Then I found four more of the vintage shades in a cupboard down in the workshop. I've identified two that I'd like to restore to their former glory. So instead of getting modern shades installed in the bedrooms, we're living with the bare bulbs until I figure out how to make that happen.

Today, I was changing the light bulb in my favourite kitchen light - a sort of spherical honeycomb blown glass thing - and realised it was really filthy. I just spent half an hour carefully cleaning it with a washcloth and some dish soap. When I was done, I held it up to the light and wondered when it had last looked this shinny and new. I thought of the people who purchased it, and wondered whether they were proud of this lovely modern thing. Or maybe it was just a common, ubiquitous light shade when it was new. Something no one gave much thought to until I came along.

I found myself wondering about these people, how they lived and what they were thinking when they picked the appalling wallpaper in the bathroom. And suddenly the idea of doing genealogy on your house didn't sound so silly.



The honey-coloured lamp shade, newly cleaned

Apartment vs. House

The one big thing that happened in the last three months is I got skin cancer, and we bought a house. I know that sounds like two big things, but they happened right on top of each other, so it feels like one really big thing to me. After two surgeries, I am all recovered now and have been declared cancer-free. As for the house, here's the first of a series of entries on the experience.


January 30th, 2010 - apartment vs. house

10:14 am
At 9:30 am, I head to the dairy (aka convenience store) down the street to pick up a banana and tinned fruit salad to go in my morning yogurt. It's already over twenty degrees C, and not a speck of cloud in the bright blue sky. Rarest of all, there's hardly more than a flutter of wind this morning. I have some chewy rye bread at home that I got from the Italian bakery around the corner, with which I intend to make toast with cream cheese. If I were in the new house, I would eat my breakfast at our new outdoor table and chairs, under cover of the umbrella. I would soak in this brilliant summer weather, out in the open air. Maybe I would bring a book.

Through the gate, up the stairs, around the corner, down a dark hallway, and through a door is my apartment. As I walk, I'm thinking about security. Despite the central city location, inside my apartment I feel safe and secure. I leave windows open, even the deck door open. Anyone who would go through the effort of scaling the wall to get to my deck would not be stopped by a locked door anyway. In the new house, I anticipate I might feel a bit... exposed at first. Outside the door, there will just be The Outside, not a series of other doors, some of them locked. I'm thinking about a story I heard, about some tribe living in a dense jungle. If one of them traveled out of that jungle, they would be very disoriented, because they wouldn't be able to focus on anything more than fifteen feet away from them. Because they'd never had to before. Even an anthropologist living with them for any length of time, would find themselves temporarily nearsighted.

Back in the apartment, it's stuffy and warm, even with the lack of sunlight. The living room windows are open, but they all face one way. I open our bedroom window, but the smell of the restaurants behind our building is too much for me. Instead I crack the guest room window, which I normally hate to do because the soot from the car park next door builds up on the window seal so quickly, and Goodness knows how much of it we end up inhaling. But we'll be out of here soon enough, so I'll chance it. In the new house, sunlight is angling in the North-facing windows in the lounge (living room) and master bedroom right now. If we threw open some windows, the worst we'd be facing is a little white noise from the freeway. Probably not much more than the hum of the city I'm hearing from our apartment windows right now.

This Friday the 5th, the new house will be ours. At 4:30pm we will be sitting in the empty house, waiting for the power to be switched on. We'll drink bubbly, and we'll eat take-away, and we'll talk about where we want to put the furniture.

The Day After Thanksgiving - Part II

I have been neglecting this blog. In my defense, my life got a bit hectic there for a while. The dust having more or less settled, I look around to find I haven't posted in exactly three months! I have not stopped writing in my journal, however. So I will be pulling entries from it to get things caught up. Starting with the second half of the Day After Thanksgiving story.

January 23rd, 2010
7:36 pm
Thanksgiving morning, my parent's elderly neighbor brought over the paper, as she always does. And although we are all various shades of liberal, socialist, anti-consumerist lefties, every one of us eventually found ourselves enthusiastically browsing the large stack of Black Friday sale inserts. The Tribune Herald's front page, above-the-fold story that day was about the fact that Wal Mart would be having a massive sale. Among us, Dad is clearly the most radical anti-consumerist, which is why none of us could fathom his level of interest in the subject. Turned out he was plotting to buy Mom an ipod and ipod-compatable stereo system for her birthday.

So now here we are, at the town's one and only mall, 7am on Black Friday morning. There's free egg nogg on offer at the door, and I'm actually a bit disappointed that the crowds aren't as massive as anticipated. That doesn't stop the lines from being painfully long at the electronics store, though, so I feel I've gotten a sufficient taste of my first ever Black Friday shopping experience.

On the ride home, Dad hatches a plan. How can Mom wait 'til her birthday to open these presents? We still have the flowers and decorations, the tasty left-overs, the coolers full of drinks... everything set up from the Thanksgiving dinner party the night before. Why don't we just go ahead and have her birthday party today?

We get back to the house, and stash the presents. By now Loren's up, and he'd like to go to the mall to check out the sales at the video game store. So back we go... Round Two: The crowd is picking up, and the lines at EB Games are decidedly less pleasant. By the time we get back, Dad has announced his Plan to everyone else, and discovered that A's husband also has a birthday coming up. So now it's a double birthday party, and of course A now needs to go to the mall to get her husband a birthday present.

So, Round Three: A and my mother in tow, back we go. This time the crowd has reached a level I'd call appropriate to my expectations, and we actually duck out fairly quickly in favour of shopping at Borders. When we get back, A and I establish an undisclosed secret location for present-wrapping (the kitchenette in the downstairs office) and I manage to track down a cupboard full of present-wrapping paraphernalia. I grab us sodas, snacks, and cushions to sit on, and we settle into gift-wrapping mode.

This is certainly the shortest-notice birthday party I've ever been involved in. It reminds me of a story about a friend of mine who helped throw a surprise wedding for her friend. I tell A about it - how it sounds like and appalling idea, but in context it actually made sense and was a great success. We kind of loose track of time, and forget that we haven't actually told anyone that we were going to hide out in our undisclosed secret location. Some time later, we're just finishing up wrapping and the boys come in, saying they looked for us everywhere, and had given up finding us. They'd actually come into the kithchenette to use the microwave to heat up left overs.

And that's how the party got started. Low-key, impromptu, and completely lovely. And that turkey soup Dad and I put together in the morning was the best I've ever had.


The table all set for Thanksgiving dinner. This room is normally Mom's art studio.

The Day After Thanksgiving - Part I

The living room clock says 4:15 am when I get out of bed the day after Thanksgiving. In the kitchen the turkey bones are simmering away on the stove, just as we left them last night. The simmering stock pot keeps me company as I drink my tea, eat my Cheerios. Everyone else is asleep. It's a rare thing to be up before Dad. He's usually up by five, but when he's on holiday he does tend to sleep in. The house is very dark and only a few coqui frogs are still doing their shrill calls at this hour. Eventually it seems like the only thing to do is slip out the back door and finish my tea on the lanai. It smells like green growing things out here, but there's no hint of dawn yet. I can see a few stars winking through the clouds.

It occurs to me that I haven't had this much time alone since I got to Hilo. And I haven't been this pleased to have some time to myself in a long time. It's been nonstop visiting with one person or another since I arrived. First trip back in about four years. Friends of mine and my parents keep coming by the house to seeing me again or meeting me for the first time. I'm starting to feel like a visiting dignitary. But the five people currently sleeping in the house upstairs are the ones I've really been joyously spending every minute with - my mother, father, partner, cousin, and cousin's husband. It's been so lovely, I didn't realize 'til this moment that it's also exhausting.

Presently it occurs to me that I'd like to do sun salutations right here on the porch, as the first glow of dawn starts to show. I thought maybe it was silly to pack my yoga mat, but this is actually about the fifth time I've used it on this trip. I start with the slow stretches, yawning all the while and feeling my body begin to warm. I go through the salutations with ritualistic deliberateness, rejoicing in the fact that I have the health and strength to carry out these now familiar movements.

By the time I'm finished, I've made up my mind about something. Dad suggested yesterday that we go shopping for Mom's birthday present today, on account of the Black Friday sales. Neither of us are big on shopping, even when it's not the busiest shopping day of the year. But I don't know when I've last been home for Mom's birthday, and I won't be there this year either, but going with Dad to pick out her present feels like the next best thing. When Dad gets up, I have the pleasure of seeing the surprise on his face when he sees I'm up already. We get to work fishing all the bones out of the stock pot and as we're adding some left-over veggies, I tell Dad I want to go to the mall with him. It opens at 6am today, and if we sneak out of the house now we may even return before anyone gets around to missing us.

Two Year Anniversary of living in New Zealand: Day Two

Yeah, I know, this is WAY overdue...

We drove along the coast on Day Two, getting a gorgeous view all the way along.



Palliser Bay coastal road

We hiked up through a dry creek bed see the Pinacles, a sight that reminded me very much of the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon in Utah:



Next we stopped in Ngawi for refreshments. This is a tiny fishing village, known for it tractors, of all things. Because the sea is so rough and the coast is so rugged, there is no harbour so they keep the boats dry docked on trailers pulled far up the long stretches of beach. These trailers are hauled by tractors. It's quit a site, these tractors lined up on the beach. I didn't get a photo, but I'll include one my Mom too last time they were here:



Mom's photo of the tractors



Loren and I at the dairy in Ngawi

The area past Ngawi is known for its seal colonies. There's a 'bachelor colony' here that can be seen year round. You can also see mothers with babies the right time of year. (It was not the right time of year)



These guys were basking just meters from the road, and completely unafraid of people.

Our last stop was the light house. We ignored the warning signs and braved the rickety stairs, though the were literally falling apart in places.



The trip down was especially harrowing. But we were rewarded with a stunning view.


View from the lighthouse

And that was pretty much Day Two. Where will we go next year? At the moment Nelson is on the top of our list of places to visit next.

Soaking in The Culture

I fell asleep last night thinking of my experience of Yayoi Kusama's exhibit. Artwork that you can walk into the middle of, be surrounded by, the outside world obliterated. I have a lot of fanciful ideas of what kind of art I would create, if I had a lot of money and time on my hands. I would love to make sculptures so big that they became architecture, something you walk into and climb upon and experience. I never considered you could create that effect with a a room, some paint, and a bunch of custom-made inflatable objects. I walked around inside "Dots Obsession - Day" until I found a vantage point where I could no longer see the door. I was floating in a little world of bright yellow that made the black dots look like endless black holes. Large amorphous objects loomed, floated, leaned against walls, in the same colour scheme. The yellow dots on black of "Dot's Obsession - Night" was a little easier on the eyes. Another piece was a room set up as a mundane living room, down to the tea cups on the coffee table, every surface covered with coloured dots. The only illumination was black lights - which made the dots light up with a pale glow. Walking through this room was peaceful after 'dot's obsession' but also deeply eerie.



(Image shamelessly taken from www.stuff.co.nz)

My favourite piece was a room fitted on all walls and ceiling with mirrors, the floor was still water with a mirrored platform to stand on. From black chords tiny coloured lights hung at different heights all over the room - the only illumination. People were let in only in ones or twos, the door closed behind them for the full effect. The effect was that of floating in an endless world of little lights, like a starry night sky stretching in every direction. It was beautiful and peaceful. My two minutes was over too soon. I wanted a room like that in my home. When life got too overwhelming, I would just go in there and lie on my back, looking up at the endless sky.

Two Year Anniversary of living in New Zealand

This is my much belated post about our trip to Lake Ferry and Cape Palliser. For our two-year anniversary of moving to New Zealand, I wanted to take a road trip to somewhere we hadn't been before. When I talked to Loren about where we might want to go, he told me to surprise him, which just made it more fun to plan.

Our route took us through Martinborough, so of course we stopped there for lunch and to check out some wineries we hadn't been to yet. It was the end of harvest season and the leaves on the grape vines were turning yellow.

One of our stops was a little family run winery called The Cabbage Tree. Often the tiniest operations make for to the most memorable winery visits. The elderly lady pouring our wine was also co-owner with her husband. After we bought a bottle each of their '04 pinot noir and their rose, she asked if we'd like a tour of their facilities. Turned out the converted barn we were in housed their entire operation, from tasting room to cellar. She lifted the lid off steel barrels so we could get a peek at their bright red merlot and watch her stir it with a huge red-stained wooden paddle. We saw their de-stemmer in action (a metal machine that pulls the stems off harvested grapes). Then we got to put our ears up to the hole in the top of a barrel of chardonnay, so we could hear the hiss of the juice fermenting. Our next stop was Murdoch James, where we got a real surprise when we tasted a syrah that we actually liked. Harvest was under way there as well, so after we bought a bottle of syrah, we got a look at their grapes and they let us taste fresh syrah and a pinot gris grapes. Here's Loren with the syrah grapes:



And crates of pinot gris:



Our accommodation was a tiny cabin just outside of Lake Ferry. Lake Ferry is a tiny village situated next to Lake Onoke and Palliser Bay. After settling into our cabin we took a walk along the beach at Lake Ferry. The beach is composed of tiny black pebbles, and it goes on for ages. The lake is brackish; a narrow strip of beach separates it from the ocean, and a break in this strip allows water to flow between lake and ocean. There were a few brave surfers out there. We had already been warned against swimming; the currents can be treacherous and there's nothing else out there between that particular strip of coast and Antarctica.



Where Lake Onoke meets Palliser Bay

We had pasta from Wishbone for dinner, and opened the rose from Cabbage Tree to go with it.

(this post is getting long. I'll do Day Two later)