We Acquire a House

This week I became a homeowner.  After learning so much about the Auckland real estate market, I felt I better get in there quick.  My colleague is building a house and after hearing about all she's gone through with builders, I decided a renovation was right for me.  We found a cute little fixer-upper, a three bedroom, one bath, two story bungalow,  We're thinking about making the attic another bedroom with en-suite.  And best part of all, the house was free.

Let me back up.

In Auckland, once per year they have Inorganics.  Inorganics is when you take all the broken junk or, in some cases, perfectly good junk you just don't want anymore, and put it on the side of the road for the city to pick up.

It usually sits there for a few days, which means that you can take a walk, survey your neighbor's stuff, and see if it is something that might look good in your house (elbow grease required).


Gorgeous home accented by pile of rubbish


Most of it is total crap; old wood planks, broken stuff you can't even identify, busted TVs with the screens gone, broken vases or dishes.  Some of it is a hoarder's dream; old sofas, tables, baskets, plant pots with a chip or to out of them, toys, shoes, busted handbags, baskets.  I've seen people trying on shoes at an Inorganics pile.  Really?  Cool by me, dude!

In some areas, people put things out that are perfectly good.  I've seen sofas, chairs, side tables, dressers, and entertainment units that, with a little (ok, in some cases, a lot) of elbow grease, could be perfectly nice in someone's house.

The only caveat to "shopping" is to try and beat the rain.  That cool leather settee may have gone through the downpour earlier.  How does it smell?

I'm not being superior - I've had my fun with my first Inorganics.  Rowan and I found a box of moldy garden gnomes.  We are going to clean them up and paint them this summer, but in the mean time, they're cozily standing guard in our little garden.  I also found some awesome pukeko statues with merely some paint chipped off of the beak.  Someone was putting out a children's easel with a blackboard on one side and a whiteboard on the other.  Rowan is in heaven playing teacher and is waiting for a live student.  The rest of us are a bit too scared to join her class, so she has to be content with teaching her dolls and bears.

Which leads me to my home acquisition.  Along with the easel, I found a little wooden dollhouse.  It had some heinous flooring, but Rowan and I have ripped it out and we plan to renovate it over the summer holidays, doing new flooring, some roof shingles, and interiors.  We're going to go slow and make it our dream home. 



Before picture. 
Cat is possible tenant. 
Would decorate with lizard tails
and headless birds.
 

I've had a lot of fun with Rowan, scathingly saying things like, "Winnie the Pooh flooring?  What were they THINKING?"  and she joins in with, "Stickers on the wall?  Ugh!  So babyish!"  Yeah, nice decorating scheme!

So, if you're planning on moving to Auckland, do so a week or two before Inorganics.  With some hard work, you could furnish quite a bit of your house on the cheap.

Word to the wise though; don't leave any of your stuff in your front yard, unless you're willing to sacrifice it to the shoppers!

You know that it would be untrue, you know that I would be a liar

When you live in an uninsulated house, you get really excited about fireplaces in the wintertime.

In the summer, the fireplace stood like a mafioso, quietly lurking against the wall, reminding us of the possibilities to come.  A squat mafioso with a really long neck.

We got the chimney swept, which was totally awesome, even though it wasn't Dick Van Dyke after all.  He was a rangy kiwi guy, with few words to spare but lots of admiration for our fireplace.  "She's a good 'un," he said.

Now the interesting part begins.  How to light a fire!

Secretly I pretend I'm Daisy from Downton Abbey, before she gets promoted to kitchen assistant (or whatever).  Yes, I'm crazy.  I sweep last night's ashes through the grate.  Hands a touch sooty.

Squirrel up some newspaper and place it in the grate.  Think about all the fires I've to light before The Family comes down for their breakfa- no wait.  No, just this fire.

Make a little teepee of kindling sticks.  Light the newspaper.

Dammit, something is wrong with this newspaper.  It is taking forever to light!  What the. . .

Ok, newspaper finally lit.  Yahoo!  Blazing now!  Kindling is. . . standing like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednigo.  Totally not lit.  Newspaper blazes out.  Kindling barely singed.

Take out kindling.  Grab more newspaper.  Hands now extremely sooty.  Squirrel more newspaper.  Squirrel an entire dang section of the Auckland Herald and make a huge tower of newspaper.  Place Shadrach, Mesach and Abednigo back on top of the newspaper.  Light that stuff everywhere.

Repeat a few more times.  Curse a bit.  Push that strand of hair out of my eyes.  Fire lightning no longer fun.  I'm not a maidservant, I am a grown woman with a university degree who apparently has no luck with a fire.  How to have fire safety in your house? Have me live there.  (but not cook; but that's a story for another time)

FINALLY get it started.  Gently place some broken up pieces of hot log, and place tenderly on kindling.

Get a healthy shovelful of coal.  Ask the kids what the hell they're staring at.  Place coal atop flames.  Say a few prayers, ask forgiveness for the huge spate of language from earlier.

Get a big fat log out, roll it gently on the glowing coals.

Sit back and sigh.  It's done!  If I were Daisy, I'd tell the Granthams to go . . . um, light their own fires.  And then get fired myself.  No reference either, which back then TOTALLY sucked.  Anyway.

Once that fire is lit with the flames dancing merrily, notice the room has gotten 5 degrees warmer.  Yahoo!  Convince myself that Centigrade degrees are way warmer than Fahrenheit degrees so I win.

Go wash the soot off my hands, face, front of my blouse, ear. . . you get the picture.

Eat it, pal!

There are lots of things I love about New Zealand life, but there are also lots of things about Arizona that I miss.  One thing that has been an adjustment is eating out. 

Our eating out has become much less frequent which is definitely good.  We usually eat out only once or twice - Friday night is our dinner out and we might grab lunch from one of the many bakeries around in the weekend, depending on how busy we are (or really, how lazy we are).

It is easy to cook tasty, home cooked meals with the wealth of healthy, fresh produce, freshly made bakery items that don't have preservatives and artificial crap included and an array of proteins from surf and turf.  And it is lovely until you get to the day when you're ready to shout, "Please!  I want to eat something made in a kitchen outside of this house where someone else has to do the damn dishes!"

Eating out is really expensive in New Zealand unless you are purchasing fast food, fish n' chips or bakery items like sausage rolls.  A girl can only take so many sausage rolls before becoming willing  to trade her virtue for some decent tacos.

Don't worry, Mom, I would never trade my virtue for tacos in New Zealand.  I mean, you haven't tried the tacos.  Definintely not worth it.

Here are some of the foods I miss:

Claussen pickles
Mexican food
A Chicago dog
My mom's chicken piccata and pasta primavera
Mexican food
Pizza that doesn't come from a worldwide pizza chain, with a puffy, chewy crust
Crawfish etouffe from Baby Kay's Cajun Kitchen
Mexican food
The mediterranean platter from Pita Jungle
Chik-fil-A (I apologize, sincerely)
Mexican food
and Mexican food.

Seth, meanwhile, dreams of Costco pizza and Someburros.

Quality Time

Now that we've gotten into a routine, I find that I get a lot of really awesome one-on-one time with my kids.  Each are in different sports and sometimes those games conflict. 

Typically when I'm with the kids, they are arguing - the typical stuff.  One of them is on another's side, one said that she hates the other (usually it is Rowan doing the hating), one of them looked at the other the wrong way, nefarious schemes to hide a new toy when we return home, something notable to be seen is not viewable from someone's own personal window, etc.

However, the world opens up when I'm on my own with one of the kids.  Rowan loves to accompany me to the farmers' market and to the shopping center.  In fact, she has made it a strict rule that only she is allowed to go to the farmers' market with me.  No boys allowed.  I think she likes it because I let her get something when we see the Hello Kitty lady.  She's a random lady that imports Hello Kitty fabric from Japan and makes skirts, dresses and purses from it.  She also sells handmade, crocheted Hello Kitty dolls.  Pretty much the only reason to visit a farmers' market. But I digress.

Rowan will chat with me for the duration of our trip.  She could just run a monologue; our times together are mostly her singing me songs from school, telling me the proper way to say things, telling me about what happens at school, with her friends, etc.  I thoroughly enjoy her insights.  She usually sings the New Zealand national anthem in Maori and English at some point.

Seth has deep questions and opinions to discuss.  On Saturday on our way to his rugby game, we talked about skeletons, nuclear bombs, why some countries hate other countries, and where kidneys are located in our bodies.  He was surprised that his kidneys are not located "down by [his] penis."  Always thinking, that guy!  Actually, thats where I would have thought they were, too, at his age.  Not by his, but mine. 

No, wait, that came out all wrong.

Accent Grave

I've been wondering how long it will take for some of our family members to develop accents.  Gary is constantly told he sounds exactly like an American at work, and also by our nephew.

Seth is pretty staunch.  I don't think he will ever sway from his generic American drawl. 

However, Rowan is marching down the road towards Kiwi lingo.  I think her first decision to do so was when they were reading a story in class. I happened to be there that day.  It was a clue story, so the teacher read, "I'm fast, I have black and white stripes, I am a. . ." and Rowan shouted first before any of her classmates, "ZEEbra!" The other classmates shouted, "ZEHbra!" 

Her face went beet red and she looked around at me in horror.  I had been teaching her incorrect pronunciation her whole life!  I was in for it when I got home.

Here are her adaptations:

1.  Mum - switching interchangeably between Mum and Mom (Seth told me adamantly that he will call me Mom forever.  Done.)
2.  Again - she pronounces it very carefully as "agayne"
3.  Tomato - it's toMAHto, not toMAYto
4.  Banana - baNAWna not baNAHna
5. Together - dropping the "r," as in "Mum, can Cara and I walk home togethah?"

It's pretty cute.  She also likes to correct our pronunciation.  She still sounds really American but with enough perserverance, study and hard work (which I think she's trying) she will sound Kiwi through and through - I give it around a year.

As it turns out, I have an accent - a Canadian one.  Everyone thinks I'm from Canada, and when I tell them I'm from America, they start chatting about guns. 

Murders and Confessions

We recenly had a new roommate chilling with us.  She was beautiful, with high cheekbones, a heart shaped face, and large expressive eyes.  A pair of antenna on her like you've never seen before.

Her name was Beatrix.  She spent a lot of time in the bathroom, then moved to the kitchen for awhile, reducing the moth population significantly.  Then she decided to check out the dining room for a little action.

There she met her maker.  A member of her own household. A sociopath who played with her a bit before he bit her beautifully formed head off and chowed down on her body like he hadn't eaten in a week.

That's right, we've got a cat.

The confession is mostly mine.  In a moment of loneliness on Valentine's day, I adopted this little gray kitten who had been rescued by a policeman from a park.  When he was brought to the vet's office his eyes were crusted shut.  The vet nursed him back to health and I couldn't resist him when I saw him.

The kids have named him Rigby. I imagine that he subsisted on wetas and people's leftover takeaways from rubbish bins (like my lingo?), because he will eat anything at all if you're willing to share.  His favorites are butter cookies with jam in the middle and hummus. 

He likes to snuggle and his favorite place to munch on a freshly caught, crunchy cockroach is between me and Gary at 2 AM. 

When I hunkered down to take a lovely photo of Beatrix (destined to be her last) I didn't know he was following me until I saw him pounce. At first I tried to rescue her but in the end, nature won out. 

He doesn't even show remorse.

The Mystery of the Poo

The other day I opened one of the closets in the kids room.  "Something in that laundry basket smells rank," said my husband.

Our washing machine was on the fritz last week, so I figured it was some laundry that we'd missed taking to the laundry place.

Have I ever mentioned that I love laundry service? All your clothes washed and meticulously folded for $30.  That's for about 4 loads of laundry.  I love it.  I wish I could use it all the time.  I might have to do a cost analysis on doing laundry ourselves vs. sending it to a laundry service. 

But I digress.  You want to know about the mystery of the poo.

Investigating the smell in the closet, there was definintely some sort of nasty stench.  A nasty, earthy, rank pong.  Sherlock Mom immediately turned to Seth.  "Did you. . . have an accident and put the clothes in the basket?"

Hey, accidents happen.  We all have had accidents in our lifetimes!

"No, I didn't!  Gee, mom, why would you ACCUSE me of that!" he said belligerently.  After many exchanges reassuring immunity from prosecution and reiterations of innocence, we took the basket out of the room.

The fug remained.

Gary and I started turning his shoes over to inspect the soles.  Now, as far as I can tell, dog lovers are pretty diligent about cleaning up after their pets.  But you never know what happened.  There have been reported sightings of a hedgehog in our backyard.  Something could have been stepped in and then put in the closet unknowingly. 

"Ummmm, here's the source," said Gary.  He pointed to a pair of shoes in Seth's closet.  Sitting atop his flashy blue and orange Adidas was a fat, multicolored poo.

We sat in shock, staring at this unwelcome addition.  What the?  After cathartic discussion and Gary's toxic waste cleanup, we've come to two hypotheses.

1.  Cat

Our house has two cat doors.  Twice we've had visits from neighborhood cats.  Once I was sitting on the sofa and an orange and white tabby walked through the hallway.  Suddenly, he stopped in the doorway and stared at me, outraged that I had the audacity to be there.  He turned and left promptly.

Another time, I woke up at 3 AM, and looked at our open bedroom door.  Just then, a big black and white tuxedo cat streaked past the door on the way outside.

It is plausible that a cat somehow got into Seth's closet and had a potty break, but I tend to doubt it.  Not so much that I doubt a cat would do that.  I've known some psychotic cats in my life who would be quite capable of pooping in some random closet.  No, the reason I doubt it is that I've had cats for most of my life and the size and shape of that turd didn't correspond to a typical cat poo.

I'm actually not proud to have that kind of knowledge.

Additionally, I keep all the closet doors closed.  I can't stand a closet door or drawer left ajar.  It is one of my pet peeves.  That leads me to my second group of suspects.

2.  Child

Children are funny.  They're quirky.  They like to play practical jokes.  Sometimes, dare I say it - they are inappropriate. 

My kids are friends with a couple of kids who are neighbors.  Sometimes they get into fights.  Usually the fights take the form of kicking someone in the mouth and vowing to never play with them again. 

Is it possible that a child pooped in my son's closet, thinking it was the sweetest, funniest kind of revenge?  I'm not ruling it out.  Please let it be known that I am not excusing my own children of this suspicion.  I'm nothing if not fair.  Both of my children have been known to pee in the backyard because she's busy playing and didn't feel like making the trek inside to the toilet.

Believe me, I'm not bragging about this.

The only person I've ruled out of the possibilities is Seth.  He would never poop on his own shoes, in his own closet.  There are not many certainties in this world, but that is one I would never doubt.

I know I'll never get to the bottom of this intrigue.  All I can do is hope that our closets remain poo-free in the future.