The Best

We had a wonderful time in New Zealand

Such a beautiful, restful, damp and arty place.  

Sadly we have to say goodbye ... 

goodbye for now.

Killer Fluffy

Our Lily is afraid of sheep.  She HATES them.

Yes, our cat has come with us to New Zealand.  We probably wouldn't have put her through the trauma of travelling if we'd known that we were only going to stay for a month, but she's been a real trooper with all the changes.  She's OK with the cold and rain here - only she does sometimes wake us up ridiculously early needing to be let outside, only to come skulking back in a very short time later.  She then burrows back into the bed with us - fur and paws all damp and cold.  She's become an exemplary snuggler and a champion heater-hogger.

The only time I've seen her really up in arms was today when our neighbourhood sheep moved into a paddock really close to our house.  Lil glimpsed them through the fence and got scared; she let out a low moan like wind through an old farmhouse and scampered quickly up onto the microwave.  Obviously we shouldn't let her do that, but (a) none of her training seems to have come with her from Townsville and (b) she's got to have at least one high safe place from where she can keep an eye on those woolly bastards next door.  I don't know what she thinks they might do to her.

Life in the Shadow of a Mountain

This morning we had to crack open the car - it was frozen shut and the windscreen was completely frosted up with beautiful feathery swirls of ice. Sitting inside the frosted up car was strangely cosy, and then as the ice melted and we were able to drive away, we came into some beautiful views of the mountain all covered in delicious-looking icecreamy snow. We've come to Taranaki - on the western side of New Zealand's North Island - for Hayden to start work with an organic cheese factory that's being built by a stream. Sounds idyllic, doesn't it? And it is. It's just beautiful. Freezing, literally. But beautiful. It's everything you would imagine life in New Zealand to be.

We're staying in a little wooden cottage with no mobile coverage and no internet (I'm typing this at the local library 15km down the road). It has rained ferociously. Geese and sheep are our closest neighbours. I'm wearing more layers of clothing than ever before: thermal socks and jumpers, woolly hats and scarves and gloves. It's quite a contrast to Townsville where I thought winter might be coming when I put an extra sheet on the bed to 'rug up' in the morning.

It is beautiful here ... but this is not the end of the story. We might not be staying long, and it is looking likely that Bunbury in Western Australia will win out in the end. In a couple of weeks we will be back across the Tasman, back all the way across Australia and as far as we know, that will be our final stop. But in the meantime we're enjoying the beautiful green grass - it's flourescent, really - the fresh clear water that comes straight out of the tap and the family and friends who are all around us here. Bunbury seems a long, long way away.

Goodbyeeeeee

Finally, something's changed.  We've packed up our house and our car, and we're heading off on a new road.

We weren't sure that this was ever going to happen.  Right down to the last minute, the plan kept changing:  there were phonecalls about jobs that Hayden had given up on, last minute interview trips to Melbourne and Western Australia (sorry Melbourne friends, we were there so briefly we didn't have time to see everybody - so we decided to be fair and see nobody while we were there.)  

In fact, the plan is not even settled yet:  we are not yet sure of our final destination.  Tomorrow we set off from Townsville for the last time; by the time we arrive in Brisbane (we're going to take four days to drive there) we'll know whether we're headed for New Plymouth in New Zealand or Bunbury in Western Australia.  

Keep you posted.

On the Job Front

Recently I have been thinking that it is a bit of a shame, really, not to be documenting this phase of our lives more closely. I mean, it might be helpful, or useful, or even interesting for other people to hear a little bit about what it's been like for us to be participating in this global thing that's going on right now. This Global Recession.

Hayden can show his side, what it's like to be a clever, talented and career-driven person who at any normal time would have to beat job offers away with a stick. He's an extremely employable person - an engineer with an MBA for goodness sake - who in recent times has gotten to know that ashy taste of disappointment when the HR people don't call back: it means rejection on the job front.

Seems like everyone in the job market is ready to accept the kind of work they were doing five years ago and we can count the number of times Hayden has held the big crumb of a job opportunity in his hands only to have some wily old eagle, who was doing that job five years ago, swoop down and snatch it from his grasp. Hayden is waiting to get the chance to become that swooping eagle himself. It may come yet. And then he'd have that crumb of a job he was doing five years ago, with its reduced pay and stripped out benefits, all its comforts gone. But, you know, it would still be a job.

It is tricky being on the sidelines of this one. I'm doing everything I can think of to stay supportive and patient, including trying to earn enough for our weekly expenses on my reduced hours at the coffee shop. (Why did they reduce my hours? I don't know. Feels like spite). We're both staying positive, we're kind to each other and we support some of the crazy efforts of friends who find themselves in a similar position. (Check out this old mate of mine Demis, who built a website to showcase his special wares. He's offering some real bargains on there: http://www.ijustwantyourmoney.com/).

And, of course, we don't want to be whingers. We don't want to be putting a negative vibe out there, and it's our instinct to close ranks and protect ourselves when we're going through a tough time. So I don't expect I'll be talking much in the future about what's going on around here ~ not until we have some good news to tell. But I thought that I would give you a little glimpse of what it's been like. For us, anyway.

Um, hello

There's just not a lot I can talk about in public at the moment.   But we're plugging away - Hayden's applying for jobs with all his might, and I'm making coffees each day like you wouldn't believe.

I have found a bit of time to get back in the garden, though.  After months away from it during our monster Wet Season, I've recently discovered that not all our plants are completely dead.  Some have gone.  A couple have thrived on all that water, but most are just looking a bit straggly and stressed.   But the thing about caring for plants is that if you get their situation right -  just enough water, just enough sun - they do grow beautifully, all on their own.  Sometimes it takes a while to find that right position, but once you do you can rely on them - they usually come good.

What happened THIS week

We have had to do a fair bit of adjusting recently, and this week I got to do just a little bit more.  This week I changed employers.  I didn't change jobs, rather my job changed around me.  Of course the first rule of blogging is: don't talk about work.  But work is all I've been doing recently, so talk about it I will.

For the last couple of weeks I've been working full time at the coffee shop, not out of a conscious choice so much as out of my panicked reaction to our current circumstances combined with the shop owner's need to cover all the shifts.  He's come to be part friend/part boss over the past two years, and he said it would really help him out if I could bump up my shifts from two days a week to five.  Just for a while.  Me, I'm not usually able to refuse a request for help.  And I was happy to do it because I loved his coffee shop; it was the first place we went in Townsville where we really felt at home and happy to just hang out.  I really wanted the place to survive, and to do well.  The boss said that a new staff member would join us soon.  He said maybe next week.  Then he said maybe the week after that.

Well.  On Thursday my co-worker and I got the news that our boss was no longer our boss, and that another bigger and much more professional outfit had taken over our tiny coffee operation.  They told us that they were keen to 'minimise any disruption' and that it would really help them out if we would stay on in our jobs.  In that moment it sounded like an OK idea, so I agreed.

But after two days under this new arrangement, my head is still spinning.  It's the same job - the same coffee, the same regulars with the same orders, the same mini-conversation over and over again throughout the day.  But the background noise is completely different.  I'm no longer working to help a friend out, doing everything I can to build our base of happy customers and to keep the whole thing afloat.  For him I worked super-hard, because if his business went under we would lose one of the mainstays of our life in Townsville.  If you are not a coffee drinker, you might wonder how a single coffee shop could have that much bearing on a life.  But just imagine we're in Casablanca.  This coffee shop was our Rick's.  So now we're still in Rick's Cafe, but it's been taken over by his greasy competitor from the Blue Parrot.  Ugh.

It's just a job to me now.