Falling off a cliff

Looks like the USD and GBP are headed for parity!  Two years ago, 1 pound would have gotten you $1.60.  Today it gets you just $1.24.  Since June it's lost 17% of it's value!  I haven't seen a slide like that since 9/11.

But if you think that's bad, compare the New Zealand dollar against the pound.  A year ago 1 pound would have gotten you $2.30, today it gets you $1.74, 25% less!

If I were earning NZ dollars, this would be an excellent time to visit Britain. :-)  Unfortunately I'm earning US dollars and the US dollar has been quite soft lately, no doubt helped by the ridiculous presidential election.  Since the beginning of the year, 1 US dollar has gone from 1.56 NZ dollars to 1.33 NZ dollars, a 15% drop.  That means I'm effectively earning 15% less than I was in February!  That totally sucks.

That said, there was an article two days ago that the kiwi (as it's affectionally known) had fallen to a 7-week low because...the global price of milk had dropped.  If "what's good for the country is good for General Motors" is true in the US, then in New Zealand what's good for the country is good for cows.

 

Eurovision revisited

I've long poked fun at Eurovision (which is something of an institutional pastime, I think) but nothing really sums it up better than the UK entry for 1974, by an Australian singer who didn't even like the song she was singing.  (It was chosen by public ballot, a formula which continues to be disastrous for Britain.)  What's remarkable is that this came fourth that year!  (Abba's "Waterloo" won.)

https://youtu.be/7CSmksNRQ9w

Olivia Newton-John, Long Live Love

Along came a spider

There's no excuse for my appalling neglect of this blog, especially considering that my motivation for starting this was a love letter to my future self; a reminder of where I was at, a crutch for my poor memory.  It was like "The Notebook" in case I ended up single.  (Did anyone notice that nobody actually kept a notebook during the relevant period of the story?)

Anyway, there's no point in apologising.  The reason I'm writing tonight is simply because I'm sitting in a hospital room at midnight.  Thankfully I'm in the lounge in the corner, not in the bed in the middle of the room.  My partner is hogging the spotlight tonight.

It's hard to believe it's only been two weeks since she was diagnosed with breast cancer.  And it was a fluke: She had an abdominal CT scan because of intermittent pain, the the CT scan just happened to catch a small part of her breast.  Her GP saw it and called her in for an immediate evaluation.  Two days later we were talking to the specialist, who ordered a raft of additional tests to see how far it had spread.

Thankfully, it hadn't spread at all.  ("Stages" seems to be a pretty ambiguous diagnosis, but I'll put it between stage 2 and 3, depending on whether or not it spread to the lymph nodes; more on this later.)  Friday we had a follow-up to discuss options, although there weren't really any options: the tumour needed to be removed, and then more testing needed to be done to see if she needed chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

The specialist only operates on Mondays so he scheduled us for today.  (The following Monday was a public holiday, so otherwise we would have had to wait two weeks.  Two weeks probably wouldn't have mattered to the cancer, but it mattered a lot to our peace of mind.)  I spent the rest of the day on the phone to the insurers; trying to get pre-approval on a Friday afternoon  for major surgery Monday morning is as hard as it sounds.

We arrived at 7am as instructed, even though we knew she wouldn't be called until 11:30am at the earliest.  It all sounded very straightforward and I thought we might be home by 3pm, when the kids get out of school, although I did have contingency plans.  It turned out, she wasn't called until 1:30pm, wasn't out of recovery until 3:30pm, and they said she could leave at 5:30pm provided she could walk and pee (not necessarily at the same time).

At 3pm I arranged for friends to watch the kids. At 6pm I arranged for friends to feed the kids.  At 8pm I was arranging for sleepovers for the kids.  My partner was recovering very slowly, and I was starting to wonder if she was going to leave that evening.  At 8pm I collected the kids and brought them home to pack an overnight bag, with the intent to drop them at their dad's.  That's when the middle child started sobbing uncontrollably, saying she didn't want to go to her dad's and begging me to keep her with me.

I still don't know if the issue was really with her father or if she was just worried about her mom, but I didn't have many options at that point.  I managed to get her to pack a bag and make some lunch and I took all three over to their dads, which is when they all started crying!  They were all hugging me and crying and I was trying to comfort them but I was also aware it was past bedtime and I needed to get back to the hospital, in case my partner was ready to check out!

To make matters worse, my phone had died.  I knew it was low so I had it plugged it in while I was waiting for the kids, but NZ (like the UK) has little switches on every outlet, and I'd forgotten to switch it on.  So I was trying to charge it in the car but meanwhile I had no way of checking with the hospital.

The kids finally went inside and I headed back to the hospital, which was only a ten minute drive.  Halfway there my phone had enough charge that I could check my messages, and the nurse had left a voicemail that they'd decided to keep my partner overnight.  By this point I was practically in front of the hospital, but I made a U-turn and went back home to pack our own overnight bag.

I also grabbed some food because by this time I was hangry.  That's hungry+angry, and you could tell I was hangry because I only had some bread and cheese for lunch, I hadn't had dinner, and I was screaming at the top of my lungs at my phone, which had now shut off again and the car charger was refusing to work.  I finally got back to the hospital around 9:30pm, and after checking to see my partner was okay, I then proceeded to sit in the corner, swearing at everything around me, while I texted updates to our friends.  I then finally heated up some food and started to feel better.

Thankfully the nurses were lovely and they gave me a reclining chair, a couple of blankets and showed me where to get tea.  Unfortunately I'm not going to get any sleep because I'm well behind at work, and the rest of the team are in San Francisco trying to land a large client that could very easily make or break the company.  (I was supposed to fly to California last Thursday, but obviously the cancer took precedence.)  So I'll be up all night trying to finish some work to support the rest of the team.  (Did I mention I receive a large bonus if they land this client?)

Meanwhile, my partner's prognosis is excellent.  They took out some lymph nodes during the surgery and will biopsy those to see if the cancer had started to invade them.  If not, and all other signs are clear, she'll be given radiotherapy which is just radiation directed at the breast to kill any remaining cancer cells.  The side effects can be just as nasty as chemotherapy, but in general it is much better tolerated (and her hair probably won't fall out).

It's been a rather surreal journey, from an unexpected start to a rather hopeful finish.  Along the way I kept describing myself as "naively optimistic," not because I was ignorant of how horrific cancer can be, but because I couldn't conceive of it happening to my partner.  I love her completely and the idea of not growing old together was simply inconceivable.  Mercifully, her prognosis was excellent, her chance of recurrence is very low, and as her GP told her, "you will die someday, but it will have to be from something else."

P.S. I don't know why I titled this post, "Along came a spider" but it seemed apt, given how suddenly it appeared, and how scary it was.  Thankfully my partner isn't Little Miss Muffet, and she kicked that's spider's ass. :-)

Eurovision 2016

The Eurovision finale was broadcast in New Zealand for the first time, and I missed it! To be fair, it started at 7am here, and it sucks. I could not have sat through four hours of it. I could barely sit through 9 minutes of it:

https://youtu.be/T077sFWGKzg

All I can say is that this year didn't disappoint. (Be sure to check out the winner, Ukraine, in its entirety.) Also check out the UK entry--to be fair, they didn't come in last place as usual, but it is ironic that artists from Azerbaijan and Belarus sang better English. (I think the line was "I come alive when I'm with you" but it sure sounds like "I come a lot when I'm with you.")

Feijoa - the real kiwi fruit

Forget Chinese gooseberries -- grown in China and renamed "kiwifruit" as a marketing exercise -- if you want an authentic taste of Kiwiana, come to NZ between March and June and feast yourself on feijoas (fe-jo-ahs).

Of course, if you believe Wikipedia, feijoas are native to South America,  and are usually referred to as "pineapple guavas" in the States, but this isn't about facts, it's about the subtle taste of "pineapple, apple and mint."  It's about cutting an egg-sized fruit and letting the soft, somewhat slimy flesh slip over your tongue.  It's about the strong, somewhat sour scent hitting your nasal passages.  In short, it's about acquiring a taste for them.  It's about going native.

Last year I found them a novelty, the kind of reaction that is neither good nor bad, but "interesting."  This year I find myself craving them, in large part because someone had the genius idea to put them in a pavlova.  Which, by the way, was actually invented in NZ (unless you believe Wikipedia).

Sadly, feijoas can't be picked early and artificially ripened, and they bruise easily, making them a poor candidate for shipping.  However, if you have a local source (I'm looking at you, California and South Carolina) I highly recommend you find yourself a few of these gems and trying them straight, put them in a smoothie or mix with yoghurt. Or just come to NZ and I'll make you a feijoa pavlova.

Lost wallet

I'm so lucky, I've never been mugged or pickpocketed* but I have lost my wallet...twice.  The first time was just after I moved to the UK, I had no cash, no credit card, no ATM card, nobody to help me, and I was living in a hotel so I didn't even have the option of eating at home!  I was quite desperate during the week or so it took to cancel all my cards and get new ones.  And then a few days later, my wallet fell out of a suit pocket in the closet.

So when my wallet went missing two weeks ago, I was hopeful it would show up on it's own.  However, I was so busy I had no time to look for it.  It took a good week just to go through my drawers and closet, plus the car and office, but I finally came to the inescapable conclusion that it was not coming back, and I needed to deal with it.

Fortunately I had some emergency cash so I was fine until the bank cards arrived.  The driver's license was a bit more annoying, as I had to go to an agent and provide sixteen forms of ID, plus pay $38 for the privilege.  Similarly the Snapper card (the equivalent of London's Oyster card) cost $10 to replace.  (More annoying, the city is looking to get replace Snapper cards with HOP cards, so this is a limited investment at best.)  I have yet to replace my library card.

I also lost a $30 gift card from Mitre 10, the local DIY chain, I'd just received a few days before. I had returned some window stays that I'd never gotten around to installing on the last house, and the current house didn't need them.  As the cashier pointed out, 11 months was slightly out of their 28-day refund policy, but she gave me the gift card instead.  Amazingly, I was able to fish the receipt out of the bin and take it back to the shop, and they re-issued another gift card!

But of course, the main thing I miss is the wallet itself.  When my last wallet died, I decided to eschew a leather replacement and found this:

It was made out of Tyvek, the same material used for shipping packages.  I didn't think the wallet would last six months but it lasted two years and was still in fine condition!  Plus everybody loved the idea of a wallet made out of money.  Of course, being in NZ I couldn't get another one with British pounds, they didn't offer one with NZ notes, and I didn't like any of their other designs, so I was a bit flustered until I discovered you could design your own.

This is what I put together:

The laser kiwi is obvious, but why a $5 note instead of, say, a $50 or $100 note?  Well, for starters, it has Sir Edmund Hillary, of Mount Everest fame, who is a lot more recognisable than Kate Sheppard ($10), Sir Apirana Ngata ($50) and Ernest, Lord Rutherford of Nelson ($100).  Plus it won best banknote of the year, 2015 (seriously!)  But the main reason is that the $20 note has a truly awful photo of Queen Elizabeth II, and as much as I adore the Queen I couldn't bear to look at that regularly.

* I once told an ex-girlfriend I'd never been pickpocketed, and she pickpocketed me!  So I really have to qualify that by saying I've never been pickpocketed by anyone who wasn't kissing me at the time.

A new toy

Yes, it's a Mac.

Now, before you accuse me of selling my soul (which I'd have to do to afford a new MacBook Pro) let me hasten to note it belongs to the company.

When I moved to NZ, I bought a $200 laptop primarily for updating my blog, which of course hadn't seen much action. I knew it was woefully underpowered for a work laptop, but since almost everything we were doing was in the 'cloud' I thought it wouldn't matter how much horsepower the laptop had.  So when I joined the company and they asked if I wanted a new computer, I said no, my laptop would be fine.

Needless to say, it wasn't fine. Although the systems were in the cloud, I'd often have 15 windows open trying to manage them, plus video conferencing or listening to music.  The laptop would regularly grind to a halt and I'd have to spend half an hour just shutting everything down and rebooting so I could continue to work!

A couple of times this occurred while I was talking to my boss, and he told me in no uncertain terms to get a new computer.  For some reason I felt bad about this, like it was a failure on my part, and besides I had no idea what the budget was and I didn't want to look greedy.  After going back and forth several times, I finally decided to go all-out and get a 27" Mac All-in-one.  My boss sent me this 13" MacBook Pro instead.

Which is fine.  I already bought an adapter so I can use my external monitor and I will probably get an external keyboard (when the %#*& is keyboardio going to ship?!) and mouse, so at least I won't get carpal tunnel, but I definitely need new glasses (or new eyeballs).  And for all the terrible things I've said about Apple over the years, I have to admit this thing is fast, and so far a pleasure to use.  But tomorrow I will start using it for work, so I'll reserve final judgment until then.

Citizen of the Crown

Yep, I finally got my UK passport*.  It was a vanity project, really -- I don't need it, and it wasn't cheap, but having two passports makes me feel like Jason Bourne.

Actually, it would have helped in Auckland en route to Japan, but that's because it has an RFID chip and I could have used the automated lanes.  This was only an issue because I'd gotten confused and was watching the wrong entry on the departures board, and ended up having to race to the gate and was the last one to board.  However, apart from that it would not have helped at all and in fact coming back through Auckland, the NZ officer said that since I had a resident visa I could use the NZ passport lane, anyway.

Now that I think about it, because the visa is in my US passport I will have to carry that to get back in NZ, but now that I have a British passport I am required by law to use that when entering the UK, so I've just damned myself to carrying both passports!   What was I thinking?

* I'd like to say I made the photo intentionally fuzzy for security purposes, but of course there's nothing sensitive on the passport cover!  However, the RFID chips have no encryption and will respond to any RF reader in their proximity, so I better get a better passport holder.  (Oh wait, those don't work.)

Wellington airport

What is it about airports and prestige? I get that large cities such as London and New York have prestigious airports, but they started with the city and then built an airport to match. (LA is a sprawl, and has an airport to match.) Politicians seem to consistently get it backward, and believe if they just build a large airport then the city will follow. Perhaps they've watched "Field of Dreams" one too many times, but it makes no sense to me.

Case in point, Wellington airport wants to expand. They currently have plenty of capacity (i.e. can handle more airplanes) and the runway is long enough to accommodate most,jets, but they can't handle long-haul flights because a jet with a full tank takes a lot longer to take off than the same plane with a small amount of fuel.  That's why international flights out of Wellington only go to Australia or Fiji.

(Currently, the longest flight is from Auckland to Dubai, at 14,000km and just over 17 hours.)

Unfortunately, in the 1950s they'd built the runway on some swampland on an isthmus so there is no way to lengthen it except by reclaiming the sea.  They even put together a cute video (albeit 5 minutes long) on how they're going to do that.  And the price tag for extending the runway 100 meters (about one football field)?  Well, as they put it, only US $2 million per meter!



Now, while that's peanuts compared to the estimated US $2.6 billion (with a b) cost of the new LA Rams football field, it's still a hefty pricetag, and the private owners of the airport want taxpayers to foot half of the bill.  In fact, taxpayers have already paid nearly US $2 million just to apply for consent from the government -- do you see the circular logic here?  The government is paying to get approval from the government.  So what do the taxpayers get for their money?  Well, by all accounts, nothing.

Air New Zealand, the nation's flag carrier, who should be advocating for better facilities, said, "Long-haul flights out of Wellington are a pipe dream" and "no airline could make money out of it."  That's pretty damning words from a major partner who stands to gain no benefit by not extending the runway.  Qantas, the other major airline that services Wellington, also said "if the extension went ahead the airline was not interested in utilising Wellington as a hub for anything other than domestic and trans-Tasman flights."  Double-ouch.

But wait, the supporters cry (including Wellington mayor Celia Wade-Brown), it doesn't make sense for Air NZ (whose hub is in Auckland) and Australia's Qantas to operate long-haul flights from Wellington.  Instead, they point to some as-yet-unnamed airline to use the long-haul flights to service their hub in some as-yet-unnamed Asian country.  That is, they not only want to build the extension over the objections of their two major partners (who account for 6 out of the 9 daily international flights) but they're doing so based on a pipe-dream of finding another major partner.

But wait, they carry on (without listening to anyone trying to reason with them): Singapore Airlines just announced a direct flight from Wellington to Singapore with a stop in Brisbane to refuel!  That proves there is demand for long-haul services from Wellington to Asia!  Well, yes, except it doesn't. Singapore Airlines has specifically refused to commit to long-haul flights from Wellington, and the economics of a flight from Wellington to Brisbane to Singapore is a lot different than a Wellington-Singapore non-stop!

So there you have it, another attempt to "jump start" the process and, rather than focus on making Wellington a great city, the focus is on doing other things great cities do.  Of course I could be completely wrong and in ten years, when I can fly non-stop from Wellington to a host of Asian countries at hyper-competitive rates, I may be eating my words.  But as a newly-minted Kiwi taxpayer, my immediate concern is on the government proposal to give NZ $150 million to a private operator to build an airport that nobody wants.

Then again, this is the same government that just spent $26 million on a referendum to change the flag that nobody wanted.  The next general election is in 2017.  Unfortunately, I won't have the right to vote until 2018.

Japan photos

I'm back from Japan, and have about 400 pictures to prove it. Sadly, I didn't see much -- I was working through the week -- but on Saturday we went to Arashiyama, in Kyoto, which was stunning. We also took a rickshaw around Nara which was equally beautiful. Unfortunately, Picasa doesn't seem to have sorted these in any order, and I haven't bothered to label any of them, but if you want a random, non-descript journey through a very small section of Japan, I highly recommend sitting through the whole thing.