Go the All Blacks

The Rugby World Cup is happening in New Zealand right now.  I'm not a huge rugby fan but I don't mind watching.  And I will tune in every time the All Blacks are playing just to see the haka.  I can't get enough of it.


p.s. I love Piri Weepu (he's the guy doing all the shouting).
p.p.s. This haka is from tonight's match against France. As this blog post goes to press, the AB's are winning 19 to 0. Go the All Blacks!

Pretty

It's going to be a long time before the cracks in our house are fixed.  We've already been looking at them for over a year, and it's likely we'll be looking at them for at least another year. 

A lot of houses have had all of their broken cladding taken off and replaced with plywood.  While plywood isn't attractive, it at least has the advantage of being uniform.  And of course it eliminates the danger of loose bricks falling on the heads of your child/dog/meter reader.  We've considered getting someone in to pull off our broken stones and plywood the house, but just haven't gotten around to it. 

So we have Oamaru stone in some places and tarps in other places.  And where there is stone, there are usually cracks.  It's not pretty.

But this weekend I did my best to make it pretty, at least at the front entrance.  We bought a bulk lot of used pots from a guy off of Trade Me.  Then we got some colourful flowers from Orderings Nursery.  And away we went.

There.  That's better.  Now rather than the house saying, "Please knock me down and put me out of my misery," it says something more like, "I'm down but not out.  See my pretty flowers?"

So much still unknown

It's occurred to me a lot recently that there are still so many things I don't know about everyday life in this country.  It's amazing all the little things you take for granted. 

For instance:

1.  How tall am I?  In America, I knew I was 5 feet, 6 inches tall for many years.  And then I had to attend a medical exam for immigration purposes and this included measuring my height.  The doctor measured me, said "5 foot 7", and made a note in my chart.  So I  have known for nearly three years now that I am 5 feet, 7 inches.  I have no idea when I gained this extra inch, but I'll take it. 
Anyway, in New Zealand, tallness is measured by centimetres.  I have no idea how tall I am in centimetres. 

2. How much do I weigh?  Similar to above - I know my weight in pounds.  I have no idea how many kilograms I weigh.  When I tell people I gained 50lbs while I was pregnant (it's true - I was huge) they ask me how much that is in kilos.  We're just not speaking the same language here.

3. How does the government/parliament work?  This is basic civics, and I'm a little embarrassed to say that I haven't really sussed it out yet.  I have a handle on the general principles.  I know that whichever party gets the most MPs elected gets to have control and their leader gets to be the Prime Minister.  I understand that sometimes one party won't have a majority and so they need to form a coalition.  I know our local MP is Ruth Dyson and that she's a member of the Labour party.  I know that when it's time to vote, I vote for a party (Labour, National, Green, Mana, or some other party) and I can vote for individual candidates.  But there is so much I don't understand.  I hear talk of "list MP's" and I don't know what function they serve.  Also, they're always talking about "MMP"; I don't even know what this stands for.  I have no idea what Ruth Dyson has ever done for me.  And other questions too.  I need New Zealand's version of School House Rock.

It is noteworthy that although Gareth grew up in a country that also uses a parliamentary system, he was initally a little baffled by New Zealand's system too. 

4. How many calories are in this [insert foodstuff]? 
Here's a New Zealand food label:

  I don't know what a kJ of energy is.  Is that like a calorie?   

(footnote: Gareth has just told me that a "kcal" is a calorie.  This particular mystery has just been solved.  Hoorays!)

5. How hot should the oven be/how much butter should I add?  We brought recipe books with us from the U.S. and other recipes cut from magazines and saved on the Internet.  All of them measure the hotness of the oven in farhenheit and the amount of butter by the stick.  I have a celcius/farhenheit conversion chart in one of my cookbooks that I have to consult every time.  And it never really occurred to me before, but how gross is it to measure butter by the stick??  Apart from being a little gross, this form of measurement is not helpful here because butter sticks are not the same shape here as they are there.  Butter is measured in grams.  I do a lot of baking and I am forever consulting http://www.onlineconversion.com/.  I don't know what I'd do without it.  My muffins would be a mess.

6. When is the next public holiday?  I know that we get the day off for Canterbury Day and Labour Day and Boxing Day and other days.  I just don't know when they are (except Boxing Day - that one's easy). And I don't mean that I don't know the exact date the holiday will fall on this year - I mean I don't even know what month.  You would think that something as important as days off work would stick in the head better.  But they haven't.

7. Have I dialed this telephone number correctly? Some phone numbers have 7 digits and some only have 6.  How is this possible?  How does the phone know when I'm done dialling?  This one bugs and perplexes. 

8.  Will I be billed for this ambulance ride?  Ok, this is not an everyday item (thankfully).  But last week Quinn and I had our first ride in an ambulance.  It's ok, he's fine now.  But he was blue and feverish and I took him to the doctor, who then called an ambulance to take him to hospital.  They were worried about his oxygen saturation level; it was too low.  And the blueness.  So we were riding to the hospital and I was sick with worry about my wee boy, but also sort of wondering, "will I be charged for this?"  Don't get me wrong - I would have gladly handed over our life savings if it would have gotten Quinn better quickly.  But I did wonder.  Ambulance service in New Zealand is provided by a private company called St John's.  I'm not sure if St John's will be sending us a bill for the ride.  We haven't had one yet.  Watch this space...

This segues nicely to:

9. Does my child have a fever? Yet another complication arising from the United States' failure/refusal to embrace the metric system! I believe but am not positive that a normal temperature is about 36.6. I think anything in the 37s is a bit high, the 38s is quite feverish, and anything over 39 is cause for worry, I think. But I'm not sure. I don't know the temperature at which alarm bells should sound. I should find that out.



Most or all of these things can be sorted with a quick Internet search.  But sometimes you just want to know things without thinking about them.  This information should be available on demand.  When someone says "how tall are you?" I should be able to answer without thinking.  Thankfully, people almost never ask me how tall I am.

Chocolate chip cookies

This post is about something near and dear to my heart: chocolate chip cookies.

My first memory of chocolate chip cookies is making them with my friend Colleen and her big sister Terri.  I remember Terri letting us hand-mix the dough as she added more and more flour.  It would get to the point when you've added most of the flour and it gets too hard for little girl arms to mix.

My friend Tami could make The Best chocolate chip cookies.  They were so good that no one believed her when she said she was just using the recipe on the back of the Nestle Toll House bag.  One night I tried to replicate her cookies.  I failed.  I had to call her over to help me when my cookies turned out like flat amoebas.

"The secret," she said, "is adding a little extra flour.  And doubling the amount of chocolate chips." 

I have just revealed to you the secret to incredible chocolate chip cookies.  I don't know if Tami reads this blog.  I hope she doesn't mind.

I love making chocolate chip cookies.  I love eating the raw dough.  I love rolling it into little balls.  I love baking each batch for exactly 9 minutes (never 10, defintely never 11).  I love laying them all out on paper towels, where they look lovely and delicious and leave little round buttery grease spots.

I love eating one from each baking tray as it comes out of the oven.  Considering the arm work-out you get creaming the butter into the sugar and then mixing all that flour into the batter by hand, I figure you need to eat about 10 of them to fill the calorie deficit. 

I do not love creaming butter into sugar and find this a major chore. Thankfully for me, Gareth doesn't mind creaming butter into sugar.  He's really good at it.

I knew there would be things I'd have to make do without when we moved to New Zealand.  It did not occur to me that chocolate chips might be one of them.  But it's true.  I have never seen Nestle Toll House chocolate chips here.  Or even any other brand of chocolate chips.  They seem to not exist.

Ok, they sell chocolate chips here, but they are not proper chocolate chips.  They are fragments of chocolate chips.  In other words, pathetic and tiny and completely unsatisfactory.

Inadequate.

Thankfully, I have connections.

Shortly after Quinn was born, our American friend Cara baked chocolate chip cookies for us.  This was an extraordinary act of kindness because Cara had to dig into her own stash of imported chocolate chips.  I used to get up in the middle of the night to nurse Quinn and sneak into the kitchen to eat one of those cookies.  They were so perfect and familiar.

Cara recently returned from a trip to America.  She asked if there was anything she could bring back for me.  I asked for one thing: chocolate chips.  She brought me two bags.

I am baking cookies right now.  I am writing this blog post in 9-minute segments between batches of cookies.

I don't know why Blogger will not let me turn this picture the right way round. I'm sorry, but you'll have to cock your head to the right.

I am in a cookie dough-scented heaven.  My tongue burns from sugar overload.  It's awesome.

Gareth just came into the kitchen, nabbed two cookies and left.  And came back a minute later to take two more.  I said, "make sure there are some left for Friday when Cara comes over."  He said, "no chance."

Assessed

This weekend will mark the one-year anniversary of the September 4th earthquake.  One year in, and things are still pretty broken here.  We try to just get on with things and not dwell on the cracks.

We had a full assessment by EQC in January, but then the February quake hit and really knocked us down.  So we've been waiting since then for EQC to come back and check things over again and tell us what repairs our house will need.  We waited and waited.

Finally someone called and made an appointment to come see us.  We were so thrilled!  We waited with great anticipation for the appointed day to arrive.  We know other people who have already had their assessments, so we sort of knew what to expect.  Two men wearing flourescent vests would show up in a Toyota Corolla, carrying iPads.  They would spend hours taking measurements and making careful notes.  That was the one thing everyone said: they are so thorough.  One friend whose house suffered virtually no damage at all said EQC spent 4 hours there.  So we fully expected them to be at our house for the better part of the day.

Mike and John showed up on time in their Corolla, wearing flouro vests, carrying iPads.  All going as expected so far.  But then it got a little weird.  Mike started telling me what a disaster the whoe re-build effort is.  He shook his head sadly.  He said the people in charge are "idiots".  They don't know what they're doing. It's all such a shame.  And on and on.

Mike explained that he had worked in L.A. following the 1994 Northridge quake.  He was comparing the rebuild effort there to the one here.  Apparently, they did it a lot better in L.A.  The people here are idiots.

As I said, we're really trying to stay optimistic here.  We want to, we need to believe that it's all going to be ok.  Mike was really not helping matters.

One of the things he said was that a lot of the assessors hired by EQC to do these inspections have no building experience at all.  He said a bunch of them are ex-cops.  He assured me that both he and John are experienced builders and that we were in good hands.  So that was good, I guess.

John took a walk around the outside of the house and came back in with a grim report:  "It's all coming down."  !!  Ah, but not as bad as it sounds -  he was just talking about the Oamaru stone cladding.  The house is made of wood, but has white stone cladding on the exterior.  It's all coming down.  To be fair, a good portion of the stones have already come down, thanks to Mother Nature.  John was just confirming that the rest would also have to come down.

They used nifty laser devices to check the floors and make sure they're still level (they are).  They made notes in their iPads.  They looked at the ceilings, the walls, the attic. 

An hour later, they packed up their gear. 

What?  Done already?  But... you just got here! 

I really did not want to question their methods, but felt I had to point out the anecdotal evidence that these inspections should take 4 or 5 hours.  Mike's response: "those inspectors are idiots."  Ah, right.  He said our house is really an "easy case" and there's nothing major or unusual here.  All of the cladding has to come off and be replaced.  All of the surfaces of the interior walls (paper/paint) have to be repaired and replaced.  "You'll get our report in 6 to 8 weeks."  But the house is solid.  They say.  After only looking at it for an hour.

Gareth was especially concerned about a bit at the back where the patio bricks have been pushed up, causing us to wonder if the concrete slab has broken.  "Nah, that's fine," they said.  Hmmm.  Gareth questioned whether they had really looked at it properly (he managed to do this politely without suggesting the builders did not know what they were doing).  Mike and John agreed to take another look, "to put your mind at ease".  The men went out back and had another look, but Mike and John did not change their views on this point.  Nothing to worry about.  In any event though, there is a separate 'land assessment team' who will have a look at this. 

So they left.

They're attitude was like, "trust us, we know what we're doing," but I have to say, after listening to Mike tell us what a disaster the whole process is, it's a bit hard to be trusting.  I guess he was saying, "they're all idiots except us," but I'm not really convinced.  I'm a little worried.

I want to believe they did know what they were doing and that our house really is ok.  It's great news that we don't have to be bulldozed.  A brand new house might have been nice, but we can really do without all the hassle. 

So we've been assessed.  Now we sit back and wait 6 to 8 weeks for the report.