Things that I have been doing other than blogging:

• Finally finishing the 2-year project of painting pretty much every room in our house by painstakingly turning the mottled jaundice yellow Formica of our master bathroom into a shining cheerful blue and stripping the bubbling ceiling and repainting it.

• Listening to much nifty music from The 13th Floor Elevators and Roky Erickson, The Eels and Big Star.

• Having a cosmos-shattering blog crossover by meeting fellow Auckland blogger, comics fan and journalist Bob of the Tearoom of Despair, whose passionate comics posts are well worth reading.

• Watching Kenneth Branagh give a nifty smouldering performance in the dark and intense Swedish-set BBC detective series "Wallander."

• Waiting in line in hopes I get tickets for the Pavement reunion show right here in Auckland.

• Bought a new toaster after the old one reached the end of its 2 1/2 year lifespan. They sure know how to make things last these days, don't they?

• Listening to the alternating bouts of intense rain and intense sun that make an Auckland spring.

• Peter asked a girl in his class to marry him. In writing. Because he loves her. How did it go? "She said she'd play with me but only if I DON'T love her."

I remember thinking, I can't wait to own a home

...So the great Bathroom Disaster of 2008 continues. I'm really hoping we can get things back to "normal" before I go to California in August, as we've been living with tarps holding up the shower wall and a rotten floor for weeks now. We've basically been waiting on an insurance claim to go through, and -- the good news -- it has and we're getting some cash to help fix the damage. The bad news, it's not enough to cover hiring builders who all seem to want precisely one gazillion dollars to repair our rotten bathroom floor. But it helps ease the pain I suppose.

Anyway, so Granddad and I are going to do the work ourselves (well, mostly Granddad who knows more about building than Bob the Builder himself) and began prospecting today as to what kind of wood we need to replace the joists, shore up a supporting beam, et cetera. Wonderfully, we found ANOTHER entirely different leak developing under the house today that seems to have sprung from the hot water cylinder, possibly created after the plumbing repairs in the bathroom because it sure wasn't there a few weeks ago. So yet another tradesman to call and get to come in and fix something dripping under the house. It's not as bad as the original leak as it hasn't been going so long, but needs to be dealt with really quick.

All in all, it's all being chalked up to "learning experience" (as in I done learned to inspect every single inch under any future house I survive to purchase). The main difference between owning a home and renting as we did for so many years is degrees of security – you feel more secure knowing you own your house and can do anything to it. But you also feel LESS secure knowing that if something breaks it's all up to you to deal with it. Hopefully in a week or so we can actually get down to the business of yanking up this rotten floor and making it all better, and then the easier job of retiling around the bath and making this whole cursed bathroom watertight for the duration. Yee-ha. Ain't home ownership fun?

I was born in the wagon of a travellin' show

Don't want to do the tedious post about why I'm not posting, so here's some content! With Bonus Cher! Hurray!

• The great bathroom disaster of 2008 is oh-so slowly being fixed... We've filed an insurance claim on the damage to the house, so cross fingers we might get somewhere with that, and the plumbing damage is due to finally be fixed tomorrow. In the meantime, I've scaled back my "this is a global disaster" point of view and taken happy pills, remembered it's just an excuse to remodel the bathroom, no one died, and we're enduring plastic tarps in the shower and not noticing the bathtub is barely affixed to the floor!

• Read the nifty Phil Spector biography, "Tearing Down The Wall of Sound: The Rise And Fall of Phil Spector," by Mick Brown, and came away with a new appreciation – and disgust – with the legendarily weird record producer. Years ago I had an affinity for the ultra-stuffed sweet sound of tunes like "Be My Baby," "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" or "Unchained Melody" (I was a teenager during the summer of "Ghost" after all). The best of Spector is like impossibly rich chocolate cake – so sweet and overpowering but still stings you where it counts. In some ways I wonder if the "Wall of Sound" was a one-trick pony, a kind of approach that never much worked past the '70s, although you see hints of the Spector touch in groups today like Arcade Fire. My personal favorite Spector work is his solo Beatles' production jobs on John Lennon's "Imagine" and "Plastic Ono Band" and especially his work on George Harrison's marvelous "All Things Must Pass." His touch could be cloying and too much Spector is like eating a dozen Pixie Sticks – how many soaring choirs and chiming guitars can we get in? – but Brown's book is fascinating as it shows how Spector developed that influential sound and the monomaniacal focus that it required. Clearly (as if his ongoing murder trial didn't show) Spector is a very sick, creepy man despite his talent – after 1968 or so, he was creatively pretty much washed up, past his peak and has spent the last 40 years trying to make a comeback, locked up in the prison of his own head. And wearing freaky wigs. Whatever you think of the man – and I have to admit I don't think a lot – there's an epic grandeur to some of those songs you can't ignore.

• Unabashedly stolen from Big Plastic Patrick: What was the #1 song the day you were born? Find out. Me? "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves," by Cher. Which is where my blog headline today comes from. It is perhaps the finest moment of Cher's life. And I'm counting the Oscar there.



On the other hand, my son Peter will grow old knowing the #1 song on the day in 2004 he was born was... "Slow Jamz" by Twista featuring Kanye West & Jamie Foxx. And this is why everything new is awful.

Why I feel like Tom Hanks in 'The Money Pit'

So we were feeling so very good about the house we bought six months ago. All the first-time homeowner jitters, but so far, it had been smooth sailing and everything's groovy. Until last weekend, when we discovered our entire bathroom floor is rotting out beneath us due to a very slow leak inside the wall behind the shower. This is what it looks like under the house:

Argh, argh I say. I won't get too much into it here, but basically, we had a home inspection done and this got missed, mostly due to our own stupidity. The leak is totally undetectable from inside the house and you have to crawl under the house for 30 feet or so to see the damage. Our inspector couldn't get under the crawlspace because of all the junk left there by previous owners and we waved it off. We made the fatal mistake: We assumed it was OK. Now, we get to renovate our entire bathroom!

We made a classic first home-buyer error, it seems. The leak has been going on for YEARS apparently unbeknownst to anyone as the rot is extensive, taking out much of the floor and joists underneath. I was actually stunned speechless when I discovered the damage.

Anyway, we're moving past the kicking ourselves in the head business and on to fixing it. After a plumber replaces the entire shower plumbing arrangement tomorrow, my father-in-law and I will pull up the tub and replace much of the floor, which will occupy much of my free time in the next week or two. I've been looking for an excuse to flex my non-existent handyman skills, anyway, so here we go. Without Granddad's very much appreciated help we would be far more up a creek than we are, as hopefully we can avoid using expensive contractors and the like to fix this mess. Either way, though, it's gonna take a bite. That's what you get for thinking you got a fine deal, I guess.

But ... it could've been worse:

Wednesday miscellany

Random note-type stuff....

• Ben Chapman is dead. Who, you say? The giant man who played the Creature in one of my all-time favorite '50s monster mashes, The Creature From The Black Lagoon (he was the gill-man on land -- another actor played him in the swimming scenes). Sure, he just marched along in a rubber suit making menacing movements, perhaps, but there's something primal and creepy about the Creature that made the movie more resonant than many others of its ilk. I long ago wrote about my curious adoration of this funky flick, and just want to salute the grand master of the gills for freaking out many a child over the past 50 years.

• Garfield without Garfield. Existential awesomeness. David Lynch meets fat cat jokes.

• Owning a house requires being handy! Today's installment is repainting the flaking and nasty ceiling in the boy's bedroom. Which requires scraping off old paint, sanding it down (all whilst standing on a ladder bending my spine in curious directions), then painting it only to discover the big patchy spots where I scraped the paint off still show. Spackle, coat three, continue as necessary. Sigh.

• All praise New Zealand its mandatory four weeks annual vacation for employees! The using of some of which means that for the first time in nearly two years, I'm a-headin' back to the United States. Not for another six months, yep, but we got a good deal on tickets this weekend and so Peter and I (sadly sans the good wife, who will mind the homestead and save us a fair amount of money) will jet to California for 2 1/2 weeks in August. My god, how will my country have changed in the past 20 or so months? ...Well, probably not too much, eh?

30 Days of Bloggery: I, Handyman

Let me present a shelf. Not much of a shelf, a mere garage shelf to hold a few tools and things, but here is evidence in my ongoing quest to actually become a rather handy man in our fine new house. We didn't buy a "fixer-upper," exactly, but there are a handful of small improvements both cosmetic and functional that we're making, as I attempt to overcome my utter lack of manly skills. (Both my father and father-in-law are immensely good blokes who can build just about anything, while I have trouble assembling a sandwich.)

So far I've refitted cabinet knobs, put up shelves, painted doors and installed coat hooks, reglued weak cabinets and the like. It's all a bit hard (I have a rather frustrating habit of doing something then realizing about halfway through I'm doing it wrong and starting over) but I felt a surge of manly pride yesterday when I decided I'd put up a storage shelf or two in our semi-finished garage and actually did it without anything breaking or much cussing on my part. Now on to somewhat larger projects like cleaning and refitting the gutters, finishing the half-sheetrocked garage and installing a brick patio. Estimated completion time: 2011.

Behold -- a shelf! Many years from now when the next people buy our house and move in they will just see a shelf, but little will they know it's actually a testament to my mad fixing skillz.

Oh, my back hurts

...A quick post to verify that we have indeed moved and we are alive. The shortest move we've done in years (across town, as opposed to 6,000 miles, 500 miles and 2,000 miles among moves I've done in the last decade) but still hard work and sweaty. Moving would be so much easier if I was illiterate (less books to move).

And yet here we are in our very own house that we actually really own for the first time ever and it's pretty darn cool. Peter even got to put our (borrowed) Christmas tree up! We still need about a million things from a coffee table to dish soap but it'll come. Our garage stinks of elderly Newfoundland from the last tenants and it's suddenly turned extremely hot as NZ cascades into summer. But we are well.

Thanks kindly for everyone chipping in on the last post to say they like the blogging. I'm looking a bit of a tweak and rethink in the coming weeks to better fit the blog into the "life" so to speak and allow me to post more frequently and with more to say. In any event, thanks for reading and now I have to go hammer something into a wall somewhere.

Is anyone there? Anyone?

...Egad, I know, it's been almost a month. An utterly insane month -- packed with a wonderful, very busy 2 1/2-week visit by my parents, and a lot of stressing about the new house -- which we're moving into this weekend! Ackthpp! We're settling earlier than we thought (at first it looked like early January), and so there's been an orgy of packing, furniture-buying to replace all the stuff we sold in Oregon over a year-and-a-half ago now, and learning about utilities, home repairs, etc. Oh, and working a very busy job.

Anyway. I've been mulling over the future of this here blog a lot too in the past few weeks, trying to decide if I want to continue it in 2008. It's been a tremendous amount of fun for me for nearly four years now, but lately it's felt harder and harder to find the time and inspiration. I've been wavering between "call it a day" and "take a break" and "dive into it with new inspiration". One of my problems is that my posts always turn out longer than I think, so maybe I need to just do shorter, more frequent posts. Or maybe I should step back and concentrate on paying writing efforts in my so-called free time.

I've also kind of become "that guy" who looks a lot at his hit statistics and comments and wonders who he's writing for and so forth, if anyone's reading, etc., which isn't any way to really run a blog if you're just doing it for fun. So perhaps I'll just throw this rambling ramble open to the floor and ask – should I keep the Spatula Forum going in 2008? What say you, humble readers?

...So by the way, we bought a house last week. We've been reluctant to publicize it all too much until everything is settled with the contracts and such ("we almost bought a house"), but now we're 99% set (just waiting for a final lawyer sign-off on a quibble about a few repairs). We are homeowners! Or rather, I should say,

We are homeowners!

Yeah, it all turned out fairly easy in the end – incredibly stressful of course, and spending far more money than I've probably spent the rest of my life put together, but in a month or two we will be the proud residents of our own 3-bedroom home with 2-car garage.

It turned out this was a house we actually looked at in the early days of our real estate hunting, a month or two ago. In the meantime the market in Auckland has continued to stagnate, a bit like the US is right now but not quite as dramatic. We kept it on our list of "maybes" and returned to look at it last week now that we had a better idea of what we wanted. It had even had a nice little price drop in the meantime, and on a second look we really liked it. Fenced yard, quiet neighborhood, a bit of land which is a rarity in Auckland central, and in very nice shape with a good deal of space. And just 3km (a little less than two miles) from where I work!

Once you make a decision – "I want that" – the process suddenly gets mighty fast. We looked at the house Wednesday morning, and by Thursday afternoon the owners had accepted our offer after a bit of batting back and forth. Egad! The last week has been filled with zipping around (mostly by lovely wife) to make the final deals, get the place inspected, et cetera. We should go "unconditional" by Monday and be able to sit back and wait until we move into our own house for the first time since August 2006, and the first place we've owned, well... ever!

Now that we decided to buy a place, we've realized how we basically have no furniture to our names (having sold our Wal-Mart vintage fare in the US before we left). So we get to start shopping so we actually have something to put in our house! After saving a lot of money this past year, it's suddenly going to start going away real soon, ain't it?

Now that I've dropped our big news, I'm going to take a little blog break right now. My parents are visiting from the US for a few weeks so there's much time spent with them, my day job is absolutely full-out crazy busy, and there's much to do before we move into our future home in early January. See you soon!

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...

Our house, in the middle of the street

Nearly a year since we arrived, the whole Moving to New Zealand thing has been going pretty darned well, really -- Avril got a swell job just after we arrived, I got a fine job myself in my first week of looking, Peter is settled in and happy at daycare, we love the country and I can eat meat pies and fish and chips whenever I like -- all of it is done of course except for the final piece of the puzzle, a place to call our own. We've been relying on the amazingly grand hospitality of Avril's parents since we arrived, staying in an apartment built on the back of their house, but this was never meant to be more than a temporary fix in the expensive Auckland housing market.

And so we've begun the dreaded house hunt, for the very first time in our lives attempting to move from perpetual renters into bona fide property owners. It's pretty damned daunting, I must admit, and we've only just begun to dip our feet in the water by going to a few open houses and doing a lot of research. And I met with our banker today to get an idea what we can afford and freely admit I only understood about 40% of the conversation.

Pretty much everywhere we've lived the last decade – Lake Tahoe, Oregon, here – we've had the uncanny knack to move there just after the property market explodes in value. Auckland home prices have doubled in value several times over since the 1990s unfortunately, which severely limits our options. No sweeping sea views and matching guest house, in other words. But we're hopeful we can afford a decent townhouse or, fingers crossed, small standalone house, in one of Auckland's less ritzy suburbs but without a gang or crack dealer next door. We're making decent, if not spectacular money, and have next to no debt which is always good. And after getting shafted by our last landlords, we're well and truly sick of the renting thing. But there seems like a hell of a lot we don't know and the uncertainty of it all is creating one heaping helping of stress stew.

I imagine house-buying is like those other big things in life – marriage, having a kid, moving – in that it hopefully isn't quite as bad as you make it out to be in your head before doing it. Or maybe not. Is it worse?