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We’re back from New Zealand and utterly buried in getting back up to speed with the business and in digging our way out from under two weeks of accumulated accounting and such.  We’ll be back up and running here again soon.

Cheers!

It’s a bit before 8 AM here. Sharon’s still upstairs sleeping and I’ve just had breakfast. I haven’t given this log of our travels nearly as much attention as I’dexpected to but we’ve just been too busy going places and seeing things. When I’m home in a day or two, I’ll write more and post some of the many photos we’ve taken.

We travel today. Christchurch to Auckland about 2 PM this afternoon and then Auckand to LAX at about 6 PM local.

I have to say that Christchurch is a beautiful city. Hagley Park sits in the middle next to the Central Business District like a jewel. The hills of the Banks Peninsula rise just beside the city to the west and off at a distant to the east are the Southern Alps which divide the South island. Services are good, the streets are clean and the people friendly. On the other hand, prices are high and dealing with some entities like banks can be a ponderous business.

Internet has been a bit of a disappointment. Unlike in the US where free Interet in hotel rooms and public spaces is rapidly becoming a given, here hotels will offer you an Intenet connection at .68 cents a minute. Then there’s Telecom with its Hotspots located around town. It’still pricy and the system was down most of the day, yesterday. I’m typing this on a computer kiosk in the YMCA lobby. It is $2 for 30 Minutes for access to the web and unless your E-mail is web-based, it is no help with that.

Cheers, until I next post from home.

Several days have now gone by and our adventure in New Zealand continues.   Currently, we’re staying at a hotel named the Fino Casementi which is just across the street from the Crown Plaza where we began.   The room rates are a bit lower here and they have an excellent free breakfast included.

Our biological clocks have finally adjusted to the five hours difference between Pacific Standard Time and new Zealand Time.

We’ve had fun the last few days exploring in and around Christchurch.   Just for fun, to see what’s different and what’s the same, we’ve been going into supermarkets, hardware stores, furniture store and superstores and looking at stuff.  A tall can of Pringles here was $3.65NZD which is $2.37 USD.  In general, things are quit expensive here and salaries are lower.  Sharon’s got a new hat which we paid $75 NZD for ($x USD) – it was her birthday present.

Yesterday, on Sunday, we took a long ride out to Sumner (Christchurch’s equivalent to Orange County’s Laguna Beach or Seattle’s Kirkland and had a walk on the beach.  Then we drove out onto the Banks Peninsula and explored and took a lot of photos.   There’s still snow on the higher ground from a storm they had a day or two before we arrived.   We ate lunch in Akaroa which is a very fun little town on the central harbor.  The Banks Peninsula is an old extinct volcanic cone jutting into the ocean just to the east of Christchurch.   Long ago, part of the cone’s wall collapsed and the sea came in forming a harbor like Italy’s Santorini or French Polynesia’s Rapa.

We’ve had one gloomy cold blustery day and several of bright winter sunshine.    They’ve had a hard winter here (worst in 24 years) so everyone is excited to see the fine weather.

Today, we may get out to the botanical gardens which are part of Hagley Park – an 800 acre park in the middle of the city.   Yesterday, we had a lot of fun looking at the various plants and trees which are new to us.   At one point, we found a one-acre natives only nursery and pulled in.  The folks there were very friendly and we had a great time talking about plants and how they do things and how we do things.

We picked up information on two different techniques which we’d never heard of which may prove to be of great use to us and nurseries like us in western Washington.   One involved copper spray and the other involved felt. I’ve been disappointed with the Internet services offered in the two hotels we’ve stayed in.  Both charge .68NZD/minute and it is a hassle to establish the connection.   Maybe the connection issue has to do with the CAT5 plug on the back of my system but the cost per minute is outrageous.   I’ve discovered that they have a WiFi hotspot down in the lobby and it is a pay as you go as well but I think it is cheaper.

In the next day or so, we hope to strike out into the countryside and see a bit of the West Coast.   I’ll write more soon.

5 PM – Christchruch, we’re back at our hotel.   And what a hotel it is.   But first the back story that brought us here.

After I wrote from LAX last night, we boarded the flight for Auckland, New Zealand, and settled in for a fourteen hour overnight flight.  We has two seats WAY in the back in the tail section.   The plane wasn’t full but it was full enough that any dreams of claiming fours seats and laying out flat were quickly put paid to.

I watched a movie, The Sentinel, and then about 11 PM, I had a glass of wine and a Lunesta and layed back to see if I could sleep.   And, amazingly, I did sleep quite well.   I’m sorry to say that Sharon did not sleep as well and was quite tired today.

About 5 AM local time, we landed at Auckland and had an anxious 20 minutes wondering of our checked luggage had made it – it had.   And then we passed through customs and everything went fine.   There was a jump to Christchurch and looking out the window on the approach was great.  I’ve looked over the maps of the region so much that it was like watching some big new three dimensional map unfold as the mountains and then the Canterbury Plains rolled under us.   And the Banks Pennisula looks huge from Christchurch which isn’t something I would have predicted from the maps.  We made a call from the airport to Tui Campers and a fellow from there came and gave us a ride to their offices and after a few papers were signed, we drove off into Christchurch on the wrong side of the road.

That’s an experiecne that will wake you up.   Every automatic instinct you have is not to be trusted.  Even passing orange cones on the left side of the road.  Because you are on the right side of the car driving but you are used to the left, you are not going to leave enough clearance when you pass by things on the left side.  Sharon said I just barely missed taking out a long line of cones at one point.   At another point, I pulled over to look at the map and smacked the curb on the left because I didn’t allow for most of the car now being to my left.   Then, once in the Central Business District (which they abbreviate CBD here) where our hotel was, we could see the building occassionally between the other buildings but with losing sight of it and getting tangled in angled roads and one-way the other way roads, we had to circle it twice before we were able to make the strategic insertion into their drive-up area.  I was glad to hand the car over to valet parking.

But, once there, things turned nice indeed.  The concierge was very nice and then when we got to the counter, the girl there had our reservation and said that normally this is a slow time of the year but that they have a big conference that they’d over-booked!   But they’d noticed that it was Sharon’s birthday – so they’d solved the problem by upgrading us to the Presidential Suite at the top of the tower!

That sounded pretty good when she said it but it was nothing to actually seeing the suite.   Jeez.  it was two levels on the very top of the building.  The bottom level held a kitchen, a big living room and a dining room with a huge glass table that had ten chairs around it but could have easily sat 12 or 14.   Upstairs, was a large bedroom and a shower with two overhead sprays that could have handled six or eight people and a monsterous tub with jacuzzi fittings that Sharon just told me takes 25 minutes to fill.  After an afternoon spent walking around the CBD, we’ve come back to enjoy our evening of splendor and Sharon’s up filling the monster now.

When we landed, there were puddles of frozen water on the ground and the pilot said it was -1 C.  It’s been cold and blustery all day but we enjoyed it.  The CBD really is a beautiful place.   A mixture of old churches, new business buildings, executive apartments, wide open squares with statues of Captain Cook and Queen Victoria.  And everywhere we’ve been, everyone we’ve talked to has been unfailingly friendly and helpful.   There are times we have trouble understanding what folks are saying because of the accent and the idioms but it is all good fun.   We bought Sharon a $75 NZD hat for her birthay and she looks great in it.

It’s not long until sunset here looking out across the city.  The scene could be someplace in the Pacific Northwest looking towards the Olympics.  It is really hard to credit how far away we are from home and that we can point straight down at the floor and say that almost everyone we know is down there on the other side of the globe.

6 PM – Just back from trying the big tub.   Yep, it’s good.   I did, indeed, feel presidential.

 

We’re going to order something small in (this all sound just so F. Scott Fitzgeral, eh?) and sit about and see what passes for TV here in New Zealand.

 

We’re in the midst of a four hour layover at LAX after flying down from SeaTac.  So far I’ve had a $5.16 draft beer and Sharon’s had a $3.24 Gatoraid.  Now, I’m typing this in on a $.25/minute public Internet terminal.

Security has been reasonalbe.  I lost my can of shaving creme – silly me for carrying it in my carry-on.  Sharon has to go throuhg special procedures because she’s got a defibrillator.  But, we’re here and it’s good.

I’m thinking that the next time I step off a plane, it’ll be Thursday and I’ll be on the other side of the world.

Cheers until then.

 

5 AM – Intense activity here the last few days as we prepare to fly to New Zealand. Accounting to prepare, a business to handoff, animals to arrange for. It’s a thousand and one details and any of them could be really bad if we let it fall through the cracks. Needless to say, normal luxuries like attending aerobics classes have gone out the window.

I’ve still managed to get down to Starbucks most every morning before Sharon rises for my morning coffee. There’s a group of people who come and go every morning and I have on-going conversations with many of them and it is a pleasure I enjoy immensely.

As the day begins today, there’s some last accounting to grind through, suitcases to go through their final assemblies, lists to check and recheck. At 3 PM, our dog, Patti-Cakes, will go in for a bath (so she doesn’t trigger our dog sitter’s allergies) and then she’s off to the sitter for two weeks. Yes, it’ll all come together today and if we manage it well, we’ll be able to go to bed tonight with everything ready and a quiet confidence – we’ll see.

I posted a reference to an article from Scientific American a few minutes ago. It’s a sobering piece. People are slowly beginning to get that the hour is very late on the issue of Global Climate Change and that nothing less than a major retooling of how the world’s civilization does things will be sufficient to prevent major consequences. But this dawning of awareness is happening far far too slowly and, for many of us, our thoughts are beginning to turn towards not how to continue to fight for change but to where to run to avoid the worst of the consequences.

One of the reasons we’re flying to New Zealand for two weeks is to begin to explore our options in this regard. I’ll have more to say in the future about why I believe New Zealand is likely to be one of the best places in the world in which to get out of harm’s way.

Midday – the beat goes on. AJ was at Starbucks this morning, the Sparrows got fed and a good cuppa was drunk sitting in the morning sun.

Now for hours, it’s been payrolls, setting money aside for known upcoming debts, turning my motorcycle in for maintenance while we’re gone, writing instructions sheets about various bits of technology we’re dependent on like computers, battery chargers, thermostats, and cordless telephones. Ah, but we found time in there for lunch (Thai) and that was good.

All in all, it’s busy as hell but I think we’re winning and it’ll all be lined up when we’re ready to go.

We are invited to dinner this Friday evening by a couple who lives in Christchurch whom we’ve only met via E-mail. Seems a strange and remarkable thing to be invited to dinner on the other side of the planet by folks you’ve never met. We truely live in an amazing time.

8 PM – Getting tired now. All of it is done but the final few things into the suitcases and then rest til morning.

Picked up another link to this blog today. Paul Hartzog, at a blog of the same name which I like a lot, has cross-linked back. Slowly, slowly we are building readership.

Well, I’m off to push a bit more and then rest. I may do a brief post tomorrow in the morning or in transit (4 hour layover at LAX). If not, the next post will be from New Zealand, mate.

Things are getting incredibly busy here. We’re beginning to schedule our days out completely before we leave so that we’ll get all the 1000 and one details done on time. It’s not easy leaving a running business and a pile of animals for two weeks.

Interestingly, I think the big Guy in the sky has a great sense of humor. In the past few days, things have been breaking left and right just to test our composure and fortitude, I think. Sharon’s system has developed the Blue Screen of Death syndrome every 20 minutes or so after running solidly for two years. Our HP Laser Printer/Fax/Scanner and decided it can no long align the scanner and shuts off every few hours with the message, “Scanner Error – Power Off – Power On”. In other news, my motorcycle front forks have blown a seal, the front wheel of my pickup truck was in danger of falling off but we caught it in time, our house sitter cancelled. Sharon’s pulled a muscle in her foot, we couldn’t find our international voltage adapter equipment and had to buy some on the Internet in a rush last minute fashion, and my lower back it telling me that I was unwise with some of the stretches I did in aerobics recently. Ah yes, and then there’s the airline bombing scare in Britan and the resulting uncertainty about what can and cannot be taken on the plane (and us with three airlines, three jumps and 28 hours of travel between Seattle and putting our foot down on the earth in Christchurch, New Zealand).

On the good side, New Zealand has not sunk into the sea and western civilization is still holding together . So, it’ll all be alright – we hope.

It’s been stressful here the last day or two. We’re coming up on a very long plane ride to New Zealand and all of the preparation that entails and the current situation with air travel because of the plot uncovered in London has got the entire air travel world turned upside down. Should we pack carry-on, should we pack checked luggage, should we pack both? Yeech. We’ll be on three airlines before our feet finally touch the pavement in Christchurch very nearly on the other side of the world.

Our house sitter bailed on us. Too much incense in the house and it triggered her allergies and her throat closed and she actually had to go to the hospital – so you can’t blame her a bit. But, it does mean that care of our animals needs to be rethought out.

This is the time of the year when a nursery like ours need to put in its orders for the stock we’ll need next year and Sharon is deeply buried in that and no one else can do it but her so she has to grind through it and hopefully get it all sorted out before we fly because if we wait the extra two weeks, we might not get the stock we want and need.

We’re particularly careful not to take chances with getting colds and flus here because they are very tough on Sharon since her heart condition prevents here from taking anti-histamines. And being sick put an additional load on her heart as well. Long story short is that it’s a bummer when she gets one so we’re always cautious about what we touch if we’re around sick folks. Yesterday, in the afternoon, I started feeling like I might be coming down with something so we went into ‘isolation mode’ wherein we essentially divide the house so that we are not touching the same objects. It’s not easy but it has kept her from getting one of two colds I’ve been unwise enough to be caught by. So, at the moment, I’m feeling 100% but sometimes I do that and then relapse in a day or two so we’ll be on this protocol for several days. Not the most convenient thing with everything else we have going one.

I’ve been having a problem with more and more spam on this blog. What the spammers do is they add fake comments to your posts and embed advertisments in them. As soon as they show up, I delete them but they’re coming more and more frequently as they determine that I do not have automated protection. So, today, I installed a very nice anti-spam plug-in called spam-karma 2.0 from here: ➡. By the way, the fellow who created spam-karma 2.0 has a very interesting website/blog – one of the more interesting that I’ve seen in awhile.

We’ve got 11 days before we fly to New Zealand. I have the feeling that even though we’re working to get everything we can done in a timely fashion, that a lot is going to jam up on us just at the end. Truth is, until we’re in the air out of LAX bound for NZ, I don’t think we’ll relax.

Ah, I forgot a story I wanted to tell. I’ve fired up Skype and it seems to work great. The core product is free and you can grab a copy here: ➡.

It lets any two computers linked to the Internet communicate using VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol). basically, you have a free phone call over the Internet. I intend to use this daily to talk to Sharon when I’m down in NZ over the winter (Nov, Dec & Jan). For a small amount of money, you can extend its abilitys so that you can place calls from your computer to physical phones out in the world (called SkypeOut) or you can accept calls on your computer from physical phones out on the Internet (called SkypeIn). SkypeIn also comes with VoiceMail. It is all an extremely cool thing. Skype has a special mode called ‘Skype Me’ which means that you are open to receive a call from anyone out there. When I first fired this thing up, I looked to see who was in Skype Me mode and I ended up calling a fellow in Mumbai, India (must have been late at night there) and we talked for about five minutes and it worked fine. Just this evening, I’ve been talking to my friend Alan down in Eugene, Oregon via Skype. He was on a physical phone and I was on the Internet. He said there were a few drop outs but that it was better than the average cell phone conversation. Amazing stuff – and free.

Tomorrow’s Saturday and the nursery will probably be busy and I’ve got mid-month accounting and also the accounting that needs to be done ahead to cover the two weeks we’re gone. Busy, busy, busy….

Talked to another friend of mine, John, today, a staunch Republican, and while our basic ideas might be different, we both agreed that it isn’t likely that either the Republicans or the Democrats have any real likelihood of doing anything serious about Global Warming. His feeling was that it won’t be of concern though because something really ugly will be on the front burner by then via-a-vis this growing tension between Islamic Fundamentalists and the western world that will basically over-ride everything else. It’s the Perfect Storm idea again – if this one don’t get you, that one will.

A,

I’m reading a book just now called Crashing the Gate by two bloggers who were part of the on-line movement that boosted Dean into the national spotlight. Their analysis of why the mainstream Democratic Party in this country is so ineffectual makes riveting reading.

I think they are right about much of what they say but I can’t say that I see their movement carrying the day strongly enough in any future near enough to be significant. Indeed, the Republicans are using their time in control very wisely by seeding the semi-permanent judiciaries with ‘their men’ so that even after the wind swings back to the left, as it usually does after a time, they will have decades of control over the judicial branch well in hand.

I don’t see much else notable. All the revelations about various creeping global climate problems unroll so slowly that the sound-bite masses just adjust to them from week to week as their new baseline realities. The intellectuals yammer and the right wing neocons, theocons and etc. just press on – captured by their own visions. The word, Dominionist, has come into my vocabulary.

I have developed some doubts about the Peak Oil concepts. I’m beginning to think that it will unfold much more slowly that I originally thought. The rising prices of oil will make sources formerly unattractive viable and their production will prolong the oil economy – though at ever higher and higher prices. So, it will change slowly and we will adapt and adapt.

Another connection I hadn’t seen before was that the new biofuels will increase the pressure on food prices because now both people and automobiles will begin to compete for the product of those same fields which formerly only had to supply one consumer group; people.

Dennis

————–

Dennis,

I noticed that those who bought CTG also bought American Theocracy, an informative book I read this year. That’s an intriguing connection. As for Dominionism, that’s always a paranoia-making topic. Thanks for the wiki link to it.

After returning from Viet Nam but before the deaths of RFK and Jimmy Hendricks, I would eschew the street rhetoric as naive: “What do we want? Peace. When do we want it? Now” I knew that social movements don’t turn on a dime. So I consoled myself by considering that someday my generation would be in command. I wasn’t so smart after all. By the time my generation arrived, the political game was still the same as played by Clinton and Bush. No Gandhi nor MLK Jr. So I guess society really does move glacially slow most of the time. The thing is, glaciers aren’t as slow as they used to be. I watch more news outlets than ever, thanks to your RSS tutorial, waiting for something important or momentous to occur, but not really expecting too much.

A.

Saturday morning and the weather’s cool. Looks like it could be a busy day here in the nursery and we could use a strong day. We’ve had a lot of big bills come due these last two weeks and it’s put the pressure on our cash-flow. The major heat-wave did not help.

I wrote a piece last night about the Snow Job story in the National Review that I’ve been wanting to write for some time. That’s always the problem with writing stuff – time is required and time is something I don’t have a lot of.

Three weeks until we fly to New Zealand. The excitment’s building. I’m hoping that I can get into Internet cafes or hotels with Internet access so I can post from there about our adventures on the South Island.

Right off this morning, customers have been coming in. Here’s a Northern Red Oak going out. Two to three hundred pounds of root-ball and 15 feet or better tall for $100 (we’re having a sale). Come on in, friends and neighbors – we’re ready to deal!