June 22, 2013
Even though Google will be stealing as much of our personal
information as possible from this next posting, I still thought it might be
interesting for some of the anonymous people of the internet to have a look at
what we’re up to these days. So here’s some of what has happened since last I
wrote:
We had a baby.
We’ve been trained somewhat in the parenting arts.
We’ve met lots of people and traveled all over the place.
We’ve sold and bought a car.
We’ve packed up everything we owned and sent it off to the
other side of the planet – the long way around, apparently.
We’ve moved to New Zealand.
It’s not a comprehensive list, but those are the bullet
points. The first item is easily the most exciting one, our little guy is
amazing and cute and hilarious and of course the best looking and most
intelligent boy anyone has ever had. I won’t go on and on, he gets embarrassed
easily.
I can’t go into all of this one: we pretty much knew
everything about parenting before our son was born, but constant practice has
refined our techniques such that we’re now the idiots giving people unsolicited
advice about how to care for their children. Feels pretty good knowing it all.
We have been to a few different places over the past year,
some of them closer to some places than to other places. For example, our trip
to Seattle took us closer to California than did our trip to New York Citeh.
Our trip to Mexico had us closer to El Salvador than did our trip to Wisconsin.
Our visit to Portugal had us closer to Italy than did our trip to Cincinnati.
You get the picture. Now that we’re in New Zealand, I guess that puts us closer
to Australia than we were when we visited Brasil that one time. So it all makes
a kind of sense.
Selling a car to a private party in the US is relatively
simple. All you have to do is find a complete stranger who is extremely
trustworthy and honest, and who is willing to pay the asking price on your
vehicle. Then all you have to do is fill out all the paperwork, collect
legitimate payment, deposit said payment in your account, and hand over all the
documents and the keys. Easy as pie. I never made pie, though, that was really
Grant’s thing. So if you can avoid it, don’t sell your car. It might be easier
to wrap it around a tree and let the insurance company sort it out. Just more
dangerous and (maybe) more stupid. Buying a car in another country is even
easier than selling one in the US. All you have to do is give someone a whole
huge stack of cash and they’ll take care of the rest. Assuming you’re buying it
from a legitimate authorized dealer. Otherwise, I’m not sure how to do it. In
New Zealand, all cars are valued at about 150% of what they would get in the
US. So, for example, a 2004 Corolla with relatively low kilometers will set you
back about $10,700 NZ. That’s outrageous. But, for some inexplicable reason,
you can score a 2012 Daihatsu Sirion for about the same price, with almost no
kms and a valid Toyota-backed factory warranty. I’d go for the latter, even if
it does mean driving a cherry red tiny car for the next hundred years or so.
Incidentally, our new car is almost exactly the same age as our son.
We didn’t actually pack up most of our things, someone else
did that for us. Somehow the container that they loaded for us is going by
train to NYC from Chicago, then it’s being loaded onto a ship and sent around the
world. I can’t figure out if it’s going through the Suez or the Panama or the
Straits or where or how. But in mid-/late-August we’ll have a container in
port. I suppose that Customs will want to dig through the whole thing, because
it has been packed so neatly, and then eventually it will be delivered to us
wherever we’re living at that time. More paperwork awaits.
I don’t think we would have moved, if we had to pack
ourselves. Even packing our four suitcases and all the necessities for the 12
week containerless period was almost too much for us. But that brings me to
United Airlines. There are good things and bad things. The good things include
their willingness to somehow allow us more checked items by two than they
should have, and to charge us literally nothing for our checked baggage. We
were expecting to pay $100 or $200, that was the way we packed. So that was nice.
Not so good? What the complete morons in Houston did to my guitar case in the 3
minutes it was in their care. I cannot express the horror I felt at picking up
my never-before-used-outside-the-house guitar case to see the corners scuffed
and damaged as they now are. When we have a bit more time, I’ll send the
pictures to our friends at United and hope the oafish imbeciles handling
luggage at that particular gate get their proper chastisement. But I’ll assume
nothing happens. Because that’s to be expected when you pass your valuables
over to stupid people against your will. So the United people have good and bad
qualities, like all of us, I suppose.
So that’s about it. It has rained/sleeted pretty much ever
since we arrived, but that’s what we were expecting, so nobody’s terribly
disappointed. The advantage of arriving in winter is that we get to see just
where the sun might actually hit houses while we’re checking around to the
various neighborhoods around campus. We also get a very clear sense of just how
warm the houses are (not at all, thus far). Rent is so high that a person with
slightly more impetuousity (that’s a new word for you) might buy a house for
roughly the same amount as he’s looking at spending on a rental. But these
people aren’t that kind of a person, so they’ll be renting, I suppose.
