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.

That’s all I have to say about all of that. What do you think of that, Google? Any good data you can sell to the highest bidder? What sorts of targeted ads will you pop into my email now? I’ll try to up some pix too, to keep even the visual learners entertained.