October 2006 Archives

it's been a long week here in australia; from sahtIhdai to sahtIhdai as my newly ausified wife says, but i declare the dinkum here fair.

i'd love to write a nice long bloggy but we're on a dial-up and i need to go and get poked and prodded by the australian government so this will just be a brief highlighty thing.

1) we're here.
2) it's good to be here.
3) it's been over 30 degrees (dah-greys) here twice this week, which is freakin' hot.
4) it is darn near impossible to get a mobile phone in this country, but we have achieved cellular status. bartlebee only with the help OF HER MOTHER if you can believe that.
5) we're crashing with friend Jim but have already applied for a terrace house in Brunswick which we may or may not get depending on if they trust our "foreign and strange" credit history more than the mobile phone guys. brunswick is about 2km from the city center, on a tram line and looks like a good spot to land.
6) i'm turning in my residency application today after my medical exam. this is quite stressful as the fee is $1990 + $297 and it is non-refundable. also, i have needed to cull together a simply recockulous tome of paperwork proving that i exist and should exist in australia.
7) i like it here. melbourne is interesting and full of things to do. the weather is up and down but it is not set to subarctic-blast with a wellingtonian regularity.
8) i can still understand 90% of what my wife says.

hopefully we'll get this house and then we'll have an address and dsl and the dinkum will be even fairer. the fairest dinkum.

oh yeah. i saw three kangaroos yesterday and only one of them was dead.

4:05 am, Wellington International Airport

we have not slept. we have barely managed to cram all our luggage into the taxi. five bags, each heavy, one on my lap, two in the backseat, two in the trunk. we wait in line for the air new zealand agents to open shop so we can check into our 6:00am flight to melbourne, australia.

the man in front of us in line throws his bags back on his luggage cart, spraying papers. he curses and stomps and pushes off. the woman behind us suggests he has been caught by the new "pay your fines before leaving the country" policy. those who owe the goverment more than $500 are now refused boarding passes until they pay up. it's a nice morning.

we roll up to the counter. we lift each bag onto the conveyor. the agent clucks and makes notes. he does some math on some scratch paper.

"you have a lot of extra baggage," he says.

"yes," we reply.

"the fee will be $800."

ha ha.

ha.

silence.

at 4:00am, everything is surreal. it's still night outside. no one is fully conscious. am i dreaming? did he just say $800 for luggage?

we politely explain that our tickets went through the united states -- all flights through the US have an extended baggage allowance. it's one of those rules that must have something to do with the need for yanks to pack lard and shotguns. whatever. i'm not complaining. we get 2 bags of max 32 kilos each vs. 1 bag at 20 kilos. kiwis wear shorts even when penguins are wearing scarves. they don't need lots of baggage.

the agent does some clicking and clacking on the computer. eventually he agrees that we did fly through the states and we do get the extended baggage allowance. he does more math.

"$300," he says.

ha ha.

er. ha?

how can that be? we don't have that much extra baggage! two-thirds of our belongings were eaten by recidivist mold and aggro cockroaches! he explains it's because we only have four bags. if we had five bags it would be cheaper because he could just charge us for an extra bag instead of $10/kilo over.

dude. we have five bags. i demonstrate by pointing.

oh. yeah. in that case, it's $60.

did i mention how much i love 4:00am?

he writes me out a little fee ticket and i go to pay at the service desk. he's written that i'm flying to auckland on the ticket. agent number two needs to confer with agent number one. agent number one is looking distinctly abashed at this point.

he loses the baggage stickers and needs to print them out again.

eventually we are able to walk away with boarding passes.

it is three hours later, on the plane over the tasman sea that it finally sinks in:

i am moving to australia. to live. for three years.

i've been so stressed out about details and possible baggage difficulties (see! i don't worry for nothing...) that the whole actually moving-to-australia thing was a bit vague.

now, not so vague. i'm here. i'm applying for permanent residency on monday. for all i know there's a freakin' kangaroo hiding in the back garden waiting to throw koalas at me right now!

it could happen.

This is off BoingBoing who got it off MondoGlobo. I believe it is the most perfect thing I've read in years.

RU SIRIUS: You're doing something with Terry Gilliam, who is absolutely one of my favorite directors.

NEIL GAIMAN: Bless! I hope that it happens. Terry has been working for many years on Good Omens, which is the novel that Terry Pratchett and I co-wrote about the end of the world…

Terry Gilliam has loved the book for years. He has been working on it for awhile. He recently came to us and said, "OK. I'm going to get the rights back to the script that I wrote with this guy called Tony Grisoni a few years ago. What is it going to cost me to get the option for myself?" Terry and I put our heads together and thought, well, we really want Terry Gilliam to make it -- we want this to be a Terry Gilliam film. We've said no to lots of people who want to make it into a cool, big commercial film... We decided that it should cost him a groat. And I don't believe they've actually made groats, which is an old English coin worth about fourpence, since about the 1780s. Which means he is going to have to go to EBay.

RU: He's going to have to do some searching… a magical quest.

GAIMAN: I mean frankly they're really cheap. We figured out we were going to need Farthings to pay the agent commission on a groat. I went to EBay and picked up a farthing for practically nothing.

i just thought i'd mention that if you don't hear from me again it's because the wind is blowing so hard here i'm shocked the house hasn't lifted up into the air and gone spinning off to fucking oz or something.

wait?

oz?

hey! i guess i may not need to bother with packing after all!

i'm really sorry if our house lands on your sister.

last time i can recall feeling this much power in the wind was when i lived in hawai'i in '96. wanko moonstool and i rented this room up in the manoa valley outside of honolulu and at night the wind would race down the valley towards the sea. we had louvered windows and they were pretty much always open so the wind just swept through the house. it also rained every day there, but only on the other side of the street.

ah, those were the days.

now the wind is coming from antarctica. it isn't nearly as pleasant.

three more days and then we're in australia. i, for one, am excited. especially after watching the castle. i can't wait to get my hair cut like dale kerrigan. and appreciate the serenity.