Life in New Zealand: year four!

The years, they whiz by like lightning now. It was just about exactly three years ago that we were in transit – arriving in New Zealand to start our strange bold new lives, 6000 miles away from my homeland. Three years now I've been living in New Zealand, and according to my wife who keeps track of all the legal stuff (I just sign forms now and again) I'll become a citizen soon enough. (That'll make six passports for the three of us!)

It is a bit tricky now from the comfort of our little Auckland home to summon up how unrooted and nomadic we were for a spell there, back in 2006 -- packed up our old life in Oregon, a little cross-American rambling before we left, and showing up in a damp and humid Auckland spring to start anew. We're "settled" now -- bought a house, got jobs, the boy started school this year, all the usual things that make up a living.

The US is never very far away in my mind and I sometimes find myself defending it to a few folks who unfortunately have a rather broad or stereotypical view of a nation as sprawling and yes, fundamentally good as I think America is -- I never thought moving to another country meant I suddenly gave up on the US. (Indeed if I had to list a pet peeve of living in New Zealand, I'd say "people bashing America for the heck of it" would be one of 'em, but I really don't try to be too thin skinned about it -- we bash Australia a lot worse down here.)

I've covered the ups and the downs of life in NZ now for the last few years, and while I'll always be a "foreigner" here, I feel a lot more clued in than I was the very first time I visited this antipodean land more than nine (!!!) years ago now. I always tell people I honestly don't know if we'll stay here "for good" -- is there such a thing? I've moved a lot, lived in several American states and ever since finishing high school it's rare I've stayed in the same place more than four-five years or so. But we are very glad to be here, here and now, and tomorrow, as they say, is another day.

Life in New Zealand: Year three!

...So this week marks two whole years since we packed our bags and made the big migration to New Zealand. I feel a lot more settled than we did after the first year; since last October we've bought a house, moved the rest of our stuff over from the U.S. and generally feel a lot more settled in for this here kiwi adventure, however long it lasts for. A lot of the smaller things that bugged me more notably at first bother me less -- the higher prices, the cultural differences, the occasional person's rather stereotypical impressions that all Americans are arrogant louts, etc. On the other hand, other things still get to me sometimes -- the general "smallness" of country can make you feel a bit claustrophobic. It's hard not to feel disconnected from the rest of the world sometimes. I still haven't really learned to care about rugby or cricket in this rather sports-obsessed place.

One thing I've told a lot of Americans when they ask me about New Zealand is that it's not perfect, which I know sounds kind of negative but it isn't really meant to be. There's this fantasyland Oz view of New Zealand out there which is good for us but also can lead to shattered expectations for many an immigrant from other countries expecting all the problems in their lives to magically disappear when they move to another land. Of course, nowhere on Earth is that perfect, really. New Zealand's got its problems; the crime situation especially among youth is a real worry for me, even if it might be a bit overblown in media coverage from reality. I don't think I'm being negative so much as I'm being a realist rather than an idealist when it comes to my adopted nation.

But there is a heck of a lot of beauty here, of course. Auckland is a nifty town, with the amenities of most big cities but nowhere near as crowded as say, Los Angeles; where you can drive pretty much no more than 30 minutes in any direction and be at a fantastic beach; where cultures from all over the world rub elbows (it's at least as diverse as San Francisco); where there's an endearing small-town feeling for a place of over a million people, a sense we're all in this together way down here on the southern edge of the world.

Being here in an election year for both New Zealand and the US has been quite fascinating, as I've blogged about frequently lately -- it really lays bare all the big and little differences between the way these two nations do things. I'm proud to have lived in both of 'em, and look forward to what year 3 brings. (The main challenge: Peter starting school! Urk!)

Are we done moving yet?

...Finally, for the first time in nearly three years, all our "stuff" is in one place again. While I was in California last month one of my tasks was to deal with the 40 or so boxes of assorted stuff (er, mostly books and comics, I admit) that had been sitting in my parents' garage since 2006. Shipping a big ol' container all the way to New Zealand is really expensive and it wasn't nearly enough to fill one anyway, but fortunately we found a very good company specializing in small loads that allowed us to ship a single pallet.

It all went very smoothly and actually came in under budget. The 41 boxes and one trunk that I dropped off in Sacramento, California just under a month ago, I picked up none the worse for wear at a freight warehouse in Auckland, New Zealand today. The boxes seemed to enjoy their ocean journey, and finally, finally, we feel like we're "settled" a bit -- we started shipping stuff to New Zealand and getting rid of our possessions way back in early 2006, and now is the first time "everything" is together again. It took a while, but we are officially moved to New Zealand in full!

I'm trying to be a bit less materialistic in my old age, but it is nice to have all my old familiar books and papers and so forth in one place again, and not go hunting for a particular thing and realize, "Oh yeah, that's in California." Stuff gives us a bit of security, after all.

I'm just not thinking about how we'll do it if we ever do move back to America sometime down the road... it'll be years away if that happens, anyhow. Excuse me, I've got stuff to unpack!

The great house-hunt update #1

...So things are looking quite optimistic on the house front for us. No, we haven't found our dream home yet, but perhaps more importantly, we have the money lined up to do that. We met our mortgage broker the other day and now have what's know as "pre-approved financing" for a decent amount – more than I'd imagined we could get when we started looking, but still within our budget so repayments don't kill us. Hurray, we can go into debt! We've also gone to 20-25 open houses in the past month or so, and have considerably refined our views from "we need a place to live" to "we'd like a 3-bedroom standalone house with a bit of yard space in a quiet area" and we're focusing quite closely on one area of Auckland now. So that's good.

As our broker (still feels funny talking about "our broker") said, "Now you just have to go out and find that house!" Which is the most complicated part of all, I guess... We've seen probably 4-5 places we could imagine living in, although none of them were totally perfect and none probably will be. But heck, the idea of being in our own place again by the start of 2008 isn't looking too far-fetched these days at all...

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
a tale of a fateful trip...

So today (or Thursday, depending on what time zone you're in) marks one year since we arrived in New Zealand, starting our so-called brand new lives!

We stumbled into Auckland a year ago laden down with overly burdened suitcases, knowing we had a place to stay with my in-laws but really, not much else. We weren't exactly huddled masses on Ellis Island, but it was still a jarring change from all we knew. But here we are – we're jobbed, day-cared and relatively settled, with the exception of having a nice little house truly of our own. Hopefully we'll get that nut cracked by year's end or so as signs are pretty positive on that front.

It's strange, though, to realize that it's been one year since I set foot on that American soil I spent most of my first 35 years on. I've lived in a "foreign country" for an entire year. The thing is, New Zealand doesn't feel entirely foreign to me. What with the language and British culture, it's not like living in Rio or Ulan Bator. Instead, it's rather like a kind of parallel universe to the American-centric one – many things are the same, some are similar, and some are just different enough to confuse you.

It's been interesting defining my identity as an American and my relationship to the US of A in this time. You definitely realize how low the current US political scene is held in view by pretty much everyone, particularly the British tabloid news services that are popular here. You do get a sense that Americans are viewed as a bit arrogant, a bit blundering and oblivious – a stereotype I try to do my best to dispel. I've met a couple kiwis that are real yobbos ("uncouth") too but I don't imagine they're all like this, and neither are all Americans loud, uncurious and insulated.

I do miss America, quite a lot, the generosity of spirit and casual kindnesses that aren't always transmitted to the broader world. I miss the landscapes, which are infinitely varied and the sense of sheer space that is missing in a sometimes-claustrophobic place like Auckland. There's a frontier poetry to America which sometimes gets obscured in the latest political screw-ups, but I do believe that the idea of America is very much alive and well, and worth being a part of. And of course I miss family and friends quite a lot. I can't rule out living there again one day.

But overall I'm very glad we did this, that I got to be the foreign one in this marriage for a while. We tried not to set goals when we moved here, knowing it might not work out (another couple we knew who moved here at the same time only lasted 9 months, after all). But now that we've got good jobs and are house-hunting away, I guess it's safe to say I'll be a kiwi for a while to come. Cheers mates!

Wherever you go, there you are

Six months, six months. It's been six months now since we pulled up stakes and left Oregon on the rambling journey that would eventually end us here in New Zealand. And yesterday, I got a letter in the mail approving me for NZ residency, which basically means I'm all but a citizen and don't get kicked out of the country next October. And free govt. health care! Hoo-hah! It wasn't really in doubt I'd be approved what with the kiwi wife and son but it could've been more difficult than it was.

Six months is a curious milestone – back before it all began, I'd tell myself that by "February or March" I'd be feeling normal again. Not so much. It's a far bigger shift than you'd think to give up much of your material possessions, quit your job and become a house-dad, move to another country and into your in-laws' house. Six months since I've worked - the longest gap since I was 16 or so!

We're optimistically planning the future -- which includes the far-out notion of sometime this year actually trying to buy a house of our own, which we'd kind of like to experience before we're 40. That would put some roots down, which is a pleasing notion when I haven't lived in the same place more than 4 1/2 years since I was 18. With the boy, now, we want to provide him some context and stability to grow up in.

None of this is particularly easy, idyllic as the idea of moving to New Zealand might sound and as much fun as much of it has been. There've been lingering bouts with unpredictable waves of depression on my part, times when I'm oddly nostalgic for everything about the past, not just my immediate last home, but all kinds of strange flashes of memory – the pines and rugged granite of my native Sierra Nevada; the dusty strip-mall laden outskirts of Modesto, Calif., where I briefly lived working for an extremely podunk newspaper; the red-brick towering dormitory of my freshman year at college in Mississippi, 11 floors of testosterone-filled male id run amok; my old buddy and roommate Kemble whom I've completely lost contact with the past couple years; the endless expanse of New Mexico highways which I've only driven through once. Nostalgic for things I did a year ago or twenty. Like a never-ending highlights reel.

I don't know what this never-ending flashback-a-rama means, whether it's just my beleaguered brain trying to catalog everything that happens to a person and make some sense of it. I tell myself (and indeed have been told by a couple people) that it's silly to be depressed sometimes about moving to New Zealand and getting to hang out with my 3-year-old son all day and I'm a whiny bastard. But if we could control what happens in our heads life would be perfect, wouldn't it?

LIFE: We have landed

AUCKLAND, New Zealand – ...And here we are. After our third (!) 13-hour flight of the year, we showed up in Auckland bleary and dazed Wednesday morning our time, somehow stuffing 12 bags of luggage (approximately 450 lbs.) into a friend's Subaru, collapsing into a heap at our new home for now, the apartment on the back of my in-laws' house.

It'll take a while for it to kick in that we're not on another mere vacation down here - that I actually have to get out and have a life here, that we soon need a car, jobs and a place of our own in no particular order.

But I ate fish and chips for dinner the other night, watched kids practicing cricket in a city park yesterday, and hear the sound of unfamiliar birds in the morning and see the panorama of greenery and colorful spring flowers everywhere. So it's all good, and as they say here, "no worries, mate!" And we're off!

LIFE: Destination: New Zealand

vag‧a‧bond  /ˈvag-uh-bond/
–adjective
1. wandering from place to place without any settled home; nomadic: a vagabond tribe.
2. leading an unsettled or carefree life.
3. disreputable; worthless; shiftless.
4. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a vagabond: vagabond habits.
5. having an uncertain or irregular course or direction: a vagabond voyage.

Yeah, I've been feeling that way... well, for months now, really. Feels like we've been moving to New Zealand for years now. And really, we have, since we decided way back in August 2005 that this was what we wanted to do next. Been shipping our stuff since January; cleared out our house in July, moved out in August. Tomorrow, finally, we're off, flying out of San Francisco into the abyss. It's been a long time coming... Nearly seven weeks since we pulled out of Oregon, I quit my job and we started down the long road. Lots of time to freak out.

Still, I'm glad I didn't decide to quit work Friday and fly to New Zealand on a Monday, allowing for this relaxed time to say goodbye to my homeland for a while. The last two months or so have been great - we had our America MegaTrek, saw many sweeping vistas and epic sights, I got to spend a ton more time with Peter than I did when I was working, and was able to catch up with many an old friend. It's been a fine interlude, but real life is lurking in the sidelines as our savings account shrinks and we realize that yes, one of us really should start working again soon. New Zealand will be an excellent transformative experience for us, and great to be closer to family there, but it also really means that daily life gets back in gear after weeks of being ... well, vagabonds. If not vagrants.

What happens next, I really don't know. We rely on the kindness of my in-laws to start (much like we've relied on the kindness of my parents as home base since early September). Theoretically, we'll find new jobs and eventually get our own place and hop on the great merry-go-round of life again, except this time I'll be deep in the antipodes and after nearly 9 years I'll be the one with the foreign accent in this marriage.

The rest is unknown --- and while it's scary as hell (there's been many a sleepless night lately), it's also kind of invigorating. I'm not sure what form this blog will take in New Zealand, but I hope to keep posting something, even if it's just a bewildered cranky American expatriate's take on a strange new world.

Thanks for reading and I'll see you in the next hemisphere.

LIFE: Ode to a Subaru

LIFE: Ode to a Subaru

We sold our car today, we did,
For a decent price, not underbid.
Bought her brand new in '99,
And 94 thousand miles on, still pretty fine.
Took her from Mexico to Canada and more,
Not to mention many trips to the grocery store.
Other than oil changes and checkups frequent,
The car caused no problems for us, not even a dent.
I'll miss my faithful Subaru as we fly south, depleted,
Guess we'll get a new car there — hope we don't get cheated.

... Fare thee well, brave chariot! Sad to leave you behind, but glad to get this whole car-selling process behind us. And I swear I won't put any more bad poetry on here. Yeesh.

Speaking of writing, a reminder to any procrastinators out there that my own little tome, Spatula Forum: Greatest Hits 1994-2004, is still available to purchase over at Lulu.com. Two hundred-plus pages of newspaper column goodness from my former career, all in a glorious easy-to-read format. It'll amuse, bemuse and confuse. It'll do your dishes and wax your car! (If you have one)

All this for a mere $12 plus shipping (remember, when you order be sure to look closely at shipping options, for some reason Lulu defaults to the most expensive one but you can change it easily to the cheaper shipping). Order now, I won't keep this in print forever. And I need to buy a new car!

LIFE: If you're going to San Francisco...

LIFE: If you're going to San Francisco...

...So, befitting our second-to-last weekend in America, we hightailed it down to scenic San Francisco this weekend to visit my old high school buddy John and his wife. As always, it was excellent to visit the City, which we used to head to all the time when we lived in California but have barely been to in the last five years since we had moved to Oregon. We hit the Exploratorium, SF's great interactive science museum where Peter was specifically encouraged to push as many buttons as possible, ate lunch in Chinatown, shopped for books in North Beach's City Lights Books, and saw the Golden Gate Bridge shrouded in fog, so I figure we satisfied our touristy needs. I love San Francisco, although I could never imagine living there (too pricey).

It was most excellent to catch up with my old pal John, whom I haven't seen much of the past 5 years other than occasional meetings on holidays. He's a super-successful San Francisco lawyer now (I mean, they can afford to have a HOUSE in the City!) and it's great to see him doing well.

I've been in this weird time-warp lately, ever since we left Oregon last month. I've had the good fortune to catch up with several friends from my high school days, some on our cross-country trek and meeting up with others up here in Nevada City. The Nevada Union class of 1990 seems a terribly long time ago now (close to 20 years, egad!), but somehow I've managed to keep up with the people who mattered most to me. We're grayer-haired, larger or balding or something, but mostly doing OK. I even had the surreal but truly terrific experience of seeing my old high school girlfriend and her family... I hadn't seen her in 16 years! It's excellent to find that you still have some commonalities and hints of friendship with people from so long ago in your life, that you haven't totally grown apart despite the years, even if you don't hang out every day.

I keep feeling a bit like I'm still in high school myself - unemployed, living with my parents at the moment, about to head off on a faraway odyssey... although this time, it's not college, it's emigration.

So I guess I'm getting ready to start the "new chapter" when we fly out to New Zealand a week from today, saying farewells to people I might not see for a very long time indeed. This week the final frenzied push begins. We're trying to sell the spunky Subaru before we go (cheap!), as well as some last-minute box shipping, freaking out, bill-paying and of course truly monumental packing for the plane flight (we're not only taking our full allotment of 6 suitcases and 3 carry-on bags, we're going to try to bring a few excess bags as well).

Of course, if it all goes badly in New Zealand, we can always come back to San Francisco, where it turns out Toddler Peter Dirga actually owns a restaurant there – I know, where does a 2 1/2-year-old find the time, I ask you?

LIFE: Two weeks! TWO WEEKS!!

...Yeah, we fly out two weeks from today. Suddenly everything's going at light speed. To quote "Almost Famous," "It's all happening!" I suppose we're actually in a kind of zen calm right now, but it's underlaid by general freaking out. We've "done" most of what we're supposed to do, all our paperwork is in order, and now we're just sorting out loose ends (like the $&*! idiots at our Roseburg phone company who haven't canceled our account yet despite being told TWICE in AUGUST to do so and who sent us a $70 bill the other day). We still have to sell the car but can't really do that until next week. Mostly spending quality time with family and friends and soaking up the Northern California pines and dust and granite so it will last me a few years.

One symptom of my impending leaving the country is that I keep buying stuff because it's cheaper over here than it will be there. Which of course gives us more stuff to deal with getting over there. But I had to get the new "Awake In The Dark: The Best Of Roger Ebert", because Ebert is (in my book) the finest and yet most oddly underrated movie critic working these days and it's a swell compendium of his work. And of course there's a new box set of Tom Waits work coming out real soon which I crave with a junkie's longing.

And oh jeez, why is it that Haruki Murakami, Richard Ford and Bill Bryson ALL have to have brand new books coming out right about now? Sigh. I know my frantic must-get-this-before-we-go syndrome is just one way of dealing with the fact I'll soon be 6,000 miles from the beating heart of pop culture's shores, but geez, books and CDs are expensive in New Zealand. Ah well. If you love me, send Amazon credit. Two weeks, two weeks...

LIFE: Ore-going, Ore-gone

LIFE: Ore-going, Ore-gone

...So here we are, officially jobless and homeless for the next couple months. Goodbye Oregon, hello strangeness. We're all in a sort of gentle state of shock I think, down here now at my parents' house in my childhood hometown of Nevada City, California. Everything old is new again. We're here for a week or so before we depart on our previously mentioned America Mega-Trek on the 15th.

Leaving Roseburg was tough, though. In almost five years a place becomes familiar, and I realized as we cleared out our funky little house that it was the longest I've lived in one home since high school. "Robu" as us snooty media types called it was a quirky town, half redneck, half natural beauty galore, and pleasantly mellow. We've given up so very much of our everyday lives these last few months that it's no wonder we're dazed - all our furniture, a lot of books, clothes, CDs, etc., a nice job and a home. We're pared down to the essentials, nearly, even if there is a disturbingly large mountain of boxes here to store in my folks' garage that has to be dealt with someday, and another remarkably mound of things we're actually going to try to take to New Zealand next month.

And yet the single hardest moment of all this stripping away had to be getting rid of my fine little Kudzu cat Tuesday night, when we dropped her off with my friend (and master golfer) Christian and his wife Mary. I know Kudzu didn't know what was going on, and I can't anthropomorphize that she'll miss me much as I will her, but she was my cat for nearly 12 years, through thick and thin.

I got her mere weeks after I finished college in Mississippi, having just started my first "real" job. That scrawny runt of a shelter cat became my companion through many oddball moves and job changes, moving with me from Mississippi to California to Oregon. She was a comforting warm ball in my bed in winters and probably gave me the first inklings of true adult responsibility when I took her on at age 23 - she was a life I was in control of, or that controlled me, and paved the way for wives and kids and all the rest that comes to us. There were times when I felt she was the best friend I had in the world. Giving her up is almost like her dying, because with her at nearly 12 years old I know chances are slim I'll ever get to see her again. I hate having to leave her, but I know it's for the best. Goodbye, old pal, and thanks again Chris for taking her on.

OK, not to get all maudlin or anything... Anyway. Ah, but it surely would ease the angst if some of you would kindly consider buying my book, Spatula Forum: Greatest Hits 1994-2004. Not that I planned on making a million, but sales are a bit "sluggish," as they say, and your $15 or so for 200+ pages of writing goodness could be considered a charitable contribution to the Get Nik Out of America Fund. It's tax-deductible. Would I lie to you?

LIFE: Adios, News-Review

LIFE: Adios, News-Review

So today's my last day at work as we begin the long and winding journey that takes us to New Zealand. It's a weird feeling – I've been working here 4 1/2 years, far longer than I've ever worked at one newspaper before. I didn't quite think I'd be here nearly 5 years when we drove up in March 2002 — I was just glad to flee the snow-bound hills of Lake Tahoe, which were utterly gorgeous but crammed with ice half the year, and tourists the other half, and impossibly expensive to live in. Plus, I really had gotten tired of political head games with my then-bosses.

So anyway, Roseburg looked nice, and I'd always wanted to live in Oregon. The paper was great, still part of the same company but quite autonomous, and a six-day daily as opposed to the mostly weekly papers I'd worked at up till then. I've learned a hell of a lot here, far more than I did at previous jobs. It's mostly been a great experience, some ups and downs, but I leave it with genuine regret rather than "Oh my god I can't wait to get out of here" feelings. Yeah, I've been ready to go for a year or so, but that's mostly because I'm an antsy restless personality. (Or to quote The Replacements, "Look me in the eye / and tell me that I'm satisfied.")

I figure I've been here for about 1,500 or so editions of The News-Review, edited countless stories, written 100 or so in-depth feature stories, about 350 movie, music and book reviews, a hundred or two editorials, won a dozen or so ONPA (Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association) awards and watched the newsroom staff roll over a couple times as it tends to do at small papers. I'm ready to move on. Thanks to everyone I've worked with here for making it a fun ride for nearly 5 years.

Giving up your job willingly is always an odd sensation, like diving into the deep end without a rope. I did this once before, in 1997 when I migrated from Mississippi to California without a plan other than "find a job," and I gave up a pretty fun job then too just to avoid staleness. Of course, then I didn't have a kid, wife etc. So there's a certain amount of crazy fear with doing this, of realizing we won't have a steady paycheck till November or December at earliest. But it's cool – we've got savings, and are ready to have adventures. God knows I don't want to be one of those people that spend 20, 30, 40 years at the same job at the same desk. Better to be a little uncertain and have stories worth telling, I figure.

We're going offline as we wrap up our preparations to move back down to California, so no blogging for the next week or so. If you want your fix, hey, buy my book!!

ETC.: I am in your extended network

ETC.: I am in your extended network

Everything must go! We're giving away and selling possessions at a record pace – the few things we held on to post-yard sale are being lined up and sold to the highest bidder. We're holding on to the bed, TV, etc. till closer to our departure Labor Day weekend, but trying to arrange willing buyers for them now. So far so good, except for the bed we paid $700 for a few years back that we're trying to get a somewhat decent price for. And good friend Christian and his kind wife Mary agreed to take our poor old Kudzu cat a while back, hurray. Everything is starting to fall into place. If we can just avoid more crises then we will survive it. (The MacBook is flying out to Apple to be repaired Monday, it looks like. At least the battery hasn't exploded.) (Edit: And the bed sold this morning. Hoo-ha!)

ITEM! In between it all, I find MySpace is a funny place. I've been dabbling over there for a month or so now, having finally been sucked into it by some friends online. I've rediscovered some old friends I haven't heard from in years, which is nice, and I particularly like all the bands you can link up to and hear tracks from on there. I do feel vaguely like an old fogey meddling in a land of teenagers, but I'm not really taking it all that seriously.

One thing that's funny on there is all the fakers – people who claim to be famous people but really aren't. It's kind of hard to tell who's "real" on there anyway – I got suckered by an apparent Bruce Campbell faker who got booted from the site. Damn you, Fake Bruce! Also amusing is the way some people think the "real" Bob Dylan actually added them to his page, rather than say, one of his PR flaks or a record company rep. I don't think Bob Dylan's actually reading your MySpace page and deeming you worthy of being his bestest "Friend," jimsparklehorse312. But I guess that illusion of bonding is part of what makes MySpace so damned successful, ain't it?

(Besides, there's the voyeuristic fun of watching people make idiots of themselves in stuff like the MySpace Stupid Haircut awards. Puts my thinning hair woes in perspective.)

ITEM! Hey, hats off to Lacey, who in my unstoppable wisdom I decided won my Worst Band Name contest. There's something about I Got Mono that just speaks to me as a wretched band name. She wins that shiny new Burn To Shine 3 DVD and it's not at all because she works with me. Well, for a few more days, anyway.

LIFE: Assume the fetal position, hyperventilate

LIFE: Assume the fetal position, hyperventilate

The Lord is testing us, we figure. Pile it on! So we're frantically trying to pack up the house and what's left of it in our final 2 1/2 weeks in Oregon. What to store, what to try and cram in the suitcases, what to try to ship to New Zealand? Trying to clean up the house. Discovering half the spare bedroom in our house is suffering severe water damage because of the crap insulation and is about to rot away (fortunately, our landlord's problem, not ours). Being told the car needs a 90,000-mile checkup and having the auto shop try to gouge an unneeded $500 repairs out of me as well.

But heck, we need a little more disruption in our lives. So yesterday Peter fell off a chair in our Backyard of Death and hit his head on the concrete, resulting in his first official Bleeding Head Wound. It wasn't pretty and mighty scary for a couple minutes, but my parents have warned me about not freaking out at the first head wound (for my brother and I, these were almost daily occurrences). We called everyone we knew with kids for advice and applied pressure to the head. Peter was back to normal in five minutes' time except for complaining, "I hurt my head." He spent the rest of the day on ice cream and watching his beloved "Dora the Explorer" and "Bob the Builder" videos and appears on the way to recovery. The wound was just shy of needing stitches, thank the Lord. If it were any longer than a half-inch or so it would've been Peter's first trip to the Urgent Care Clinic – a trek that, with our bouncing lad's hyperactivity, I'm sure lurks in the not-so distant future.

And THEN, then, as if bleeding toddlers and cross-Pacific migration anxiety weren't enough, our brand spanking new MacBook computer began acting up this weekend, spontaneously shutting down for no apparent reasons several times a day. Apparently, I discover through Mr. Google, this is a kinda widespread problem. Sonofabitch. We're covered under warranty and all, so we should be able to get Apple to fix it or replace it, but really, really, we didn't need to deal with this as well.

If anybody needs me, I'll be curled up in a ball somewhere, whimpering quietly.

LIFE: Mega-America Trek

LIFE: Mega-America Trek

Finishing up my late-night Saturday shift at the paper, and I've just written what might be one of the more surreal headlines of my life: "Llamas die in blaze."

…Anyway, that's neither here nor there. So anyway, in all my talking about the big move to New Zealand in October, leaving Oregon in September, quitting my job, et cetera and so forth, I've never mentioned anything about our mega-America trek! Road trip! For how can an American lad leave his motherland after nearly 35 years without saying farewell to the amber waves of green and so forth? Anyway, visions I had of using our 6-7 weeks between leaving Oregon and leaving America for a grand, sweeping trip from sea to shining sea have had to be scaled back some. For one thing, it's expensive when we'll be making no income till November at the earliest, and for another, have you tried driving thousands and thousands of miles with a toddler in the car?

So my thoughts of visiting New Orleans, old friends in Texas and Mississippi have been sadly abandoned. Instead, we're still taking a pretty decent trip at the end of September, from my parents' house in Northern California (where we'll decamp to after leaving Oregon) down to visit friends in Los Angeles, then we're going to take a leisurely drive through Southern Arizona and then New Mexico. We'll then go up through New Mexico and into Colorado, visiting some more friends in the Denver area, and then zip across the Rockies through arid Utah and Nevada home (maybe stopping in Wyoming too). It's still a pretty damned ambitious trip to take but I'm really hoping we can pull it off, hopefully without leaving Peter in a rest stop somewhere. We're still in the planning stages... Any suggestions for sights to see in Southern Arizona or New Mexico would be appreciated! We spent our honeymoon in the Sedona/Grand Canyon area, but I've never been further south and only once briefly passed through New Mexico.

There's nothing at all like the Southwest in New Zealand, of course, and there's something about the wide-open road and highways of America that I'll really miss. NZ is only about the size of Oregon, and is rarely more than 100 miles across at any one point. You can pretty much always see the ocean. Which is great, but at the same time, I might get to feeling claustrophobic sometimes. One of the beauties of America is that you can get in the car and just drive, from Portland to Kansas if you wished, or Anchorage to Orlando. It's a big old world out there, and I want us to feel the highway wind on our brows a bit before we trade it for another one.

...Still alive, just in case anyone was wondering, but the maelstrom of life has been quite busy. Just about eight weeks now until we leave Oregon and we're rapidly picking up speed, moving downhill toward unknown territory... Now that we're nearing August, the real craziness begins.

Big huge yard sale Saturday was a smashing success, sold close to everything we had out there and no kooks or wackjobs to speak of other than the usual. We made money galore and then celebrated yesterday at the newspaper's staff picnic which I somehow ended up on the organizing committee for this year. Peter ran around being cute and singing his latest, the "A-B-C" song, to anyone who asked. So it's been busy. Tossing and turning in the sweaty summer nights, too much buzzing around the brain to be able to sleep decently... Coffee, coffee, where the hell's my coffee?

Seriously, doesn't anyone want our cat?

LIFE: T-minus 6 Months

LIFE: T-minus 6 Months

Well, it's official. We bought our tickets today for a one-way trip to New Zealand exactly 6 months from yesterday; we leave the American shores for good (?) Oct. 23. So unless we want to punt a couple thousand in plane tickets, this pretty much makes it graven in stone that we're on the way. You can't actually hear the freaking out but it's going on; Avril has already moved from scared to excited although I'm dwelling more on denial at the moment. You get sucked into the day-to-day drudgery of things that you kind of forget that "everything will change" quite soon now... and there's a million and one things to do between now and October. We must have the mother of all yard sales. A few dozen friends I'd like to visit. A cat to find a home for (anybody?). Must learn proper use of "bloke" and "mate." Oh, and at some point must really think about getting a job.

And on Wednesday, I have to get fingerprinted by 'the man' as part of the FBI Records Check I need to complete at part of my visa approval program, to make sure I don't have any violent or dissident history in my past. Only two speeding tickets between 1990-2006 that I can recall; they don't count it as murder if they can't find the bodies after all. Thankfully, Avril has been the one navigating the lion's share of bureaucracy and immigration forms I'll have to navigate as I wend my way toward (eventually) dual citizenship, which Avril and P already have. I am a man of the world!

LIFE: Countdown, 6 Months...

LIFE: Countdown, 6 Months...

...So I've been in the throes of a slightly mild freakout, if that's the right word for it, these last few weeks since we returned from New Zealand, and as we get ready to move there for good in just (urk!) six months' time or so. There's a sense of disconnect being back here in Oregon. I feel antsy, like Peter bouncing in his crib. It's not that I'm not looking forward to the Great Migration – but the enormity of it all is inching beastlike into my brain and it's simply hard to relax sometimes. There is much involved with packing up everything you own and either selling it, storing it or moving to the other side of the world with it somehow. From the purely physical to the emotional to the "spiritual" for lack of a better term, the doubts and worries flutter in some days.

It all feels oddly like the last few months of high school, or my final semester in college – the sense you're ABOUT to do something grand and complicated and exhausting, but it's not quite time to do it yet. You spend about half the time being freaked out about the future and the other half nostalgic for a past you haven't left yet.

I will miss the idea of being able to drive five days and still being in America (even if I don't exactly do that every day), petting my cat (anybody want a cat?), seeing my parents and brother more than every couple years, mowing our lawn, reading The Oregonian A&E section on Fridays, cheap bookstores and comics and music, and about a zillion other things. NZ is wonderful but I may feel claustrophobic sometimes, I fear.

Good thing is there's lots of others doing this. Curiously enough, some friends of ours who live in a town just up the road are also moving to NZ this fall – they're like our mirror image, Amy's a Kiwi, husband Brian is American, and their three kids, and they're finally doing this big adventure themselves in September. They've kindly offered us to poach a bit of space in their shipping container as they've got a lot more than we do to get over there. Hard to imagine there's two families in the same county having the same story right now! Or take this family, who went over from Seattle to NZ with Small Family in Six Suitcases as the title of their blog says. Amazing! And we thought we were minimalists!

There's plenty of angst and drama ahead in the coming six months, I know... We'll deal with it, and there's far worse fates than moving to New Zealand. I've always been of two minds; part of me loves the traveling and changing jobs every few years and having lived in Oregon and Nevada and Mississippi and California and New York and so forth, and part of me is perfectly happy to sit in my comfortable chair with my comfortable cat and comfortable books and the view of the hills and trees outside our living room, rather than plunge into unknown territory again... But then again, you don't get the stories without doing the adventures, do you?

But hey! Friday is my second blog-iversary! Yes, two entire years of blathering without end. Return here for pithy insight and valuable prizes tomorrow!