Our address and phone number: D-day minus 1

The address of the flat we are renting is as follows:
19 Maida Vale Road
Wellington 6011
New Zealand

And the phone number, preceded by the country code of 64, is 4 381 2238.

Last minute preparations are in hand. We think we are ready to embark tomorrow morning. We keep our fingers crossed about the flights--5 hours plus from here to LA, and then a few hours later the big 12 hours 55 minutes non-stop from LA to Auckland.

It is difficult for Joan to cut the cord with the IMF. She is now (at 6.15 pm) on a conference call with her erstwhile colleagues discussing a legal brief to be submitted to the IMF tribunal. I expect she will be on her I-phone again in the airport tomorrow.

I need to give my beard a good trim...then we will go out to eat with John as the cupboard is intentionally bare in the Powers's apartment. (What the hell are the rules about those apostrophe esses?)

Maybe the next post will be in the LAX airport, using the laptop, while we wait for the Air New Zealand flight tomorrow night.

We will not have a Wednesday this week, though we will have two Tuesdays when we come back.

Joan in Retiring Mood...

Remember--we are doing this trip as a celebration of Joan's retirement. Just to see if I could put a photo on the blog, I loaded the only photo we have on this computer--Joan in the last minutes on the last day of work in her office.

Our Home Away From Home

The recipe may not always work that way

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. - Jane Austen

Wednesday Morning--D-Day minus 6

We have today got our premature Xmas cards in order. Joan does hers, and I do mine, covering family and a few friends. Mine are really a bit of a joke. I designed them and did the text, and John got them onto a Powerpoint screen and we printed the copies I needed. They all sit waiting to be posted. The only one I have neglected is for Nene--and that is because I have no street address for her.

Our Auckland friends have instructed us how to get a cab from the airport to their house. They say, "Do not use the airport cabs, they are all run by Sikhs and they fiddle the meters. Call Discount Taxis and a very large Maori will arrive in a somewhat battered cab and drive you to our house for half the price the Sikhs would charge."

When we are away, rather than depriving the cleaning lady of her income, we have instructed her to come into my apartment (where chaos reigns in the bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen) and "do the best she can." She comes today and we will go over the instructions again. There are just too many things to think about when you are going away for a prolonged period. Anne must have to face these problems when she comes to stay with Rachel.

Monday Morning

Slow start this morning. E-mail to our New Zealand landlady asking for her phone number (we hope we can buy a card to stick in my cell phone when we get to New Zealand.) E-mail to the car rental company asking--for Joan--if the car has automatic transmission. Tried to improve our seats on Air New Zealand--found that their internet system would only place us together, so we could not get aisle seats opposite each other. John had a fall in his race yesterday, so I have called the bike store to check up on him--he seems OK.
We keep thinking of other odds and ends of things we need to do...
We need the address of our friends in Auckland. Our plane gets in at 5.30 am, and we have said that they should not come to pick us up at that ungodly hour-but that we will take a cab.

John has just explained to me that the worst way to allow people access is to give them my e-mail address and password. The way for visitors to go in is to go to http://www.davstecut.blogspot.com/ . He has also told me that I can put in up to 10 e-mail addresses of people we want to keep in touch with and they will receive notifications by e-mail when we update the blog. So we are getting there.

Now--a question, how different is it to pack for two months than to pack for two weeks? We are making lists.

I am still trying to find out how people can access this blog. They can, of course, go into www.blogger.com/home (why that doesn't light up in blue, I do not know) and then put in my e-mail address and password, but that is a very complicated way of accessing the blog. I must research this thing in more detail.

Julia Child's kitchen was well worth visiting, and they have videos of her showing you how to make pancakes. We also went to the National Gallery to see a collection of paintings acquired by a couple called Meyerhoff. Modern American painting. I cannot understand why they bought more than a third of the pictures on show. And more of a puzzle--where did they have space to hang them? (They also paid for the Meyerhoff Concert Hall in Baltimore, so I suppose they could afford a huge house.) now to look at the 'help' page

And why is the time shown for these posts so far adrift. I must get this sorted out before we set out on December 1.

Changed The Name

Well, I did manage to change the name, but I am still at a loss as to how people can access the blog. Cannot mess around now as Joan is pushing me to quit so that we can go down to the American History Museum to see Julia Child's kitchen. Lovely day here in DC.

Sunday Morning

I am still threshing around in here trying to undestand how it all works. I would like to change the name of the Blog, but I see no way to do so. Nor do I understand how others can access the blog. The idea was that--with the web-site --anyone in the group of family and friends could log in and see what we are up to in New Zealand. Probably young John will be able to sort it out. He is away cyclo-cross racing (he won his race yesterday) so we will have to wait.

I really do not know what I am up to here. I thought it would be a good idea to have a blog about our time in New Zealand so that anyone could go in and check where we are and what we are doing. But at the moment I am bemused by the whole thing and have not got my bearings.
I should mention that we leave on December 1--which means that today is D-Day minus 11, I think.