One Year On
Now Playing: The Killers - Smile Like You Mean It
As of today I've had my car for one whole year. It's also exactly one year since I moved back to my parents' place, so I avoided living there for a whole year by just a few days. Strange that. It was rather odd circumstances in which I started off with my new car, this time last year. Everything had seemed so promising just a few days before as I had taken this car for its test drive, had it checked out, sorted out a good price and so on. I was feeling really excited about finally getting a car that was one I had chosen, one that would really feel like my own. After crashing my parents' old car a couple of weeks earlier I had gone through an annoying stage of having to catch various trains and buses to get from Takapuna on the North Shore to my work in Avondale - a commute that took nearly an hour and a half each way!

Of course, anyone who knows me will know what happened next as seemingly out of the blue Jess decided to break up with me on that Monday night. So the moment which should have been a really exciting and happy moment of my life managed to happen on the particular day when I felt so utterly shattered and depressed that I couldn't even get myself to do any work (I managed to get myself out of bed at 7.00am and go to work though, which was a pretty amazing achievement). In a way I guess perhaps it was good to throw something bad and good together in that way, in that I didn't find myself being quite so intensely shattered once I was driving my new car around, enjoying that first day with it as my car.

It's strange to think that was now a whole year ago. For a while I wondered whether May 29th would roll around and I would find myself thinking about the events of a year before throughout the day, perhaps having a quiet reflection on it and realising the bad and good aspects that have come from that particular day in my life. Yet, oddly, yesterday came and went without me actually noticing the date in a way that would have had me remembering the events of last year. It was a pretty busy day I suppose, especially in the evening going shopping for our meat and vegetables, then trying to sort out internet, and then finally having the water cut off at 10.30pm because of roadworks nearby. I remember at one stage yesterday thinking that something about the date looked quite familiar, or stood out a little, but I shrugged it off without actually thinking about things, as perhaps the date I had needed to remember for some reason that was now unnecessary, like hooking up the phone-line or something.

It is quite difficult to look back on the events of a year ago from a reasonably objective point of view. I have so many conflicting emotions about it, first and foremost a memory of my own heartache, the most horrible feelings I think I have ever felt. The most similar feelings to those which I felt that day seemed to be those when my grandmother had died. It may seem like an odd link between two things, but when you think about it I guess to me it almost felt like Jess had died, in that I wouldn't be able to see her again. Someone who had become such a massive part of my life over the past six months was now snatched away from me forever. There are differences, obviously in the fact that she is still alive out there, yet on the other hand because there wasn't a particularly clear and obvious reason for why she did what she did there was this finality lacking in my mind - perhaps similar to when someone goes missing but isn't confirmed to be either alive or dead. While I found myself obviously enormously upset about this relationship ending when it had seemed to have been going so well, and worried about ever finding someone else to have a relationship that would work that well, my other great feeling that developed was a simple missing of her, I guess like you would if someone who knew had died. Having to rely on the memories of them and not being able to experience being with them any longer.

After things going from bad to worse for a little while throughout June and early July, obviously in the last ten months life has generally been pretty good for me, and everything that went wrong during that time laid the platform for me to eventually rebuild my life in a way that's turned out to be clearly better to how it was before all the shit happened. It's a strange situation to find myself in, one where I still have such painful memories of what happened a year ago, yet at the same time I realise how necessary that pain was for me to end up where I am now with my life. I now realise that if those things hadn't have happened, I would definitely now be living a life that wouldn't be what I had hoped for and wanted - an oddly perhaps Jess could see that a lot earlier than I could and therefore made a decision that she knew would benefit both of us in the long-term, in the way it most definitely has for me.

I want to be able to reach back, to myself a year ago, and tell him that things will turn out fine, in fact even better than he could probably imagine. To tell him that he needs to give up on trying to understand why she did that, because he'll never know and trying to figure it out will just drive him insane. I want to tell myself of a year ago to back up everything on his computer so when it gets stolen he doesn't lose a whole pile of irreplacable data. To reassure myself that I will find someone who's not just as good as her, but so vastly better and more suitable for me in almost endless ways. Of course I can't do this, but I guess it's enormously comforting to realise that everything did turn out for the best, that it was all necessary pain, that it was because everything was so shit then that things can be so good now.

A Dream Blog
Now Playing: Snow Patrol - Hands Open
In so many ways I really wish I could write a "dream blog". I've only really come across one true dream blog before, it was the msot fantastically interesting reading that I wished I could emulate something like that. I have always known the raw material is there - my dreams are an interesting mix of things that would be amazingly fascinating to write about, often rich in detail and putting together such bizarre circumstances that would be not only interesting to read, but also totally hilarious. The All Black playing a rugby test in my parents' lounge - of course it would happen in one of my dreams!

Last week I knew that I had had a couple of really interesting dreams, and I was determined to make myself remember them and then relay them on here. Yet, as is usually the case, I could only remember a few snippets from them, like photographs really, with no real connection between them, by-in-large, leaving myself to try and figure out what would have happened in between these snippets. Trying to logically figure out my dream is, of course, a completely irrelevant task. Perhaps it was the way in which I found myself waking up most mornings that was robbing me of remembering my dreams, being jolted out of sleeping by my cellphone's alarm clock rather than gently waking up - like I think I managed for most of my childhood where I had trained my body to wake up at almost exactly 7.15am each and every morning. Of perhaps it was just the situation, the location, or my mind just immediately reverting to thinking about what lay ahead of me in the coming day rather than reflecting on my dream, or I was just forgetting how to remember them?

Often it's interesting how my memory of a dream does fade. When I'm asleep still it feels like my memory of the dream I've been having, or even of previous dreams that night, nights before or even years before, are at my fingertips. I can navigate around a dream Auckland through my memories of past dreams that I don't know about when awake. Immediately in the morning after I wake up I realise that world has slipped away from me, yet I still manage to clutch onto my memories of it - at least in part. As with most memories I have the memorable snippets from it, but in addition to that I can keep in my head the 'storyline' of how the dream went, even without its clear snippets. Yet as the day wears on, as my head gets filled with other things, that story slowly fades and if I'm lucky I find myself with just a reasonable number of snippets. If I'm not lucky everything goes.

Yet for some reason, perhaps the change of house, I have managed to find myself remembering a dream from each of the past three nights. As always, the details of them have slowly slipped away from me, but there are still some interestingly strange aspects to them. It must have been three nights ago now, but the first dream I remember was particularly humorous when I look back at it now. I was somewhere with Leila, Natalie, Aston and Amalia as well probably, and I was playing with Aston giving him a few cuddles and so on when he randomly said a proper word. I don't remember what word it was, but everyone was like really surprised that this not-even-two-month-old baby was saying a word. I remember when Amalia was about 6 months old the phone rang once, and Amalia said out loud "hello" in an absolutely perfect manner even though she hadn't said a proper word before then, and wouldn't say more for a while afterwards. So that experience probably helped justify what I had been hearing from Aston in this dream. However, he kept on saying words, at first one or maybe two together, but then progressively more and more, stringing a number of words together leaving everyone really amazed, and slightly weirded out by it all. I remember saying to someone, either Leila or Natalie I assume, that "if I wasn't here watching this I so wouldn't believe it was happening". I think I had a similar dream a year or so ago about Amalia, that although she was really young (in my dream perhaps around Aston's age) she was able to talk full sentences really well.

A couple of nights ago I had another pretty weird dream, which I remembered in quite impressive detail at the time, although obviously that's faded a little since then. In it I was back working at McDonald's, although not at the store I worked at most recently but at the old store at St Lukes (which now no longer exists thanks to a major renovation of the shopping mall there). However, in this dream I wasn't really working there, and I think it was set at this current stage of my life where I had the job that I do have at the moment. Nevertheless, in this dream I had decided to go work at this old McDonald's for a random shift. I snuck in, thanks to someone who I knew who was still working there, and managed to look the part enough to not be snapped by any managers currently working. The place seemed really busy, but I felt like Superman - able to cook a massive amount of Big Macs impossibly quickly, and then darting down to the Drive-Thru to help out there. The old St Lukes store had the most annoyingly designed Drive-Thru ever, with it being on the wrong side of the car for a start, and then having a 'bottom-booth' where you had to do drinks, take money and hand out each order during normal times. In the dream I was doing various parts of Drive-Thru, at first zipping through the main part of the store throwing burgers and fries into the myriad of bags I was carrying around, and then later on pouring drinks like crazy - reminiscent of Friday nights back in 2001 when I worked at that store.

It was surreal though, in that I felt as though I was half there, actually involved in what was happening, but at the same time half-removed from it - like someone in third person just sitting there watching what was happening. At one stage I mentioned to the other people working that I did in fact have another job, and that I would probably be heading back to that soon. The idea of working a little bit at McDonald's but heading back to my normal job obviously appeals to some aspect of my subconscious I suppose. I think that eventually I was either spotted by a manager, or decided that I had had enough of this, and I ended up leaving.

Then last night I found myself having a particularly odd dream, or at least a snippet of one. I was going to Eden Park to see a cricket match, although it was only a local match (State Championship for those interested). These matches are usually watched by about three men and one dog, so I was particularly surprised that Eden Park (the main ground) was at least half full, the kind of crowd that would be at a One Day International match, not a four-day domestic one. Everything seemed all bizarrely hyped for such a match, there were cheerleaders and fireworks everywhere and the crowd was getting into this match in a way that just wouldn't happen normally. Then things started to get even weirder as the ground seemed to narrow, a little at first but then more and more until it seemed like all that was left for a field was the pitch the players were playing on, I was sitting in the stands yet able to look up and down the pitch as if I was out there fielding in really close to the batsman. The ground seemed like a corridor of sorts, but then it began to turn into one, a hallway perhaps similar to the one in our new house, although it had an odd twist in it which made playing cricket a little bit challenging. By now I think I was playing in the game, and it had merged to some sort of informal indoor cricket. About then I think the dream either ended, or shifted on to something else.

Shifted
Now Playing: Evermore - Know Its True
It feels like last week was a very very long time ago now. Having completed the shift, and having the whole weekend feel so utterly surreal because of this new house, it feels quite bizarre that only a few days ago, on Friday morning, I headed to work from my parents place, the last time I would have a morning ritual there.

As a lot of my posts recently have stated, I was rather stressing out about the move, and worried that we would end up being constrained by ten million other little things that were going on, and it would turn into a never-ending mission. Fortunately I got the keys for the place on Thursday, which meant that although we weren't actually meant to shift in until Friday we could start moving some boxes that Thursday night. We managed to do a fair bit more than a few boxes in the end, making a decent dent into the furniture that would require shifting the next day, while moving all the boxes that had been at Leila's place and a fair few that had been at my parents' place. I felt greatly unburdened by the end of Thursday evening, that the extra amount of work that I had envisaged us struggling with on Saturday had now been done. The opportunity to stay at the house of Friday night, which we hadn't even really considered up until that point, also emerged, if everything went well on Friday.

I spent Friday running through in my head of the things that we would need to get done. The power had been sorted out, which was a relief, and after wandering around the house quite a few times on Thursday - shifting everything in - I had a better feel for how the place would be set up. After a fairly quick dinner at Leila's parents' place on Friday night (I was just itching to get stuck into things) we loaded up the cars for another trip over. Ella's old washing machine, which weighs an absolute tonne, was shifted slowly and carefully while everything just seemed to work and go to plan. We couldn't fit both couches on the trailer, but that didn't turn out to be a major problem as one of them could be shifted on Saturday. Packing up my room was a bit insane, as it had to be lived in until the last moment and therefore there were tonnes of random things everywhere that ended up in miscellaneous boxes. A trailer load and a few car loads from my parents' place later and we were done, everything (with juust a few random exceptions) was now at the new house. Mainly still in boxes and randomly everywhere, but at least it had been moved.

Slowly making the house feel like a real home, rather than just some big place full of empty rooms, was probably the most fun and exciting part of the whole moving process. Deciding where in the bedroom our bed would go, where the drawers should be, and even silly things like which cupboard the plates should go into, was exciting. Amber came over with some of her stuff, and then everyone managed to get the kitchen sorted out in a surprisingly short period of time. Box after box was emptied, then chucked out the back onto an ever-increasing pile. Amalia's room was particularly fun to do, with such a huge amount of space to work with I knew it would be easy for her to spread out all her toys over the floor and for that to not really be a problem. Leila and I had bought her a huge plastic container to hold all her Little People toys in, which got filled up right to the brim, surprising me a little due to the sheer number of them.

In the end, we had managed to sort out the house well enough to sleep there on Friday night, which was a very satisfying feeling. There were still a few things that would need to be brought across from other houses on Saturday, but by in large everything was done. Lying down to sleep in this enormous room felt so unreal, exciting yet almost unbelievable that this place was actually ours. Although some parts of the house aren't exactly ideal, a little tatty rather than anything particularly bad though, there are so many reasons why I am amazingly glad none of the other houses before this one worked out. There's the location, so close to buses for Leila and Amber, and within walking distance of Sandringham shops, there's the nice section, the nice bedrooms and lounge. But most of all there's the size, and when it comes to houses size does matter. This place is huge, which offers so much freedom and so many opportunities to not have to worry about things that would be problematic in smaller places. There's an enormously long and wide hallway to play indoor soccer, cricket, or whatever other past-time you fancy. The bedrooms are huge, the lounge is sizeable, the kitchen - while not equipped with particularly many benches, is big enough to fit a tonne of people in it without feeling crowded, and Leila's old desk has been added to provide more benchspace.

On Saturday I had a bit of time in the house to myself, with Leila at work, Amber at her parents' place organising stuff to come across, and Amalia at a birthday party. It gave me a little bit of time to reflect on the place, to come to terms with the fact that this was now my home, that this place was truly ours. I finished organising Amalia's room, sorted out a few technical things related to the phone, and pretty much relaxed for a while. It was strange that the time I had envisaged being absolutely insanely busy and stressful on Saturday had turned out to be an almost unnervingly quiet time. With no internet yet, and having built myself up to having an enormously busy Saturday morning, it felt weird to be there having almost nothing to do. Later in the day Amber did come back with some her things, Leila got home from work and Natalie brought Amalia over.

Yesterday was the first 'normal' day we had in the house, with a little bit of everything really. Amalia and I played indoor soccer with an infltable globe up and down the hallways seemingly for hours, I walked her down to the local playground, then had lunch at a really awesome cafe at the Sandringham shops with Amalia and Leila. We bumped into my old form teacher from high school, which was interesting, and then had the most amazingly nice Lemon Cake. I took her over to my parents' place for a while, then we went shopping for dinner, cooked dinner, bathed Amalia and had dinner before taking her back to Natalie's.

It's interesting at a stage such as this, a changing point where it's so obvious of what came before this moment, which will be so clearly distinct from everything after it. Amber, Leila and I all agreed that everything felt so unreal and almost impossible to believe. It was almost as though any moment we would realise our weekend away from normality was over and we'd be returning to our normal residences come Monday, or that our parents would just show up at any moment. I think it'll take a while before we realise that this is, in fact, our new reality, our new home. The place grows on me almost every day, and I can see us living there for quite some time.

Drawing Nearer
Now Playing: Fat Freddy's Drop - Flashback
I would like to be writing a blog update about something other than shifting house, but it does seem to be dominating my thinking at the moment that it just wouldn't feel right to be updating about something else. Over the last couple of days we have managed to take a few more steps towards ensuring that everything will be nicely organised for the move. I have the power sorted, I've packed up my room a lot more than it was before, the phone-line is nearly sorted out and so on. We're going to attempt to get as much done on Friday night as possible, without making it impossible to actually get some sleep that night, so that Saturday doesn't turn into a major mission. I am sure that unpacking at the other end will take some time, but I have confidence from the last time that I moved that a new house can be sorted out and organised in not too long of a period.

I had a rather weird dream last night about moving. At least I think it had something to do with moving in there. In my dream it had somehow become Saturday morning, or at least that's what it felt like. I was worrying where the whole of Friday had disappeared to, and also why it was dark when it should have been light, or light when it should have been dark. I felt slightly panicked that a day seemed to have just been lost, though at the same time we might have actually been in our new house in my dream. It's quite frustrating that I can't remember more about that dream, just little snippets like there was a moment where I was going to a rugby match at Eden Park, another part where I was lying in bed being really weirded out by the time, and another bit where it seemed like I was somewhere completely strange, like out at Piha beach. When I initially woke up, the dream was still reasonably complete in my mind, and I tried to follow it through again, in my conscious state, to help firm it up in my mind. I did run through a general series of events, but in my sleepy state I could feel my memory of it just slowly slip away. Just another frustration of how I struggle to remember my dreams, even though they're often so rich in detail that I know they would make the most fantastically interesting stories and blog posts if I did manage to ever remember on in its entireity. Annoyingly, my ability to remember dreams seems to have diminished more and more in the past few years - as I am sure back a few years ago I was able to remember them much more frequently, and in much more detail than I can these days.

I know that in the next couple of days I will dream about it pouring down with rain on Friday night and Saturday morning, dream that all the number of things that could go wrong, will. While I always seem like a fairly laid-back and stress-free person, I think that's mainly the case because I manage to deal with those feelings in a less obvious way than many other people do. I obviously still get stressed, and still worry about things going wrong, it's just that I don't flip out about them, rather they just slowly eat away at me, and remind me about those stresses whilst I'm sleeping. Fortunately, with each passing day, I feel less and less stressed about the move. As one thing after the next gets ticked off the "to do list" I feel calmed and reassured that by Saturday night we will have a nicely set up home, with power, with a telephone line, and not too far away from having internet.

Moving Anticipation
Now Playing: Snow Patrol - Same
It's an odd feeling at the moment, a realisation that by this time next week I'll be living in a different place, a place of my own. Hopefully the power will be on, there might even be a phone-line set up and with a slice of luck internet as well. Our furniture will be reorganised into a nice, liveable house, we'll have a bedroom of our own, a kitchen set up and ready to go. A home that's truly ours. It's an exciting feeling you know, but at the same time it is a bit freaky.

It's not the idea of having my own place again that's freaky, in fact it's enormously exciting yet hard to imagine, in the same way that just before you got overseas on a holiday you know that things will be so vastly different in such a short period of time into the future, yet it's difficult to imagine that future as real. The scary part of the upcoming week is simply organising everything, making sure that there is power on when we move in, that we have enough trailers to make sure everything goes smoothly and doesn't take forever, to make sure that we'll be able to sort out the house in a way that doesn't drive us insane. I'm somewhat surprised that this time I'm getting freaked and stressed out by it, considering that I'm the one who has done this moving thing on many occasions before. Yet this time seems different, this time it's me who's the driving force behind organising everything, I'm the one who is experienced and should be the one who knows what to do, rather than just relying on everyone else. The responsibility is a little freaky, and although somewhere in the back of my mind I do have trust that things will go OK, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done before I can truly feel relaxed. From prior experience I don't even want to look at the weather forecast, as I just know it'll pour down with rain at some stage on Saturday.

Anyway, on Sunday Leila and I stopped by at our future house to have a look at it again. Leila hasn't actually been inside the place yet, as it was Amber and I who checked it out originally a week back. Leila had briefly looked at it from the outside earlier in the week, but this time it has been vacated, so we could afford to have a good peer in the windows and check out the place as well as possible. My fears about there being no wardrobe in Leila and I's room proved to be unfounded, as there is a fairly impressively sized one. Further to that Leila got a good look at the dining room and kitchen, and I managed to very carefully navigate the extremely narrow driveway that leads up to our carport. Something tells me getting a trailer up there on Saturday will be a mission and a half.

So while it doesn't feel quite real yet that we will be moving, and the next week looms ahead of me like an amazingly daunting prospect, there's still excitement there. I am looking forward to that time, looking forward to getting everything organised and sitting here, this time next week, from a new house. Our house.

Packing
Now Playing: Blackfield - Scars
Whilst discovering that within a week or so we would at last have a place of our own was a fantastic feeling, it also confirmed a lot of work ahead. Packing. Joyous. Having become the moving-pro throughout the past few years, having moved on about six occasions within the past three and a bit years, I should know what to do, I should be feeling calm about it, knowing how long it'll all take, knowing what needs to be done. Yet it's still daunting, I look around my room and realise how much there is that needs to be packed away, how much furniture will need to be shifted, how many things we thought we had but we don't actually have, the huge number of things that will need to be sorted out at the other end, and just this feeling that there's so much more to do before we'll finally get to the point where it feels like a home.

In the past I've been in the situation where the house doesn't really become unpacked for months afterwards, and I certainly don't want to go there again. Not having everything where you want it to be makes you feel like your life's in limbo: you can't do this because you don't know which box the important thing is, you can't do that because you are sure you should have unpacked it, but it's just nowhere to be seen. Boxes are everywhere, the phoneline isn't hooked up yet, the internet isn't going, it's just chaotic. But of course that passes, and often it hasn't actually been that bad. There's a sense of excitement too, living in a new place, and I suspect moving from here into a big house there will be this enormous feeling of space, that I will no longer feel claustrophobic in a small room, that I'll have space to spread things out, that it won't feel cluttered and that I won't have to climb across half a million things just to get to my desk, or the bed.

It's difficult to convince myself that our new place will become my home, in just over a week. Driving through Sandringham I search for the nearest dairy, the video shop, the liquor store, whether there's a nice cafe anywhere. This relatively unfamiliar suburb will become my local area, my patch. It'd be good if I was Indian, with the place providing every sort of Indian or Pakistani food imaginable, Bollywood videos and so on. I wonder how long it'll take before the new place feels like home to me, whether it will be odd having all my stuff in an unfamiliar house, whether it will immediately feel like 'my place' or whether that will take longer. I wonder how the place will feel on a cold winter's evening, will it be nice and cosy? Will we freeze our butts off? Will I learn where all the light-switches are quickly? So many things to happen, so much potential excitement. Even though I have done the moving thing quite a few times before, there's still quite an excitement, I am looking forward to it very much.

A Long Day
Now Playing: Snow Patrol - You Could Be Happy
It's difficult to say when the day actually starts, is it at 5.20am when my alarm sounds? Is it a few hours before then when I randomly wake up, feel not sleepy at all, head racing with weird Harry Potter dreams where I'm in the stories but not really either as myself nor any of the main characters, in a sort of narrator type way. Is it later than that, when I dream about spending the previous evening at work so that I don't need to wake up early as I never actually go to sleep (and the time passes so incredibly quickly)? In any way, it's too early for me. After looking forward to my Napier flight so much a couple of weeks ago, this next one - to Tauranga - has turned into an annoyance. Three or four changes later to the schedule I find myself forced into a 6.50am flight as there aren't any seats left on the 8.45am one, and therefore required to wake up at a particular ungodly hour of the morning. Wait, I correct that, 5.20am doesn't even deserve to be classified as morning, it's the kind of hour that you should never see, unless it's at the very tail end of a hard night out. Even then, one should really be in bed by that stage or you're really going to regret it the next day.

But I stumble out of bed, I have done this before I tell myself. There was a while, back almost five years ago now, when waking up around 6am was the norm for me, and while this is a bit earlier than that, it's just a once off, I can live with it. The early night plans went slightly out the window, and then I struggled to get to sleep, and then I had crazily intense Harry Potter dreams, and then the weird dream about spending the whole night working. There's something deeply disconcerting about dreaming events that will happen throughout the day ahead of you, even if they're a little fucked up, as it's so much easier for your subconscious to think of it as real. Nevertheless, I manage to find some clothes, gulp down a yoghurt, stick my contacts into my eye balls without too much pain, and get out the door by around 5.45am. A bit ahead of schedule, half an hour to the airport, should mean that I have a bit of breathing space.

Driving through the street of Auckland at that time of the morning is so glorious it's almost worth the early rise. There's barely a car to be seen, all the lights magically turn green as you approach them, the place is just so eerily quiet and serene it doesn't feel like Auckland at all - but in a good way. Even though a really convoluted route is required to get from my house to the airport, including driving past our 'house to be' (well, near enough to it), I manage to get all the way out there in only 20 minutes. So I'm way ahead of schedule, it's still not nearly light, I'm stressing now that the person I'm going to Tauranga with won't show up, perhaps because I misread an email and the flights hadn't changed from tomorrow till today. Time goes on, I read a bit of my book, a bit of the reports that the workshops will be on later in the day to refamiliarise myself with them, stress a bit more, then finally relax as I see her. Good, I won't be getting to Tauranga for a completely pointless reason.

The flight there is pretty non-descript. It feels odd to be in a plane for only 30 minutes, like by the time it seems we've hit our cruising altitude the captain informs us that we're about to begin our descent. In a way it feels much too short, although after being on a number of flights I wished like anything to be shorter, it's weird thinking of a flight as not long enough. Yet this is how it feels. We close in on Tauranga, generally the world underneath is cloudy, the sun has just risen out to the east, but I was on the wrong side of the plane to truly experience what could have been an awesome sunrise. I make out Tauranga airport below, although it seems as though we've overshot it, before the pilot turns a hard right, and brings us back level. It seems strange doing such a sharp turn that close to the ground, especially as in Auckland the flight path is long and straight. We fly over a golf-course, freakily low, as I do my normal half-panic on the landing. I guess I always consider how easy it would be for the pilot to mis-judge their descent and for us to hit the ground a few hundred metres too early, or too late for that matter, and no matter how many times I try to convince myself that everything will be fine, I still can't stop myself from slightly stressing out each time I come in to land.

My time in Tauranga passes uneventfully. The workshop goes well, I get lots of reading done because there's just masses of time to spare, I have a walk around the city for a bit, then get to the airport far too early, which gives me the chance for more reading. After Auckland's airport, Tauranga's is quite amusing really. One flight comes in all the time I'm waiting there, which of course is the very plane I'm going to go on back to Auckland, but at other times I'm entertained by tiny little private planes taking off and landing all over the place. I think how cool it would be to have a plane of your own, to just have that freedom to fly whenever you wanted. Then again it would probably be amazingly expensive to not only buy a plane, but to also keep it maintained, get a pilot's license, get the proper fuel and so on. Maybe in a dream-life.

Boarding time finally rolls around again, and we're all squished like sardines in to the uncomfortably small plane. The engines roar again, the acceleration is mind-blowing - perhaps this is the closest I'll ever come to zipping along in a really expensive supercar. Then we're up, straight into the sun I notice looking up along the plane. Good thing I'm not flying it. I get a good look at Tauranga as we ascend, trying to make sense out of all the different little peninsulas and arms of the harbour that make up the city.

We get up above the clouds eventually, and the world seems a different place, a much calmer place. I look down on the clouds, it's amazing how solid they seem - like giant bundles of cotton wool. It looks like if I jumped on them it would be the most comfortable bed ever, and I would just bounce forever. Perhaps it's my tiredness talking, making me dream of impossibly comfortable beds. Yet, as I look down I spot the odd gap in the clouds, and see a patchwork of farmland below. In a way it spoils the effect, makes it obvious that these are not giant cotton-wool beds, but instead just boring clusters of watervapour that I would fall straight through. In another sense though, the world underneath is interesting, it almost looks like a model version of reality - as though someone's made a huge pretend model out of little pieces of cardboard to represent trees. I look ahead, and the clouds rise away into the distance, then up to the amazingly clear blue sky. It feels beautifully lonely up here, as though the plane is in a world of its own far removed from the rest of the world, yet you feel on top of things, that from this point you can see anything and know everything. I try to envisage the clouds as an endless ice landscape, and it's quite convincing really, looking perhaps how Antarctica would from a helicopter skimming over the snow.

Of course the beauty of the cloud tops can't last. We descent into them, then the world comes much closer, I get my landing tension again - although oddly this time I'm worried that we're coming down too slowly and we won't be able to land on the runway in time. But of course I'm wrong, we land fine. Then it's truly back to reality, struggling through Auckland traffic for the next couple of hours over to pick up Leila, then to pick up Amalia, then bringing everyone back home. By the end of it the day seems to have stretched forever, was yesterday a different day or just part of the same long event? Was the morning seriously the same day as it now seems so long ago? I watch Shrek 2 with Amalia, and draw some pictures. She's in a nice, happy, cuddle mood, and goes to sleep relatively early for her. I collapse into bed soon after, the light goes off, darkness. Joyful.

At Last
Now Playing: Coldplay - The Hardest Part
It had become quite easy to think that it would never happen, as our search for a house to move into seemed to drag on and on. A couple of months was longer than it had ever taken to secure a place before, although our search had been a little bit here and there this time, lots of looking but not really that much popping up which fitted our needs. When something good did come along, there was either that highly annoying one little thing that spoiled the place, or we'd apply and get no response. Himikera Ave - gone before we had a chance; Ahiriri Road - no response; New North Road - no response despite a good number of reminder emails from myself. It had started to feel a bit hopeless really, which is always a frustrating feeling as time wears on, and the idea of having a whole house being yours becomes more than more appealing. Fitting the needs of three different people into one probably didn't help much either, along with getting ourselves to viewing times and thinking not only from our own perspective about whether it would be suitable, but also from everyone else's perspective.

But, finally we have managed to find a place. It's a little rough around the edges, in a groovy student-flat kinda way, but has enormous potential to be an awesome home. Visiting it on Saturday, we knew that it had a few things in its favour and a few things against it. The location was great, within sight of a bus stop and pretty close to my work, the rooms looked quite sizeable and there was a bath. Going against it, no dishwasher and a rather bizarre looking kitchen with limited bench space. In the end we figured it would tip on the size of the bedrooms. So on Saturday afternoon Amber and I went to check the place out, as Leila was at work. We took Amalia along, which probably turned out to be an awesome idea as she charmed the Real Estate Agent. The house was generally as expected, a bit rough around the edges but feeling like it had tonnes of potential. The bedrooms were surprisingly large, the lounge was big and separate from a dining area, and the kitchen - while weird in the way it had such limited bench-space, was big enough for us to fit a table into in order to add to that. Most definitely potential here. Front garden and back garden looked nice, level and with a lawn as well as generally fenced off. We loved the place, although having been in this situation before I didn't want to get my hopes up too high, as my knowledge of Real Estate Agents reminded me this may yet be another dead-end path.

However, as we left the place, we were informed that we would have first choice on the property, which was awesomely promising. Throughout the rest of the weekend we all tried to keep our excitement in check, as there was always a foreboding feeling that something might randomly go wrong, and we'd end up enormously disappointed. Yet, this morning, those fears proved unfounded and on May 25th we'll be moving into our new place. Sweet.

Graduation
Now Playing: Silverchair - Straight Lines
There's a slight sense of deja vu, in that I have been here before. Twice in fact, once in May 2003 and once in May last year. I know what's coming, I know how things will proceed throughout the day, yet it's different this time. Obviously it's different. This time it's Leila dressed up in the fancy robes that before you put them on you think will look amazingly stupid, but somehow end up looking really really great. In a way it's a little sad to not be doing the whole graduation thing myself, once again, but I've been there twice, I've enjoyed it, and in a different way it's also very satisfying to see Leila enjoying the limelight, getting some recognition for all those long hours finishing last minute essays, the stresses before exams, the endless lectures, and so on.

We mill around the graduation marquee waiting for 9.30am, when the parade will begin. There's nibbles all over the place, champagne (which feels a bit odd at this time of the morning) and really nice orange juice. A great deal of Auckland's future stars are concentrated within such a small area it's almost exciting, not to mention all the staff members too. I expect to see a whole pile of mild acquaintances, but apart from spotting someone I think I used to play table tennis against at high school, and my thesis supervisor, there really aren't too many. Perhaps it's a sign that I have really moved on from university, or perhaps it's just a bit of chance. We queue for ages to get photos, then give up when the line hasn't moved forever, check out the cute little Auckland University graduation bears - rather expensive little things too actually.

Seemingly finally, the call goes out for the graduands to line up as they will be seated in the town hall, and for everyone else to leave. After a major panic earlier in the morning resulting from lost tickets, I finally feel calm enough yet again to be truly excited about this. The procession is not too far away, the best part of the whole day really except for your three seconds of glory across the stage to receive your degree. Leila's parents and I hurry out to find ourselves a nice spot where we can follow Leila on her nice journey through the streets of central Auckland. After a while, the graduands have finally organised themselves and they emerge from the marquee, cameras flash everywhere, over-enthusiastic parents get almost squashed by the procession, as it slowly moves towards the road. Then there's another wait, I remember it was at this stage last year it started to rain on us all, a tad annoying. However, this year the weather's fine, couldn't be better really, as everyone waits around for the traffic to be cleared from the roads further down. At last, the marching band starts again on the bag-pipes, and everyone's off for real this time. It's quite cool watching from the sides really, following Leila as she makes her way down Bowen Ave, down Victoria Street, and onto Queen Street. A nearby Kindergarten has stopped for the moment, everyone leaning over the fence cheering. Shop assistants pop out to see the big deal, cameras flashing and waving everywhere. It's awesome seeing the city celebrate its graduates, recognising the hard work they've all put in over the years and truly acknowledging their achievements.

The roadworks on Queen Street separate everyone off from them for a while, but eventually we come back together, for a last message of good luck, before they all disappear into the Town Hall. We take our seats, then wait for the graduates to take theirs, as they've been reorganised after the procession. There's some old-fashioned pomp and ceremony, a bit of singning that reminds of intermediate school assemblies, and then the seemingly endless procession of people receiving their awards. It's difficult to feel excited for all of them, to clap for every single person who crosses the stage, but we do our best, and give out a good loud holler as Leila makes her way across the stage to receive her degree. In the end the repetition wasn't as bad as I thought it might have been, considering I didn't have the anticipation or the excitement of actually receiving a degree myself.

We meet up again. have some lunch, compulsory photos in Albert Park and then eventually head home. Leila comments that it's been a surreal day, which I guess is a pretty good way to sum up graduation. It's this really good moment, a time to feel special and recognised for all those tricky moments at 10.30pm on a Tuesday night writing the last few lines of the essay due tomorrow, or the moments when you check your essay due dates and find you've got two to write within the next week. Or the boring lectures, or the stupid tutorial person who didn't know what they were talking about but truly thought they did. All those things somehow manage to become worth it on that day of graduation. It's nice.

The Dancer
Now Playing: Sia - Butterflies
It's fairly early still, perhaps 10.30ish on a Saturday night. The bar seems reasonably full from the outside, with a number of people partially inside and partially outside, perhaps they're the smokers, who have thankfully been banished from poisoning the rest of us with their cigarette smoke for the last couple of years. Yet inside it feels oddly deserted, a huge dance floor lies seemingly abandoned in the middle of the place, a few people cluster around the bar ordering drinks, while more are spread around the edge of the place, each in their own semi-cubicle surrounded by comfy cushions and a dark decor that feels oddly homely and foreboding at the same time. The whole communist headquarters thing really does seem to work actually, and although it's difficult to think of a communist headquarters in such a non-serious way (especially after the amount of Russian history I've studied), it's a cool gimmick. There's about 40 different types of Vodka in the drink menu, stuff I've never heard of, stuff hardly anyone outside the bar has probably ever heard of. But inside you feel like you might be the next one heading to the gulags if you don't order something with at least a little bit of vodka in it. After all, this is the Lenin Bar at the Viaduct, my new favourite bar in the city.

Leila and I do the girly thing, and order cocktails. I feel as though my manliness has been dealt a slight blow by not ordering something more... well... yuck, but hey who cares? Might as well get something that actually tastes good. Leila sticks with the amazingly good cocktail we got last time we were at the Lenin Bar, a fruity combination of passionfruit and mandarin that is simply divine. I go for a powerful apple thing, which is OK, but not nearly as nice as Leila's passionfruit one. We settle down, the place is still pretty slow but a few people who seem to be trying to get the dance floor going, but really without any success. Next to where we're sitting there's a couple whose mouths seem to be permanently attached to each other. The people sitting on the other side of us laugh amongst each other, someone calls out "breathe... breathe...." to the seemingly joined couple, everyone giggles.

Back on the dance floor, the optimists continue to try and get things going. There's one guy in particular, quite tall, funny black-rimmed glasses, who obviously thinks he's god's gift to dancing. I disagree, but that's not really the point I suppose. Perhaps it's the number of drinks that means he's able to just dance around by himself in the middle of the non-existent dance-floor without becoming enormously embarrassed and quickly disappearing to never be seen again, or perhaps he's always like this? I wonder what it would be like to have that sort of self-confidence, not worrying that I look like an idiot in front of heaps of strangers, or just being able to have that confident freedom to just dance if I want to dance. Surely it would be liberating, to break away from needing to feel normal, needing to ensure I didn't make an ass out of myself, needing to feel accepted by those around me. But on the other hand, my logical mind reminds me that perhaps it's a good idea I don't have the self-confidence to do such things, that whatever he's attempting doesn't seem to be particularly effective at either attracting girls or giving others the push-start necessary to get the dance floor going. But I guess he's having fun, perhaps that's the main thing?

Slowly the dance floor does become populated. A Hen's Party sees to that, as a whole mass of costumed young women stagger into the bar, obviously already having had a few, and take over the dance floor. Every single guy in the place seems to want to try their luck on this enormous group of girls, but they seem to be quite happy to stick to their own. Leila reminds me that on Ella's Hen's Party the number of guys who claimed to be on a Stag-Do who wanted to join up was staggering. Perhaps they think it's an effective way to score?

After a while Leila and I head off home, it had been a pretty long day really and my head was hurting like hell. But it had been a very pleasant evening, with a great dinner followed up by a good trip into town. A good way to spend a Saturday night.

The Numbers Forum
Now Playing: Fat Freddy's Drop - Flashback
Early 2004 was probably one of the busiest times in my life ever. Recently moved into the first real place that felt like "mine", baby either on the way very soon or just born, and on top of all that I had my busiest semester of university ever. I look back at it in an interesting sense - a sort of admiration that I managed to make it through that time with my sanity intact, and that I actually coped with it all pretty damn well. It's an easy stage of my life to categorise, as I just recall any memories I have of being at the Rugby Road flat where Natalie, I and Amalia (for the first couple of months of her life lived). Seemingly never-ending dishes, watching Nip/Tuck after ER on Monday nights, Criminal Intent after CSI on Sunday nights, with Rove after them both. Writing essays in the bedroom, on the lay-z-boy at 2.00am in the morning, there are a lot of memories I have associated with that time.

Funnily enough, one big memory of that stage was my obsession with The Numbers Forum. I had been visiting the main site for almost two years at that stage, getting my almost daily updates of how well movies were doing in the USA - somewhat to fulfil my curiosity for what good films would be coming out in New Zealand soon, but in other ways just another path for me to fill my obsessions with statistics and numbers. I learned all sorts of useless trivia: Titanic made $600 million in the US, Spider-Man's opening weekend was $114 million, Shrek 2 opened in 4,100 theatres and so on. It was interesting and addictive though, and once I discovered that there was a forum attached to the webpage, where people like me could discuss how movies were doing, and predict how well we thought some of the ones coming up would do (and 10 million other things), I was totally hooked. Checking back on the forum these days, it's interesting to see that I made about 1,200 posts on it - largely compressed into the space of just a few months in the early months of 2004 - and how interesting and amusing our threads often became.

It's particularly interesting how that stage of my life was so intertwined with my discussions within this forum. I read the replies I made and I can picture myself back in Rugby Road, laptop on knee, network cords cris-crossing everywhere, trying to get one more reply in to a thread before I had to get back to that Environmental Geography essay that needed doing. I can still picture myself excited at how well Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azhkaban did on its first day of release, but then disappointed when initial predictions were lowered and it hadn't beaten Spider-Man's record - and of course the twelve pages of discussion that accompanied those few days. At other times, sitting in the computer labs at Auckland University when I really should have been studying, but instead getting caught up in whether Shrek 2's first weekend would drag up the performance of The Day After Tomorrow, or whether it would drag it down. Once a week everyone in the forum would take their time to predict the subsequent weekend's final figures, and with a little bit of practice and thought it was amazing how close we got. I think on one occasion I managed to get the closest of all according to the estimates for the weekend figures, only for the actual takings to push me down to 2nd place.

Since it's hey-day I have occasionally returned to The Numbers Forum. After all, it was that site which as much as anything else led to me stopping writing in my blog for a few months at the end of 2004 and start of 2005. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of people had a similar experience of the forum to that I had, and after going crazy with posts (some had up to 5800 posts on the forum, my 1200 paled into insignificance compared to that) they slowly drifted away. I suppose that all along the forum did rely on only a few people to keep things going, but in another way I think that's what attracted me to it, that it was small enough for me to get to know a few of the other people posting there, and for threads to advance slowly enough for me to not end up completely lost if I couldn't get on for a day or so. However, these days I find the forum largely abandoned, apart from a few people trying to sell stuff on there, posts which are probably worse than nothing. Maybe one day it will be revived, I certainly know that there would be a lot to talk about if we were to get things going again. It would also be interesting to find out where the people I regularly talked to on there are these days, what they're up to and how things have changed for them in the last three years. A bit like my old Yahoo Chat days really.

Flying
Now Playing: Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms
The flight attendant scans my boarding pass, I head through the gate and out into the boarding area. Gate 48 says my pass, right at the end I bet, and I start walking down towards the planes. This is the cheap-ass end of Auckland airport, the commuter flights to smaller centres on the smaller planes. There's none of the comforts you get from international flights or larger domestic flights, no little tunnels to walk through straight into the plane. I remember first coming to this part of the airport when we went to Great Barrier Island when I was 14, and then again later that year when my school's geography quiz class won a scenic flight over Auckland. It's more low-key, but in other ways it is more interesting as you're actually on the concrete runway. I keep walking towards Gate 48, which really is right at the end of all the gates, and eventually spot my plane. Seems to be the same one that took me to Nelson last time I flew at the end of last year. There it is, sitting on the runway - about a 50 seater - and looking a bit small actually. I admire it for a minute, amazed by the simple fact that this machine can defy gravity and get us halfway across the country in an hour - a distance that would take about six hours to drive.

I climb up the stairs and into the plane - seat 4A is fourth row on the right the air hostess informs me. Seat A, must be a window seat, awesome I'll be able to look out the window as we take off. I always seem to end up on the left side of aeroplanes when I take off at Auckland. I settle down in my chair, hopefully nobody ends up sitting next to me so that I'm able to spread out my stuff. Should I put my bag in the overhead locker? No it'll fit under the seat in front of me, and plus I want to be able to access the stuff I have in my bag, read a bit more Harry Potter and possibly even refresh myself once again on the report I'm presenting at the workshop. I get my iPod out and start listening to it - reminding me of when we took off to Canada almost two years ago. Finally everyone's in the plane and we start taxiing down the runway, it's a typical day in Auckland weather-wise and we're going to take off to the west, then probably hook around down to the south. Pretty typical, but a bit frustrating as it means I won't get to see much of Auckland as we head up, but then the weather's not particularly great so perhaps I won't miss much. We gather a bit of speed, heading down towards the end of the runway. We're at the end of the airport we want anyway, so it's not long before we're in position to take off. I spot a larger plane further up the runway, stopped like us. Waiting. Then in the distance I spot an incoming plane, three lights in the distance slowly becoming bigger and bigger, turning into a plane, coming closer and closer then zipping past in front of us. As soon as the plane is past we're on the move again, in front of the other, larger, plane. Here we are, ready to go.

Normally the pilots bring the plane to a complete halt before gunning the engines, but this guy gets a rolling start and then puts the foot down. This is probably my favourite part of flying, as everyone's literally thrown back into their chairs from the acceleration. It's like the on-ramp of a motorway, where you jam your foot onto the accelerator and speed up to meet the traffic, but this time the plane just keeps going, I don't know how fast we're going, but the feeling is awesome. Perhaps we're doing 200 kilometre's per hour, perhaps more. I look down, and see the wheel rolling over the runway as we somehow manage to gather even more speed. The plane seems to lift up a little, I know that it won't be long before we're up in the air, and sure enough, below me I can see the wheel lose contact with the runway, the ground slowly retreats below us and we're in the air. Once we're off the ground the pilot ascends quickly, it seems like we're close to a 45 degree angle, we bank to the left, heading over the Manukau Harbour, and I gaze back to see if I can spot the airport as we turn. Sure enough there it is, amazingly small and distant considering the small time we've been airborne for. The rest of Auckland lies beyond, as we turn to the south and head over the south head of the Manukau Harbour. There are farms below us, a few roads that I can make out, some surprisingly big houses, a few fields cultivated with some type of fruit and vegetable, everything looks so neat and tidy, I'm reminded of Google Earth, and then it all disappears as we hit the cloud level. It's always a bit disappointing when that happens, like this amazing view that has just been snatched away from you. The plane bumps through the clouds a bit, and then we're above them, and the view - while not quite as interesting as before - is once again quite different. The tops of the clouds seem to form amazing shapes, to stretch on and on forever. I wonder how far I'm able to see, I wonder how far away those most distant coulds are, how far away the horizon is, whether it would be possible to see the shape of the North Island as would be seen on a map if the clouds weren't there. It'll be interesting to see what Napier looks like from the air once we come in to land.

For now I just settled back and read a bit more of my Harry Potter book. Listening to my iPod, reading Harry Potter, on a plane... now this is definitely how all my days at work should be! I thought back to my first main flight - down to Wellington in the May holidays of 1993. My excitement was unbelievable, as while I had been on a couple of short flights to Waiheke back in the days of sea-planes, this truly was the real deal. We would be travelling the whole length of the country, going in a real plane way above the clouds. I remember watching the plane take off, magically transfixed that it could go up so high so quickly, looking down on the clouds so far below us that it seemed like they were sitting on top of the sea, glancing across to see the central North Island volcanoes rise above the clouds, being taken up to the front of the plane (ah the glorious pre 9/11 days) and looking ahead to see the Southern Alps of the South Island. That was truly one of the most awesome days of my childhood. Yet I counted, this flight would have been the 20th time I had taken off (I think) on the flight, was I becoming jaded from it all I wondered, sitting there in the plane reading Harry Potter. Would I end up like those other people reading the newspaper while the plane takes off one day? Like the people in Sydney who read their newspapers while crossing the harbour bridge, even though out the window they had one of the most amazing views in the world down to the Opera House and taking in the rest of the glorious harbour...

Nah! I think I'll always enjoy the kick of the acceleration as the plane hurtles down the runway before taking off. I'll always feel slightly apprehensive as we come in to land - hoping that the pilot hasn't messed things up enough to land us in the sea, or in someone's living room. I'll always enjoy it (just not long-haul flights - they do suck!)

A Day in the Life
Now Playing: Snow Patrol - In My Arms
Reading through other people's blogs and then coming back to mine I often get the feeling that for some reason mine seems way more serious than the others, and that I'm not really quite sure why. I mean my life, while generally serious, has its funny parts. Amusing things happen, I think that I have a reasonable sense of humour and I don't usually tell jokes that go down like a lead balloon, but when it comes to writing in here I feel like I need to be totally serious, to write about pressing issues going on in my life, to recall things that happened in my life in a serious manner and to even relay funny things in an overly serious way. Perhaps it's the "tone" that this blog has developed, one that for some reason feels quite serious and just wouldn't work if I was to go totally insane and out my mind saying crazy and bizarre things all the time (wow even writing those few words seemed to feel odd). Maybe I will try to be funnier, maybe I will try to show that my life isn't a serious set of things happening all the time, that I do have fun.

So I find myself sitting here at work, where I generally update these days, especially on a week like this which is pretty quiet because I finished off just about everything I've been working on at the end of last week and my boss keeps on disappearing over Auckland before we can sort out what to move onto next. As long as I have reasonable productive things to do (like update this blog, read other people's blogs, search Wikipedia for critical information like who won the 2001 Tri-Nations series, oh... and of course ensure that I am ready for important work stuff coming up) I shouldn't end up too bored. I have my iPod playing to keep myself entertained with a bit of music (Dire Straits playing at the moment... how 80s!) and an occasionally entertaining view out my window across the street to the other side of the road, a few more houses and so on. There's a van parked outside, nothing unusual about that, we end up with all sorts of cars parked outside here as we're close to a bus stop, close to a caravan park, close to a supermarket and so on, so all sorts of cars end up parking outside the office. This van has curtains across the back windows, perhaps the person owning it sleeps in there at night? That would rather suck, sleeping every night in the back of your van. But at least he's got a sense of humour, and has painted a green monster and white ghost on the side of his van - Ghostbuster's style. Other than him, the scene remains calm and peaceful - sometimes a police car will cruise past, and sit in wait for speeding vehicles zipping down the street here as they try to short-cut between New North Road and Blockhouse Bay Road. Across the road are surely the worst drivers in Auckland, who every time they back out of their driveway manage to find a way to either come amazingly close to the fence, or run over their recycle bin. I used to park my car out on the road, but after watching them come agonisingly close to wiping out other cars parked on the street, I wisely began parking on the driveway here. My boss says that he once saw them run over a pile of cardboard they had put out for recycling about 15 times, perhaps because they kept on wondering what that strange sound was as they drove over the pile.

Time has gone by pretty slowly today. I guess that's because there isn't particularly much going on at the moment. I have a trip to Napier to look forward to tomorrow, although the workshop which is the reason for the trip may be a little scary as it places quite a lot of responsibility on me to make things work, in front of our biggest client as well. But I feel calm about it, I spent all of Thursday last week printing out about 10 million pages that ensured I have everything I need not only for the Napier workshop, but also for subsequent ones next Wednesday in Tauranga/Whakatane. I know what I'm talking about regarding these workshops, I basically wrote the reports myself at the end of last year, I have everything I need for them. I've re-acquainted myself with specific findings in the last couple of days, I'll have more time to do that tomorrow as well on the aeroplane - unless I want to just relax and enjoy myself if the view's nice out the window. Or perhaps it's a chance to read a bit more of the Harry Potter book I'm a quarter of the way through (book 5 by the way, not my favourite one but I need to get myself familiar with it again as the movie's coming out in the next couple of months as well as book 7).

Perhaps there are other productive things that I could be doing. The house-hunting process seems to be going nowhere at the moment which is enormously frustrating. Every place we've applied to has not bothered to get back to us, not even to say that we haven't got the house, and the length of the process is just beginning to move beyond the mildly frustrating and into the highly annoying. It feels so powerless this process, almost like trying to find a job. Putting in an application, hoping we fit all their criteria, hoping they liked us, hoping they'll think we're reasonable people, hoping for one to finally work out, hoping that we'll eventually find a house of our own. After having my parents' house to ourselves a couple of weeks back, it reminded me how nice it is to have that freedom of the house feeling like your own, of being able to watching whatever you want on TV whenever you want to watch it, of being able to choose what and when you have dinner, to be able to play music on the stereo in the lounge without worrying about annoying other people. To just have a place that feels like my own for a week was great, and it has made me realise how much I am looking forward to moving out, and subsequently how frustrating it has become that we keep on getting no responses.

More cars drive past outside. Quite a few vans. Some slowly make their way around the corner near us, while others rip around thinking that they're not going to make it up the hill unless they really put the foot down. I guess it's only a matter of time before someone messes up the corner big time, and either ends up in the creek or at least through one of the nearby fences. Lunch time isn't too far away, a chance to get out of the office for a while and experience Avondale - wonder what I'll get for lunch? Must remember to send my boss' mail up to Singapore, check the PO Box, hopefully there'll be something for me from the Waitakere City Council either today or tomorrow. Sorry, I digress.

I do enjoy my job, don't get me wrong here. In so many ways it's the perfect job for me at this stage of my life - a variety of different things, a bit of freedom to get things done the way I like to do them. I have a growing stature, a chance to show people that I know what I'm talking about. I have more and more client interaction, I'm running three workshops over the next two weeks that may have a huge impact on parts of Whakatane, Napier and Tauranga. It's interesting, it is fun a lot of the time, and it does give me the chance to feel like I'm making a bit of a difference, even if that's only in a very minor way at the moment. Yet, as I'm sure all workers will understand, it doesn't stop the day-to-day process of things from being boring at times. Especially when there's not particularly much to do, as I feel bad about not doing more work stuff until I realise there isn't actually much to do, and end up comforting myself with that knowledge.

So to Napier tomorrow, thoughts rush through my head again - how long will it take me to get to the airport? Should I get my client's cellphone number to make sure that we can be in touch with each other if something goes wrong? How are we going to get from the airport to the meeting? Should I park at the airport? How much will that cost? I shake those thoughts out, everything will be OK - yes getting client's cellphone number is a good idea. Everything else will be fine, enjoy the day, enjoy the plane trip, make sure to get a window seat and then enjoy myself. If I get the right hand side of the plane I might even see the mountains if the weather's nice enough, the left side of the plane will probably be mainly a view out to sea, though I'll see a few interesting things. Enjoy myself, do a good job at the workshop as I know I can do, but enjoy myself. A free plane trip - NICE!

Sleepy
Now Playing: Evermore - Light Surrounding You
I do want to write something a little bit different to my normal Monday "here's what I did on the weekend" post. I did have a pretty good weekend though, my birthday on Friday night was fun and I did manage to end up feeling quite "special" for the day, which in the end is the whole purpose of a birthday really. Then the rest of the weekend were lots of fun times with Amalia, yet strangely somewhat relaxing at the same time. I think I needed to have a more quiet weekend than normal because I slept badly on both Friday and Saturday night, and ended up feeling rather energy-less on both days.

Oddly enough, I think I noticed feeling particularly tired and sleepy on Sunday because it tends to be a fairly rare occurance these days. Generally I have my life organised enough to ensure that either I'm in bed not too late, or I will be able to sleep in enough to make it up. The idea of waking myself up with a bit of caffiene turned out to be majorly counter-productive as for some reason when I'm already tired coffee just makes it worse rather than giving me more energy like it supposedly does for other people. It's a strange sort of tired too, like the whole world takes on a surrealness to it, like I'm in a dream where I sort of inhabit my body but at the same time I'm also sort-of in third person watching what's going on rather than actually living it. I guess that it's the sleepiness that makes everything reminiscent of a dream and enhances the surreality of it all.

It's interesting when I think a bit more about my changing sleeping patterns throughout the last few years, and even before that back to when I was a child. When I think about it now, I probably went to bed generally too early throughout my childhood, and as a result found myself having to fall asleep when I wasn't actually that tired, and subsequently finding it really really difficult to fall asleep. I would lie in bed (often with the light on as I was a wimp and scared of the dark until a much older age than I really want to admit to it) thinking about various things for seemingly hours, then freak out that I was never going to fall asleep, rush out to tell my parents I couldn't get to sleep, then try again for a while more... and so on. The hours that I was trying to get to sleep now seem amazingly early, but I guess that a lot of those memories did come from when I was quite young, but probably in summer it was still light outside that definitely didn't help, and I can't imagine trying to fall asleep with the light fully on these days.

As time went on, and I became the master of my bed-times much more than ever before, somewhat unsurprisingly I began to find it easier to fall asleep. I guess because it was later and I was actually more tired, it was inevitable that I wouldn't spend as long trying to make myself fall asleep. Eventually getting over my fear of the dark would have helped further as I was now able to fall asleep in the dark, with fewer distractions around my room and obviously with the darkness telling my body that indeed it was time to fall asleep. Even later on, I probably developed better techniques to ensure that I would fall asleep quickly - of letting my mind wander as I lay there at night, rather than trying to develop a particular trail of thought in my head, and it became even easier. I stopped actively trying to make myself fall asleep, trying to find that moment when I would actually drift off, and rather just let it happen to me.

Once we got a computer at home, during my first year of university, my sleeping patterns changed rather more dramatically, as the most fun internet chat was to be had between about 10pm and 2am each night, as that seemed to be the time when the people I knew were most likely to be online. Though come to think of it that was probably because I was online at those times. I would find myself stumbling to bed when I eventually managed to summon enough motivation to leave the conversation I was having and head upstairs to bed. While going to bed this late was great for making me fall asleep quickly, as I would be gone just about the moment my head hit the pillow, it did mean that often I felt totally wasted the next day, in a way that I had never particularly experienced before. Sure, there were the odd occasions during primary and intermedidate school when I woke up in the middle of the night and found it impossible to get back to sleep - the longest hours ever as I counted down to 7am and actually being able to get up; but it wasn't until the latter half of my first year at uni when I felt so actively tired. I literally fell asleep during one lecture on Geomentality (a Korean lecturer telling me about Maori legends... which was quite weird actually) and almost fell asleep in quite a few other lectures. This was strange for me, someone who usually found it very difficult to fall asleep in circumstances that were anything except perfect.

Throughout the next couple of years my sleeping patterns were all over the place yet again, with early starts due to Natalie's Starbucks job mixed in with other late nights. Then at the start of 2005 I did a whole pile of graveyard shifts at McDonald's for a few months that really messed around with things. It was a bit annoying how much that screwed my sleeping patterns up, because working at McDonald's on the graveyard shift (11pm-7am) allowed you so much more freedom to do things the way you wanted than could ever happen during the day. Usually your fellow staff members would consistently work the same shift, which meant that you got to know them quite well, and it was just a more relaxed feeling around everyone. But the pay-off was having enormously messy sleeping patterns, getting to bed at about 8.30am, sleeping (if I was lucky) until about 3pm, then heading back to work around 9.30 or 10pm that night. Although I generally got a reasonable amount of sleep during the days, it wasn't the quality of sleep that I normally got at nights, and I would always find myself at the end of the shifts having the most intense level of tiredness ever. On the occasions when I had a couple of days off and managed to get to sleep at night, turning off the light and actually truly experiencing darkness for the first time in many days felt like such an amazing feeling. I don't think I have ever slept that well again.

The consistency of my current job's hours does mean that my sleeping patterns have once again returned to a sense of normality. There's also a strange circularness to it all, beginning in my school days when I needed to wake up around 7.30, get read and be out of the house shortly after 8.00 - I now find myself in the same situation, in the same room (though thankfully not alone in the same bed). It's quite odd really - perhaps my sleeping patterns are a reasonable metaphor for my life: a long time of normality, then times where things were all over the place, and now returning to something normal again.

25
Now Playing: Coldplay - Clocks
So I turn 25 today - the last aspects of childhood have finally gone as I can (finally) get a rental car and (even more finally) get student allowance without my parent's income being taken into account (not that I'm studying, but ANYWAY). When I was younger I think that I looked foward to being 25, it would be like the peak of my life when I would be old enough to have money and cool stuff yet still young enough to not really feel old. I don't know whether my expectations have really been fulfilled, but while I say to people occasionally that I do feel a bit old these days, it's not really that true. Perhaps because the people I find myself working with or interacting with at work are generally all much older than me, I do think of myself as quite young still. I feel like I'm just kick-starting things into action rather than feeling like I'm the experienced know-it-all. Which is a little intimidating, but still ensures that I feel young.

I have found myself, somewhat unfortunately, becoming less and less excited about my birthdays throughout the past few years. I guess that when you're 19 you look forward to being 20 because it feels like a big milestone to no longer be a teenager, while when you're 20 you look forward to being 21 because that's culturally the "big birthday". Yet once you pass that 21st I suppose that it doesn't really seem like much of a big deal to go from being 23 to 24, or 24 to 25 and as a result it's not really that exciting anymore. It's just not quite the same as when I used to wake up and be so excited by the fact that I was now 11 and not 10 anymore, and that the whole day would pass in a magical sense of bliss because of that. In fact, when I woke up this morning I lay there trying to grasp the last threads of the dream I had just woken up from, and for quite a few minutes didn't even register that it was in fact my birthday. Leila immediately reminded me once she had awoken, but I was kind of like "oh yeah... that's right".

Nevertheless, I guess it is nice to have a day when I'm the special person. As it often seems like I'm running from one thing to the next trying to make sure everyone else is alright, it is pretty cool to have a day when I can sit back and think that at least for this one day it's everyone else's job to make sure that I'm having fun and that I'm enjoying myself and feeling happy. And a few nice presents always helps things along - hopefully I will be able to put together enough birthday money to get myself a digital camera.

The Last Day
Now Playing: Evermore - Know It's True
So this is my last day of being 24. When I think back to this time last year it seems like a hell of a long time ago, perhaps longer than many of the years before it seemed. I guess that's because a relatively large amount of stuff has happened since that time. I've talked about that on many occasions before, so I won't go boring everyone once again, but it is quite interesting that because things have changed so much since April last year it just feels like an age ago. To compare my life now with how it was then is difficult, as although it felt like it was working out really well at the time, this time last year, in hindsight I now realise that it was standing on fairly thin ice, as things turned out it did disintegrate rather badly a month or so later.

Yet I'm not one to dwell too much on the negative side of things, as obviously there have been some significant positive changes in my life throughout the past year. I have found myself generally happier with life throughout this time than at pretty much any other time in recent memory, and although there are still some pieces left to fit in the puzzle the main foundations are there and I feel like I'm generally living my life the way I want to, more than I have before.

Yes I have remained fairly slack in my updates throughout the last week or so. As I wrote in my last post the inspiration to write a big long post just hasn't really been there lately, and while I know it will come back I haven't really had the motivation to force myself into writing in here when I haven't really felt like it. Maybe it's just the time of the year, shifting from reasonably warmish weather back into what feels like winter, that's just depressing enough to suck away my motivation as I realise we've got about six months of coldness ahead. New Zealand got bundled out of the Cricket World Cup in the semi-finals, yet again, which actually wasn't particularly surprising I suppose, but just reinforced how annoying the whole 1992 World Cup situation was, as we blew what has turned out to be our only real chance of ever winning the world cup. One day I'll write about my experience of that match, which although hazy after 15 years and relatively depressing, is still an interesting memory from my childhood.

But anyway, yeah I turn 25 tomorrow. I guess that's theoretically my peak in a way. After that I'm supposedly 'over the hill' and 'old' etc. etc. Kind of weird really as I still feel like I'm getting myself started in the 'big bad world'. Hopefully I have a nice day.

Blog Laziness
Now Playing: Chemical Brothers - Surface To Air
It is funny how at times you find yourself so caught up in the day to day aspects of life that you find yourself amazed by how the year is zipping by. It's not too far away from being May, and really when I think of myself at work in particular I am just getting beyond the point where it feels like the year is getting started. I suppose that a lot of that has to do with the changes at work that have taken place, with Pete leaving for Singapore, and the fact that I have just made it to a year formally with the company. Then again, often I find myself thinking such thoughts around this time of the year, probably because with the changing seasons it has become obvious that we're definitely not at the "start part" of the year, instead being well into the "middle part".

I haven't seemed to have had much motivation to write in here lately. I suppose that I've been busy doing other things on the net, and fairly busy at work etc. etc. It's also been a phase where I've largely felt uninspired to write in this blog, which in some ways is a little sad considering that enthusiasm I have generally had lately. I'm not too worried really though, as often that kind of thing happens and I go through a phase where I'm not really reading too many blogs and not really feeling like I have too much to say. Or I just can't be bothered sitting down and typing out an entry. Perhaps it is just blog laziness, as there has been a reasonable amount of stuff going on in my life - more possible houses popping up for us to apply for and interesting times with Amalia over weekends etc. etc.

There are a few rather interesting things coming up in my life throughout the next while though. A cricket world cup semi-final on Wednesday morning, my birthday on Friday and a day-trip to Napier next Monday. Then Leila's graduation is not too far away - so there will be fun and interesting times ahead, and I'm sure that with those things I will find myself having more motivation to write in here.

Cry Baby
Now Playing: U2 - One Tree Hill
At primary school it's marginally acceptable to burst into tears - even when you're a guy. People are generally quite considerate of it, and although there will probably be the odd "cry baby" taunt, generally everyone accepts that it's not like the worst possible thing ever. At least that was my experience. I don't actually remember bursting into tears particularly often at primary school, although I know it would have happened on more than a few occassions (I have many other embarrassing primary-school memories but I'm sure I'll come to them in time. There was of course the occassion when I first wore my glasses to school, and probably also many of the times that I fell over on the asphalt courts and scraped my knees. I don't think there was ever a summer where my knees weren't covered in various grazes at different stages of recovery, but while I would have surely bawled my eyes out after each and every one of them (at least in my earlier years) I guess the reason why I don't specifically remember them is because it wasn't really a big deal. Everyone cried, even the big Samoan guy who was twice your size but still three years younger than you.

Yet by intermediate things really did change in that regard. Perhaps towards the end of Standard 4 it had become a little less 'acceptable', as my memories of Dipak calling me four-eyes include something along the lines of the reason he did it was to make me cry. Nice. But anyway, at intermediate there were immediately so many more reasons for me to be feeling upset and on the verge of tears. While the whole "four-eyes" thing largely died down at intermediate - I remember one kid once calling me that and then getting sternly told off, by another kid - people had become so much more sophisticated in their ways to make you feel miserable that it didn't need to be done through simple name-calling like that. They could cleverly exclude you from their games, pretend to comfort you in a way that made sure you knew that you'd fucked something up big time, and find all your insecurities in adept ways to make you feel as miserable and hopeless as possible.

And being the fragile creature that I was, I would inevitably burst into tears if things got beyond a certain point. If I felt unfairly picked on during our lunch-time games, out came the tears. When I got told off during aerobics in front of half the school, out came the tears (although I tried to hide them by saying that my glasses were hurting my eyes, which my teacher kindly and probably falsely backed up by saying the same thing happened to her). I suppose I didn't make life easy for myself, by doing stupid things like forgetting mufti days and having to wander around school in my uniform while everyone else wore their cool clothes, or even worse once I did remember mufti day wearing a stupid tracksuit that made me look about 8, while everyone else was wearing their jeans and Stussy T-shirts in summer, or their oversize polar-fleece hoodies in winter (remember when they were cool?)

Even in Form 2 I still suffered from this fragility, especially towards the end of the year when all my friends seemed to desert me. During games of handball I felt unable to simply accept that I'd messed up and hit the ball out - instead sticking my ground and trying to argue my way out. I'm sure that on some occassions I was quite justified in doing this, but on others it felt like I needed to do it because there was simply no other way to deal with losing out after slowly making my way close to the top. On one occassion I was amazed at the way a friend of mine, Jason, managed to just deal with that situation whereas I just couldn't handle it without getting myself so worked up and inevitably pissing everyone off once again.

While by the time high-school rolled around I was able to control my emotions a lot more, on a few occassions they still got out of hand leading to another round of tears. However, slowly but surely I felt more and more able to bottle up those emotions, to create a bit of a wall around myself that meant while I still got upset and hurt at times - particularly in the first couple of years at high school - I was able to keep that reasonably externalised from myself through this wall. In fourth form, a guy called Keith who had been in my class when I was in Form 2 kindly started reminding me and a few of the people I knew about how much of a cry baby I had been back then. While this was really really annoying, as I had hoped to let all that disappear behind me, what it did let me realise was how far I had come in those couple of years. That I knew the things which had set me off back at intermediate school I could now get through. Sure, I still felt upset and hurt on many an occassion at high school, but generally I was able to just suck it in and bottle it up, rather than turning into a burbling mess.

I guess this is probably a more common kind of story than I ever thought at the time, that other people were also struggling with the same things that I was struggling with. To fit in, to be cool, to not make a fool out of oneself and so on. As I tried more and more to achieve these things, in many ways it was my self-confidence that continued to erode. Obviously the person I was naturally couldn't fit in, couldn't be cool and would inevitable end up acting like a dick - so I needed to be someone different. I had to keep my emotions under strong control, I had to do everything possible to ensure that I wouldn't end up embarrassed and looking like an idiot. And through all of this I probably became very successful at it, at least at keeping my emotions under strong control so that I wouldn't burst into tears or snap at someone and end up making a real dick of myself.

The irony of all of this is, of course, that once I got towards the end of high school and into university, I found that I had gone too far and my emotions were under too much control. I found out that just as I was great at moderating myself when I felt bad and keeping an emotional distance between myself and everything else to make sure I didn't end up too hurt, that this also meant that it was really difficult to let myself experience positive emotions and to open myself up to the good friends that I had during this time. I was so good at making myself feel neutral, and being largely sheltered from everything that it was difficult to move away from that, difficult to let anyone in and see the real me, as I had specifically been hiding the real me for quite a few years as it seemed like he was an unlikeable idiot who continuously made a fool out of himself. Fortunately I do feel like I have largely regained my self-confidence throughout the last few years, although with a few rather large hiccups along the way obviously. At the end of high school my friendship with Jannatun enabled me to realise that the real me was actually someone pretty cool and worth knowing, while my relationship with Natalie made me realise that - seemingly unbelievably (as I had previously thought) I could actually be found attractive by someone, a physical boost to my self-confidence that had never happened before.

Yet I still sometimes notice that some of the effects of those years at intermediate and high school still stick with me and affect my personality. I'm not the kind of person who finds their emotions swinging this way and that way all the time, in fact I often have to force myself to get angry about something to make sure that I make sure my point is heard. While this is obviously useful at times, as I'm able to trust myself not to do something stupid in a rage and don't get too down-trodden when a few things don't quite go to plan, in other ways it's really annoying and I do find myself wishing that I didn't have quite the same level of control over my emotions. For example, when Jess broke up with me last year I almost wanted for force myself to cry while she was still there, so that she knew that this was tearing me up, but while I was shaking and felt totally shit, I couldn't externalise those feelings in an obvious way. I knew that to get myself through and over the hurt I felt I would first need to truly experience it, and then get that out of my system - but in the time after that I found myself acting so normally, a little quieter than usual but I wasn't a sobbing wreck all the time, which seemed to actually make things more difficult. I found myself listening to music that semi-related to what had happened and using the emotion in the music to finally bring some of those feelings to the surface of myself and finally experience them.

In effect, instead of doing anything and everything I could to stop myself from crying - as had been my goal for those years at intermediate and high school - I now found myself doing whatever I could to help myself cry, to become the cry baby I had been at primary school at intermediate once again.

Nostalgic Trip
Now Playing: Salmonella Dub - Bubble
I had, what I guess could be termed, a reasonably typical and not too busy weekend. I've had a bit of a cold throughout the last couple of days so that has slowed me down a bit, generally because of a blocked nose rather than any other too serious symptoms, but enough for me to not feel exactly like myself. Leila's recovery from her long-term illness appears just about complete, although that positive is balanced against her realisation of how far she's got behind in her university, which is stressful enough for me thinking about how she's going to catch up, let alone her thinking about how she's going to catch up. Nevertheless, by Sunday night the weekend felt quite satisfying, in a way that it hadn't felt on Saturday night really. It felt like a weekend should, having a little bit of everything to ensure that, while only being two days long compared to the previous weekend's glorious four days, it was still pretty cool.

I can hear myself thinking here "why on earth do I need to go into so much detail to remind myself why the weekend was actually pretty good?" I guess that a lot of my working week is made easier by looking forward to the upcoming weekend, to plan something particularly nice for it or to just have the knowledge that it will be a fun time. It's not that my work is particularly unlikeable or stressful - often Monday feels like my recovery day after a busy weekend - but I think I look forward to them because they're different, because during the week life just becomes so patterned that it's nice to have things done differently on the weekend. It's nice to not know exactly what I'll end up doing on that particular day, nice to know that I won't be getting up at exactly the same time, and going through a series of events every morning that turn out to be exactly the same each day. It's not that I find those events unpleasant in any way, and it's been particularly nice throughout the last month to have cricket to watch each morning while I'm eating breakfast - but in the end it's a pattern and every Friday night I find it quite exciting (in a silly way I guess) when I don't have to find my phone and set the alarm for 7.25am the next morning.

Anyway, on Saturday morning Amalia and I had some nice time with just the two of us. I dropped Leila at work, and then after that we headed off out towards Mission Bay. Amalia had been wanting to go to a nice playground, as she loves them, and as I had been getting a little sick of the same playgrounds over and over again, I remembered that the one at Mission Bay was particularly cool. However, driving out along Tamaki Drive we spotted one at Okahu Bay that looked like it might be fun, particularly as it appeared a little different to the normal playgrounds and had a flying fox.

There's something about flying foxes that always made them the coolest possible thing a playground could have. The one at Cornwall Park used to have a flying fox, as well as the coolest ever slide that twisted around a giant oak tree - before it got destroyed and turned into a pretty pathetic playground - apart from the push-train. The awesome playground at Long Bay on the North Shore also had a flying fox, though most of my memories of that place are of me being too scared to go on it. School camps generally had the best flying foxes, though I remember the one at my standard four camp seemed set up slightly wrong which meant that it was a mission to hang on when it slammed into the tyres at the end. However, the most amazing flying fox I have ever seen was at my standard three camp, at Carey Park in Henderson Valley. This one stretched for what seemed at the time to be an eternity, most probably at least a hundred metres I suppose. At the top you had to climb up about three flights of stairs to reach the top of the wooden structure you started off at. There was a rope netting underneath the first part of the flying fox, put there because if you fell of it from such a height the results would be pretty nasty. A teacher was there at the start to help you on, and there was an interesting system of pulleys required to help the actual fox get back up to the start. Some of the bigger boys were great at pulling this rope to get the fox back up to the top. I went on it at least once, possibly twice, absolutely shit-scared of coming off, but in the end loving the thrilling speed it accumulated on its long descent. To this day I haven't seen a cooler flying fox.

Nevertheless, the Okahu Bay one still looked pretty exciting, although knowing Amalia is still a bit small to go on it, I basically just popped it into my memory bank as something to surely come back to in the future when she's big enough to go on it on her own. We played around the rest of the playground, climbing some rope ladders, a few swings and more, before checking out the flying fox properly. I told Amalia to watch as I went on it by myself, and she was pretty amazed by how fast I zipped away. Soon afterwards another father and his son, who appeared to be about Amalia's age if possibly a bit older, came up to check out the flying fox. The boy asked his Dad if they could go on it together, something I hadn't really thought of as possible, and they just jumped on it and headed away - safe and happy as anything. After seeing that I figured that it would be sweet as for us, and after carefully positioning Amalia in a way that I could hold both her and the fox tightly, we zipped off as well. It was cool being able to share the thrill of her first flying fox ride, and brought back a whole tonne of memories related to them for me.

Yesterday the weather was really all over the place, so Leila, Amalia and I had a variety of small outings including a small walk around my old primary school - as there are a couple of really cool playgrounds there and Amalia really did seem obsessed by them this weekend. I was fine with that though, as it's always fun to marvel at her physical skills as she climbs up rope ladders like someone way older than her and balances her way across other areas in ways that even surprise me. It was interesting having a wander around Mt Albert primary, remembering my times there and all the fun little places I used to play in. I guess that because when you're at primary school your curiosity for the world is greater than later on, where you just hang out where you friends are, I explored every last little bit of that school a lot more than I explored my intermediate or even my high school. Therefore, no matter where we walked I found myself having so many memories and recollections from my days there. We sat down near the dias, where we always used to have school lunches for 10 minutes to make sure people actually ate their lunch before we could go off and play, and I imagined things how they were back then - which is at least 15 years ago now (god that makes me feel old). A few trees had disappeared, as well as some of the classrooms (stolen by Leila's old primary school as it turned out). I recalled having hundreds of lunches there, sitting in surely the best place possible with my best friend Nick as he had his ham roll and two superwine biscuits - which later turned into gingernuts, while I had a variety of things in my school lunches (most memorably those little red packets of raisins). It was funny to think that my best friend and I managed to end up with the best place possible to sit during lunches, and seemed to have so many other friends who sat around us. I guess it reminds me that things were actually pretty cool at primary school, and perhaps for once in my life I was part of the 'in crowd'.

The New School
Now Playing: Lifehouse - Hanging by a Moment
I suppose I was lucky in a few ways, that because my family have lived in the same house since before I was born I only ever went to three different schools: one primary school, one intermediate school and one high school. I know other people who chopped and changed schools again and again, which when I think about it must have been hell. I generally felt a bit sorry for the new kids that came to our schools, not knowing anyone and always feeling like a bit of an outsider, even months after they first started. Luckily I never really ended up in that particular situation, although effectively I probably did something very similar, something that - when I think about it - probably messed up a lot of things during my early teenage years.

During my time at Mt Albert Primary School the place did a bit of a metamorpohsis, thanks to the removal of school zoning, which allowed people to chop and change where they sent their kids. Mt Albert ended up with a Samoan principal and while the wider area was gentrifying throughout this time it seemed to largely bypass Mt Albert, that became more and more ethnically diverse throughout this time and as a result a lot of the people decided to send their kids to the oversize Gladstone Primary. It was a bit awkward having people who lived in our street but obviously sent their kids to another primary school because they wanted to avoid the one with all the Pacific Island kids, but despite (or perhaps because of) being one of the few white kids in my class at school, I dide really enjoy primary school. There were a few moments that weren't particularly great, like when I started wearing glasses (as I wrote about a few days ago), and a few other times that I plan to end up writing about at some stage on this page, but overall I did enjoy primary school. I had a best friend, Nick, who was in the same classroom as me for every year except when I was standard 1, which was a huge bonus. But I think the most important thing was that generally people were nice, and although there was the odd person who was mean to you, in general your friends were your friends and they stuck by you and didn't stab you in the back at every opportunity, just to look cool.

Towards the end of standard 4 it became a little worrying that everything might end up changing for me. For a start, Nick was always a year behind me at school (despite being less than two months younger than me) which meant that no matter what I would end up going to a different school to him at least for one year. And secondly, my parents planned for me to go to Pasadena Intermediate, largely because it was on my mum's way to work, rather than Kowhai Intermediate where most people from my primary school were going. I later learned that Kowhai had a bit of a bad reputation at the time, which (as is always the case for schools) may or may not have been justly deserved. I knew a couple of people who would be going to Pasadena, Tan and Andrew, although that was through the cricket team I was playing for rather than through school - and plus I knew the chances of ending up in the same class as them would be pretty low. In addition, a few people from my primary school seemed to be hinting that they may end up going to Pasadena as well, so I figured that possibly things wouldn't be particularly bad.

We had an open day at Pasadena at one stage towards the end of primary school. Unlike the open day at Kowhai, when all the standard 4 students had been dragged along because it was highly likely most would end up going there, my parents had to drop me off at the open day at Pasadena and then pick me up again. We all assembled in the school hall, where I managed to find Tan and Andrew, and also met their friend James - someone who I would know for the next 10 or so years. As is always the case when getting a bunch of students together in an assembly hall - even if we weren't yet going to that school - they got us to sing a bunch of songs (what is up with teachers and their obsession with singing?) which I didn't know because they were the ones other primary schools sung but not mine. We then wandered around the school, even getting split up in to the classrooms that we were likely to end up in the following year. I remember watching a bunch of seemingly huge guys play a game of handball on the courts, and then having my future teacher read us some of a Terry Pratchett book (the one about the really small people... I think). It wasn't a particularly unpleasant day, but I had this foreboding feeling that I felt out of place and a tad lonely, and that this would continue once things kicked off properly the next year.

On my first day of intermediate school I found myself feeling like the new kid at a school, and even though all the other form 1 students were technically in the same boat, they had friends who they knew from Gladstone, Grey Lynn, Westmere, Bayfield, Pt Chev or any number of other schools they had come from. And despite various chances for other Mt Albert Primary students to end up coming to Pasadena, it turned out that I was the one and only person from Mt Albert who came to Pasadena that year. Feeling left out from everyone else's primary school groups was difficult enough, but this was compounded with the general nastiness that accompanies intermediate school, as everyone starts to hit puberty their hormones scream at them to be as mean to everyone else as possible, so that they could feel a little bit better about themselves. From the happy friendliness of primary school it felt like I was being thrown into a big nasty fire - one that seemed to get worse and worse at every opportunity.

Fortunately I did find myself making a couple of friends reasonably early on. I had met Umesh, an Indian guy from Gladstone, on my first day. We discovered interestingly that we were both born on April 27th, 1982 at the same hospital and therefore there was a good chance our mothers had seen each other around the maternity ward at that time. However, at intermediate school we each had our individual desks where we spent all our time, and unfortunately if you didn't end up sitting next to or near your friend it meant that you hardly had any opportunity to talk to them or interact with them during class time. You were left sitting next to other people, who seemed to over time develop a hearty dislike for me.