Settled

Where has the time gone?!?!? Although I had big plans for keeping everyone up to date with what has been happening, technology failed us. We had a little trouble getting connected in Fiji, but managed to do a little bit. The much more sophisticated country of New Zealand caused us many more problems. However, Mark is now an expert on internet connections (paid, free, borrowed, I won’t go any further…), and subsequently an expert on the Christchurch phone system and of the several wired & wireless opportunities for connecting. When we landed in Christchurch on 5 January, having been away from regular email communication and saddled with a useless phone for the last week, he was heard saying “I’ve never felt so naked in my life…”
We searched high and low for the perfect home for our family for the next 6.5 months and we’re happy with what we were able to secure. Christchurch is a beautiful city with a large number of enticing locations. I hope to describe many of them in this blog over the next several months. In the end, we went with a house that the kids fell in love with, and that Mark & I were also very happy with. The house is modern and is in one of the high school zones we had selected. The former means that it won’t cost as much to heat in what we’ve been warned will be a much colder winter than we experience in Southern California, and the latter means we won’t have to beg a transfer to one of the high schools that we were planning for Benjamin.
One of the largest factors in finding an appropriate place was whether it was furnished or not. It didn’t make sense to pay to ship a great deal of household goods to NZ, and it would have proved difficult to guess what we would need. So we did not bring much and are planning to enjoy the simple life. That said, we still need a few basics like beds, linens, towels, some kitchen utensils and pots & pans. Some places that claim to be “furnished” turn out to be only “partly furnished” (read: lacking beds). After brief consideration of such places, we decided that buying beds was probably too costly and they were excluded. Our new home in the Huntsbury subdivision of Christchurch did indeed have beds, although we needed to purchase one mattress. The kids and I spent the good part of one morning picking out and buying towels for everyone. Then, common sense kicked in and I had Mark take the kids to the park while I picked out linens for all of the beds.