I’ve been stuck into work, and it’s interesting how the cycle of the day is different here. I only overlap the West Coast of America’s work day for five hours–by 2pm my time, they’re all heading home. So I email furiously in the morning, and get replies, and spend the afternoon clearing out the inbox so that it can all begin again the next day. I really love the afternoon when every message I send doesn’t generate two in response, and I can feel like I’m getting through them. Of course, email is a sorry excuse for actual work.

It’s wonderful how easy it is to see a doctor over here. Our local GP, Elspeth, had a busy day but still managed to fit Jenine in. Jenine was dizzy, which was diagnosed as nothing more than a virus affectin gthe inner ear: walk around, get the brain compensating, all’s well. Less than an hour in the waiting room and we’re out. In Colorado, that’d have been a nurse visit (the nurse checked Jenine, but didn’t try to diagnose), a scheduled visit to the doctor for a few weeks’ time, or a trip to the ER.

Another full day: we drove to Auckland to collect a fridge we bought on TradeMe, I cleaned the rusty grill, and began the rehabiliation of teh house. I hosed off the front wall and windows, digging out spider webs with the brush, and swept as much of the dirt, dust, and leaves out of the garage as I could reach. We have two cars in there (a dead Honda that Dad’s selling on TradeMe, and an Austin that Uncle Zom keeps threatening to fix up).

Finally we went to the beach today (Sunday). It was good to walk on Omaha again, white sand crackling underfoot. The kids could have spent all day there, and I’m sure they’ll spend many days this summer there. Looking at them running into the surf, digging sand castles, and burying my legs with sand, I thought: this is why I brought them back here! Every kid should grow up doing this stuff!

The problem with flying to New Zealand from America is that if you get a well-timed flight, you don’t really have jetlag on the first day. You get this fantastic feeling of competence, because you’ve flown halfway around the world and are fizzing and popping with energy. That lasts until the next day.

I woke around 7:30, puttered around until 9. Then we went into town to make our first shopping run, including gas for the car. Holy Jesus H Christ on a Crutch: NZ$65 to fill the tank! I’m absolutely useless at making sense of the metric amounts, I’m so attuned to American miles/gallon and so on, but I know that a shitload to fill the tank isn’t good. I guess that’s why there’s now a “give me $20 worth of petrol” button on the pumps–the wallet’s the limiting factor, not the tank.

I don’t know whether it’s the equinox or the move, but it feels like there’s SO MUCH TIME in the day. I wove flax with the kids, my parents arrived down the road from us (they’re also moving back to NZ from the US), went out on the boat, caught up on email, gathered seafood, ate the seafood, yarned with my uncle, played music, and watched a Colbert Report. I’m hard-pressed to get through my inbox when we’re in the US!

Straight from the Ministry of Education comes 2006 Term and Holiday Dates.

Flight summary follows. Qantas: very good. Kids: great. Sleep: taken where it could be got. Customs failed to care about our coffee:

Customs: What are you declaring?
Us: Coffee.
Customs: Any honey or fruit juice?
Us: No, it’s coffee.
Customs: Ok, through you go.

I swear, you could be declaring the bloody Hope Diamond and all they’d ask is, “any honey in it?”

I had to push my family to come, and it wasn’t easy. They all had comfortable lives in the US, but I knew that I really preferred New Zealand and that if I stayed in the US for much longer then I’d never escape. I was losing my accent, losing my idiom (“honey, I’ll put the trash in the trunk”), but not really happy with what I got in return: debt to buy a house, free and easy credit card debt, a too-fast lifestyle, and participation in an economy that supports politics I don’t believe in.

Great guest rant on Public Address by a CRI (formerly DSIR, government scientific research org) talking about insanity of current contestable funding mechanisms. “A staggering amount of a scientist’s time is now spent writing funding proposals rather than doing science. The red tape is almost unimaginable. On some occasions it has been necessary for our CRI to hire a six-tonne truck to deliver its funding applications to FRST (the main New Zealand science funding body). Yes, the paperwork is measured in tonnes rather than pages.”

I was prepared to think of the questioning of Maori rituals as more political bizarrity, until I read this eloquent explanation from Pita Sharples in Public Address. Now it makes perfect sense.