i'm dreaming of a white... tuesday

And it's not the ethnicity of Karori residents I'm referring to, who are robustly multicultural even if unambiguously middle class. Rather, it's the fact that the weather forecast has snow in Wellington down to 400m tonight, and our latest estimates suggest that our house might well be at that altitude! There's a southerly storm sweeping the nation, and in 30 minutes today at my work the weather suddenly changed from sunny and calm to driving rain. The rain has eased off but there is now a bitterly cold infiltrating wind. We've woken up with the house literally in the clouds about three times in the last fortnight, so I'm pretty confident we could see snowmen here by morning. Sure hope my bus still runs...

We're settling in to the new house, trying to get all the basics sorted before the baby arrives. Statistically that's less than two weeks away now, but we're already well within those error bars on the deliveries statistics stem-and-leaf plot. Yikes. On the weekend I screwed some 25mm x 75mm lengths of wood to the wall inside the cupboard-laundry here, as the space between the studs was too wide to hang the dryer on. (And what would I do with a dryer on, anyway?) Attaching the wall mounting bracket to that, I turned to actually getting the dryer on. Fisher and Paykel obviously saw me coming, because for this step their instructions say in big letters, YOU WILL NEED HELP TO DO THIS. Yeah, yeah. But I'm big, so maybe I can do it myself I think? Ha. Several strained muscles later, Saturday night sees the washing machine in the hallway, with the dryer half into the laundry cupboard propped up on two dining chairs. Ah, and a series of gouges in the plaster of the rear wall of the cupboard, and some ominous aluminium-residue marks where I've dragged the conduit up and down the wall trying to lift the dryer into place.

So, Sunday I figure I'm going to have to call in the artillery. On the way back from church, we're thinking who we'll drag up to ours to assist. But then I get to thinking. It's only the lifting PLUS the positioning I can't do. I can do each of them on their own. And there's really no space for someone else to help anyway. (This is a really small cupboard.) Physics to the rescue. I pile three boxes still full of books on the cupbard floor, then lift the dryer up onto them. So far, so good. Bronwyn grabs some 15cm (6 inch) high boxes we've got lying around, still full of stuff. I lift the dryer 20cm, she sticks a box under. I rest it at its new height. I lift the dryer 20cm again, another box. The dryer gets higher and higher. Eventually we move to layers of spare carpet sections, and towels, to get a finer-grained control of height. Finally, the dryer is perched just a little higher than the bracket. Much encouragement to the dryer occurs, a clang, one side is in, more robust encouragement and suddenly it is feeling pretty solid. A few boxes, now crushing rather impressively, are removed on trial. The dryer remains stoic. More boxes, no cascade of dryer excitement. All the boxes are removed. The dryer floats resplendent in the air, just the way bricks don't. (Kudos to the late Douglas Adams.) Success!

The weekend also saw me visit the Mitre 10 “MEGA” store in Lower Hutt—heaven in hardware—where I acquired a rivet gun and associated ammunition, many many window and door security devices to install with same (love those infrared-triggered laser beams), a heated towel rail that I have now wired in (unbelievably the same price as a normal one...), and other wall-mounted hardwarophillia. So we are getting sorted! We've also bought a coffee table and ordered a lounge suite, on top of the larger fridge and now-installed dryer we bought last weekend, so we're finally getting on to replacing the things we sold when we went overseas. Admittedly the lounge suite won't actually be delivered for 14-15 weeks, but we're still feeling like we're getting things ready for the baby. I hear this is because Bronwyn must be “nesting”, which presumably means I'm building a dam, with powertools, or something. Or perhaps wiring up my cave for ADSL internet? (Which still hasn't been connected here, incidentally, but that's another rant...)

So yes, the baby is growing well, but no, it hasn't arrived yet. And checking here for updates is waaay better than emailing us or phoning us right now. Oh, you haven't got our new phone number? Whoops. Well, we'll certainly be passing that on to people. Real soon. Once the baby is settled. Into high school...

Don't take it personally. We're real busy getting sorted, and it's quite nice to have some space. But we'd love to hear from you. We just may take a while to get back to people.

But I'm loving my new, slimmed-down 45-minute commute. (Twenty in the car.) Thank you, Jenny Craig?