Last Tuesday morning, a dozen people walked into my apartment while I was in the shower. If you take one step inside the door of my apartment and turn your head to the right, you are looking straight into the shower. It was pure luck that that morning the bathroom door was more closed than open and they didn’t actually see me. I normally don’t bother closing doors since I live alone.

It was also pure luck that I wasn’t singing at the time. I normally sing in the shower, but it just so happened that I was brushing my teeth the moment they walked in.

The dozen people were real estate agents. My apartment is up for sale at the moment and the company selling it does what they call a caravan, where all their agents go and look at the new listings or upcoming auctions. It generally happens on a Monday morning, but it had been canceled three times before (usually with little or no notice given to me). After they canceled the previous Monday, she mentioned contacting me to reschedule for the following week but they never did. And since they hadn’t contacted me, and Monday was a public holiday, I’d figured it would be the following week instead.

What I didn’t expect was them to just walk into my apartment at 10:30am on a Tuesday morning. I have the only key to the property, so they’d convinced the hotel staff that they had permission to be there and to let them in. And to give them some credit, at least when they realised I was there, they backed out the corridor again. I told them to give me two minutes to get dressed but they couldn’t wait that long and left.

To be fair, they had tried to call me at 8:30 that morning but my phone was flat. When I woke up on Tuesday I’d put it on charge and then got in the shower, so didn’t get the missed call messages until too late. But not being able to reach me, they apparently decided to just come on in anyway.

Everything about this process of selling my apartment has lowered my opinion of real estate agents (if that was at all possible).

I realise this was a while ago now, but the weekend after I first moved into this apartment, the Queen Mary II arrived in Auckland for the first time.

You might have heard about it, since she’s the biggest ocean liner in the world.   Technically, she’s not the biggest passenger vessel, since the Freedom of the Seas cruise ship has a higher gross tonnage, but Queen Mary II is longer, wider and taller than Freedom of the Seas.   She’s too big to tie up alongside Prince’s Wharf or Queen’s Wharf where most passenger ships dock, and instead had to tie up at one of the container terminals.   That was pretty good for me, since I got a great view of her coming and going.

Here is her arrival just after sunrise:

All day the roads and footpaths around the docks were congested with people coming to take a look at her. 

They had to be quick since she only stayed for the day.  Here is her departure just after 10pm the same night:

There was a massive fireworks display for her departure, unfortunately it was too far west for me to see from my apartment (which faces east). Luckily for me though, it was perfectly reflected on the side of the Lumley building, so I just sat back inside and watched the fireworks on a big screen.

I moved into my new apartment a couple of weeks ago and I love it.

There were a few issues with getting basic utilities provided.  I could only live a week and a half without internet before I shelled out for a modem so I could at least get dialup.   Broadband didn’t get set up until I’d been there 3 weeks.

I was relieved to find that my furniture all fits.   I need to get a couple of bedside tables, but otherwise I managed to find the exact right amount of furniture and stuff for a place this size.

I love the place a lot more than I thought I would.   It’s lovely being able to stand on the balcony and watch the sunrise as the city slowly wakes up.  It’s also great being able to stand out on the balcony at night listening to the music from the bars and clubs nearby.

If it sounds noisy, it is, with the doors open.  But they are double glazed so I can close them for a bit of peace and quiet.  It seems very cosy and safe and private.   It’s my own little haven that I can retreat to and relax with a glass of wine at the end of the day.

Just a week after I move into a highrise apartment, Auckland has its biggest earthquake since 1970.

Fortunately, it was still small, only 4.5 on the Richter scale, 15km down (very shallow) and 40km away.   But still, being on the 15th floor of a 38 story building, it was scary.    I’ve never felt one in Auckland before, and I only have a very dim memory of a small one as a child at my grandparents house.  

I didn’t realise it was an earthquake at first.   My building at work is very old, and every time a big truck thunders past it’s the equivalent of at least a 3 on the Richter scale, so I’m fairly used to that.   For the first second, I thought it was just a truck going past.    Then I realised that it couldn’t be, since the shaking was worse,  this is a brand new building, and I’m 15 stories above the street.    My next thought was that something was wrong with the building.  I didn’t think the whole building was collapsing or anything like that, but it is a new building, and I thought maybe a balcony railing had collapsed or fallen down near the pool.

It was only after it had been shaking for about 3 or 4 seconds that I realised that it was an earthquake.    There was no up and down movement, just horizontal, but everything seemed to be moving both side-to-side and back-and-forth at the same time.   My monitor was shaking, the desk was shaking, and I could feel the walls and floor all moving. 

I remembered my earthquake drills – you’re supposed to get under a desk or in a doorway.   I jumped into the bathroom doorway, since it is the furthest away from the balcony, but even as I did, I was thinking that it wouldn’t matter where I was standing if the whole building collapsed.     I stood in the doorway as the shaking subsided.  I think it probably lasted around 8-10 seconds, although it seemed much longer at the time.

As soon as it stopped, I stepped out into the corridor to see if anyone was evacuating or anything like that, but on seeing no sign of anyone, I stepped back inside and hopped onto the computer.  Geonet had a report of a magnitude 3.7 earthquake off Orewa at 8:24pm, but the 9:00pm quake didn’t show up on their site for another 15 minutes.

There was apparently no damage anywhere in Auckland, and Geonet say that the quakes weren’t volcanic in nature.  However, it is very unusual to have two such large (by Auckland standards) earthquakes so close together.  Hopefully there won’t be any more like those anytime soon.

I signed the paperwork for my new apartment today.  I move in about two weeks time.   I’ll probably post more details after my move in, but for a sneak preview, here’s the kitchen:

Here’s the view:

This is what my front door looked like when I got home from work on Thursday 11th January:

At about 1pm on Thursday afternoon, in broad daylight in a busy industrial area, someone drove up with a crowbar and forced the door open.  That is a very good quality deadlock in a solid wood door, so it took quite a bit of effort.  It needed probably a dozen strokes before finally the door frame gave way.  The door itself was damaged in the process, and the main doorhandle was completely wrecked:

Once inside, the alarm starts beeping, and they had 60 seconds before the alarm went off.  In those 60 seconds, they went through all my drawers (13 of them) and my cupboard, and took (that I know of):

• All my jewellery boxes (two large ones and about a dozen smaller ones)
• Vanilla moisturiser/soap/bath gel set in display case
• Feijoa fruit moisturiser/bath gel set in display case
• A counted cross stitch kit
• A paua-shell inlaid picture frame
• A gold watch
• A toiletry bag
• An old camera
• A battery charger
• My washing basket (presumably to carry off everything else)

As soon as the alarms went off, the neighbours from three doors along, and the neighbours from upstairs came to investigate.  They saw the door, but the burglars had already gone.  The people in the apartment downstairs heard a car leave, but nobody else saw or heard anything.

The neighbours called the police, as did I when I got home, but they didn’t come.  I filed a report with the burglary squad for insurance purposes, but there’s almost no hope of finding either the offenders or my stuff.

I suspect they will be very disappointed with the take.  Despite the fact that there were two large jewellery boxes and a dozen small ones, my jewellery probably isn’t worth over $300 in resale value, although it will cost closer to $2000 to replace everything.  Almost all my jewellery is junk.  There are only a couple of things with sentimental value, nothing that I will really miss terribly.  More than anything else it is a hassle.

I’m insured, of course, but now I have the problem that the insurance company likes to see receipts or photos of the items.   As many of you know, I hate having my photo taken, and I don’t have receipts.  A lot of the stuff is years old, and only cost me $20 or so, not something I would keep a receipt for.  Also, a lot of it was given to me.   So many people give me dolphin earrings that I just have no idea how many dolphins I may have had.  I figure I must have had at least 30 pairs of earrings, and probably half of those were dolphins, but for the life of me I can only remember about 5 pairs.

So, if you are insured, go and get your camera right now, and go and take photos of everything you own that you might want replaced after you get burgled.  Store them in your gmail account and you won’t regret it, I promise. 

I managed to get myself down to Sylvia Park today to check out the new shopping centre and supermarkets.

The Warehouse Extra is not as skanky as I had envisaged based on my previous Warehouse history.  Still, I have no desire whatsoever to shop there.  I can’t see any reason why I would go there when I could go to the beautiful big Foodtown instead.

Ahhhh, the Foodtown.  Not because it’s wildly different and spectacularly better than all the other Foodtowns in Auckland, but because it was empty.  I dunno whether it was the time of day (3pm on a Thursday), or the fact that not many people have caught on yet, or both, but it was almost deserted.   I had the aisles to myself, nothing was out of stock, and there were absolutely no queues at the checkout.   I could actually enjoy grocery shopping if it was always like this. 

As for the rest of the shopping centre, well, it’s a shopping centre.   It’s like St Lukes without the movie theatres and is much less efficient.   St Lukes is relatively compact by virtue of being two-storied and boxlike.  Sylvia Park just sprawls. 

It pretty much has the same lineup of shops you find in the CBD or in other large shopping centres.  I imagine I might go there reasonably often because it is the closest shopping centre, but I see no reason why people would bypass any other centre to go to Sylvia Park.

Now that I’m living on my own, I can’t delegate the grocery shopping chore to anyone.  I’ve often said that I hate grocery shopping, which isn’t really true.  I actually don’t mind it, but I don’t enjoy it enough to want to do it. I remember that when I first left home, doing my own grocery shopping was a new experience so I really did enjoy it.  But that was over ten years ago now, so the novelty has well and truly worn off. 

My first choice for grocery shopping is Foodtown online.  The delivery costs $10 – $12 depending on how much I buy.  Given that I do a fortnight’s shopping at once, it really isn’t too big a deal.  When you weigh that $10 against the cost of petrol getting to the supermarket, my time spent shopping, and the fact that impulse buying is completely eliminated, to me it seems like a pretty good deal.

Still, sometimes my shopping list just isn’t big enough to make an online order cost effective, so in that case I have several supermarket choices.  The map below shows the relative distances to the supermarkets I frequent:

Pak N Save is by far the closest.  I go there when I want quick topups, or bulk purchases of common items.  The problem is I’m a bit picky with what I buy, and half the time Pak N Save just doesn’t have what I want.  They have large quantities of the most common items, but they have a very limited range.

Foodtown is my favourite supermarket.  I’ll go to the Foodtown at Pakuranga if I happen to be at the plaza for something else, but it’s rather small and has a fairly limited range too.    My favourite is Foodtown Greenlane.  It’s big, bright, clean and has a huge selection.  It’s also open 24 hours, which is sometimes a priceless advantage.  (Yes, sometimes I do my grocery shopping in the middle of the night.  So sue me.) 

There is now also some supermarket choices at Sylvia Park.   I haven’t yet been to the new shopping centre there.  The second stage of shops just opened last Thursday, so I’ll give things a while to settle down before I go have a look.  I mean, it’s just a shopping centre, I’ve seen them before.

Sylvia Park is marginally closer than Pakuranga Plaza, and sports three choices of supermarket: Foodtown, PakNSave and the Warehouse Extra. 

I don’t want to buy groceries from the Warehouse Extra.   I haven’t actually been there yet, so I don’t even know anything about the place and I could be totally wrong about it.   The idea of buying fresh food from the Warehouse just creeps me out.

You see, I used to work at the Warehouse Oriental Market.  It was a dingy, dirty, grotty place.  Being basically a big shed, it wasn’t very well lined or sealed.  The roof leaked when it rained.  Pigeons got inside and shit everywhere.  The bare concrete floor was uneven and constantly dirty.  The shelves were bare wood and metal and were also constantly dirty.   And literally every product we sold was cheap, dirty and shoddily made.

I’m sure this new Warehouse isn’t like that at all, but I still don’t think I could bring myself to buy food from there.  The mental associations I have with the Warehouse are too strong.

I don’t really like experiencing major life uncertainty.   And I’ve been going through some lately, although pretty much vicariously.    The uncertainty I have is only a pale shadow of the uncertainty my flatmate, Stephen, is experiencing, but I’d like to whinge anyway

Last year, Stephen told his company that he would move to Texas if they wanted him to.   They said they’d get back to him.  So at that point, it was about 5 months before he even knew if he might be going to Texas.  Nothing to do but wait. 

Then, in about March, he found out that he might be going, maybe, probably.  But no idea when.  Maybe he’d find out sometime the following month.   Then in April they said yes, he probably would be going, pending security clearances and various other things, and it probably would be sometime later this year, maybe June or July.   So I started seriously contemplating what I would do after he left.  Yeah, yeah, I’ll miss him and all that.  I don’t do soppy stuff, so I started considering the practical aspects.

The problem is that I really have too many choices:

• I could stay where I am and live alone.  I really can’t afford it though, but I maybe could just manage if I scrimped a bit
• I could get another flatmate.  But I’ve been pretty comfortable with Stephen.  I don’t really want to adjust to living with some random stranger.  I think I’m too selfish, so I’d really quite like to live alone for a while.
• I could find another cheaper place to live (alone).  But I don’t really want to be further from the city, in fact I’d rather be closer.  Places closer to the city aren’t that much cheaper. And then I have to decide what to do with the car (cheaper places don’t have carparking – it costs extra) and my furniture (the cheapest shoeboxes are usually furnished).
• I could move back in with my parents.  But this would be the second(!) time.  And anyway, I’d have to pay for the ferry, and I have a problem of what to do with my furniture (storing it costs money, selling it seems wasteful if I am going to find a flat eventually) and car.

I still don’t know what to do.  At the moment, I am leaning towards staying and trying to bear the cost for as long as I can before switching to a skanky shoebox.

Then, at the start of May, Stephen was told he would be leaving on the 22nd of May, about three weeks time.  We have to give 21 days notice if I want to leave this flat, so there really wasn’t any time to decide.   I didn’t give notice just yet.  We got a whole lot of boxes and started sorting things out to pack away.

Just two days after that, he was told that actually he maybe wouldn’t be going at all, because the company he was going to work for cannot hire South Africans.  Now, the only way he will be going is if his citizenship application is completed within the next month.  So, he’s now either leaving within a month, or not going at all, and we don’t even know when we will know!