Digital Fortress
Now Playing: Snow Patrol - How To Be Dead
Before a couple of years ago (almost exactly actually) I had heard of the book "The Da Vinci Code" but hadn't read it. Apparently it was particularly interesting and exciting, dealing with all sorts of strange symbols and other things like that, with obviously an interesting link to Leonardo Da Vinci. I was curious, but then again I'm curious with a lot of books yet never get around to reading them. Don't get me wrong, I really do enjoy reading novels, it's just that I'm often quite picky about them and end up getting halfway through quite a lot of them but never getting to the end. It's generally not that I didn't like the particular book, I just didn't feel compelled to finish it off. There have been a number of books, even in recent times, that I've enjoyed to a reasonable level but haven't managed to finish. Perhaps I'm a bit lazy, in that novels seem so much more work than simply watching a movie, or perhaps it's just that I can recognise the quality of these books, and therefore I don't exactly dislike reading them, but that they're not my type and therefore I don't feel like I have to finish them off as quickly as possible.

But anyway, at the airport before we left to go to Canada 2 years ago, my mum and I decided to buy a couple of books for the plane. I chose The Da Vinci Code, as I figured I should find out what all the fuss is about, and she chose the Lovely Bones. Anyway, throughout our plane trip and the first few days in Canada I read away at The Da Vinci code, and found myself hooked. It wasn't that this was the most amazing book ever, I just found that it clicked with me nicely. I could picture it in my mind in a way that made sense, I liked the 'intelligence' that it seemed to have, the interesting insights and just the way that it was written in a way to keep you hooked. It wasn't a struggle to get through, it was easy. Before I knew it I was up to page 100, 200 and so on. I didn't really buy into other people thinking it would be the greatest book ever, but I liked it. I knew that it would easily turn into a good movie, which it did.

I started to track down a few other books by Dan Brown, the author. I had mainly just heard of Angels and Demons, which I read and found to be obviously similar to The Da Vinci Code, but interestingly different at the same time. This book seemed to attempt greater things than The Da Vinci Code, but to do so in perhaps a less refined manner. The twist was pretty good though, although there were a few unbelievable things as seems to happen in most of Dan Brown's books. I imagined Angels and Demons as a movie, one that could easily be better than The Da Vinci Code because in the end it's a more exciting story in my opinion.

Then I got onto another one of his books, Deception Point, which I came across in a second-hand bookshop a few months ago. It was interesting to once again see a similar pattern to this book as the previous ones, although this didn't reallly annoy me as much as it might have. Although completely different to the Robert Langdon storyline of Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, I actually thought Deception Point was potentially better than either of them. It didn't get bogged down in the whole religious issue as much as these other two books, which may have made them more interesting to other readers but wasn't really of major interest to me. Once again it had some pretty groovy twists and was quite difficult to put down.

Finally last week I managed to track down the last Dan Brown book I was yet to read, Digital Fortress. A quick search on Wikipedia revealed that this was actually his first ever book, published in 1998, followed by Angels & Demons in 2000, Deception Point in 2001 and The Da Vinci Code in 2003. None of his books had sold particularly well until The Da Vinci Code came along, although obviously they've subsequently become way more popular (due to people like me). Once again I liked the 'intelligence' of this book, and although it had a bit more of a niche audience than his others, due to it being mainly about computer security and code deciphering, it had similar enough plot lines to keep things going nicely and make sure that I wanted to know what happened next. One annoying thing about it was that the twist turned out to be really similar to that in Deception Point, and in fact the whole plot had a few too many similarities. This would have been OK, except for the fact that I was easily able to pick the whole "seemingly good guy who turns out to be the secret bad guy" plot twist far too early. There were also a few weird plot holes that I haven't got my head around quite yet, but I'm not too fussy I don't think. I liked the book, I'll look forward to any more he writes and I will hope that more of his other books are turned into films.

Especially Deception Point. That would make a truly excellent movie.

A Few Photos
Now Playing: Matchbox 20 - Unwell
This isn't really a blog-post, but rather just a variety of photos that we've taken of our new house. Mainly for the benefit of people on the other side of the world.

One of the kitchen, although it's not particularly tidy. Note the really interesting cork tiles, we honestly did not burn that big black hole in the floor and I can't quite imagine how it would have happened. The interesting fridge magnet arrangement was because Amber and Amalia had been making a giraffe out of all them just before.

And here's the dining room, which is actually pretty much part of the overly large kitchen. Your dining table is being put to good use as you can see Ella.

This is our awesome hallway. Long enough for a full length cricket pitch, wide enough to play a decent game of indoor soccer, the hallway rocks. That is until you open the lounge door and the vast expanse of the hallway sucks all the heat out in about 3 seconds.

And a typical view of Amalia's bedroom. Fortunately the room's big enough for any mess not to really be an issue as there's always an easy path through it. Isn't the blue dinosaur cute?

A reasonable view of the front of the house. Oddly enough our big bungalow is surrounded on both sides by blocks of flats, with 10 on one side and 8 on the other. We're not sure whether to be freaked out by this - in particular the number of people who will know when we're not at home - or whether to feel comforted that there's a lot of 'passive surveillance' of the house and if anyone did break in there's a good chance one of the neighbours would see or hear them.

And finally one of the backyard. Surprisingly big really, and also in need of a good mow. Yeah... I know.

A Non-Dream Post (generally)
Now Playing: Bloc Party - Tulips
The more observant visitors would have noticed a few minor changes to the formatting of this site, most notably the change to the title above. Honestly, after two and a bit years of exactly the same template I was getting rather sick of the sight of it, and although I don't have the know-how and guts to dig too deep into my template and make more serious changes, hopefully by making a few small adjustments I'll put off the day when I get fed up to the point of making massive changes for quite some time yet. I tried a few more adjustments, but although they worked fine in Safari and Opera, they messed around with Internet Explorer big time and hid my most recent entries, which unfortunately just won't do. Nice one Microsoft.

It's funny reading through yesterday's entry, and realising how much I seem to be getting into writing "dream blog" entries at the moment. I guess I've always had quite a big interest in my dreams, and especially when there are similarities across many different dreams that I have. For the last few months my dreams do seem to have been more truly interesting than usual, although sadly I seem generally less able to remember them enormously well until the last couple of weeks. When I woke up this morning my mind immediately flicked towards what I was to do for the day, which somewhat frustratingly meant that the little fragments of memory which would allow me to look back at the dreams I had been having just a minute or so earlier were snatched away from me. Because I had actually managed to remember dreams from quite a few of the previous days I was actually more annoyed at myself for doing this than I expected to be, telling myself in future to try harder to linger a bit longer thinking about the dream I had just been having, when I initially wake up. Maybe tomorrow morning it'll work better.

In my haze of not updating particularly frequently, talking a lot about dreams or mazes, I don't seem to have written much about "my life" lately. I suppose that it has been a reasonably uneventful time in the last few weeks, as we've settled down into the house well and truly by now. While the house still doesn't really have that 'super-familiar' feeling that I associate with places I've lived in for a long time, it definitely feels homely now, and less and less as though we've just got our stuff in someone else's place. I guess obviously it isn't REALLY our house, as we're only renting, but it is startling to feel as though it is. At the same time the novelty of many things is starting to wear off as well - the dishes sit there for a day or two longer than before as nobody in particular is that keen to do them, and spare time is taken up with thoughts of "hmmm.... now what needs doing?" Yet in other ways it's getting better and better, as our confidence grows with cooking and we come up with new and exciting options to put our food together in a way that'll create something truly awesome.

On Sunday we bought an Edmonds Cookbook, not the original one which has apparently sold over 4 million copies in New Zealand since it was first published almost 100 years ago (that's about one copy per person), but a compliation of favourite recipes from the cookbook over the years. There are some pretty cool recipies in there, and handily some useful cooking instructions for things such as roasting meats. I flicked through the book on Sunday afternoon, and then I decided to make some Hokey Pokey with Amalia. I remember at high school in science class a few people made Hokey Pokey for their homework science experiments, because it illustrated some interesting chemcial reaction between sugar and baking soda. So I was kinda curious exactly how exciting this reaction would be, and got stuck into it. Amalia was keen to help, as always, assisting me to measure out the sugar, although surprisingly not that keen on the golden syrup. After getting the sugary mixture all hot and boiling I added in the baking soda - wow what an awesome reaction! After a couple of mixes the sugary liquid seemed to almost explode before my eyes, thickening up, changing colour and growing like crazy for a couple of seconds. I stirred it around for a bit, and then flipped it out. After waiting for the Hokey Pokey to cool and harden, which took a while and I was amazed at Amalia's patience, we dug in to some of it and it was truly divine. It was quite cool just how simple and cheap this really nice treat was to make, with a bit of excitement thrown in there too. Should be fun making that again.

A Couple of Things
Now Playing: Evermore - Running
Perhaps I'm slowly regaining motivation to write regularly on this page. Eventually I'll probably get back to the situation where I'm thinking to myself as certain things happen throughout the day that "that'll be interesting to write about", as does generally happen to me at various times when I'm really into this blog. It has seemed that at home I'm far too busy often to be writing in here, that I'm either getting into dinner, cleaning up after dinner, getting the washing done, vaccuming the place or whatever else needs to be done. Or if I'm not doing one of those things I'm thinking about what needs to be done regarding them. Nevertheless, while home life has become rather busy in the last couple of weeks, at work things are still reasonably quiet and although that has changed in the last few days with some new things for me to do, I still have a reasonable amount of time to be writing in here.

There are a few exciting things coming up in my life throughout the next couple of months that I finalised last week. First up, Leila and I are going to see Evermore play next Saturday night. I have actually seen them once before, at the only concert I've actually been to before, when they supported Snow Patrol at the concert I went to earlier this year. Seeing them then was like a massive bonus, while this time they'll be the main act and will therefore put together a more complete and lengthy performance. It's about half the price of what going to see Snow Patrol was as well, which is helpful for the bank account. Then in a few weeks time we'll be off to the final rugby test the All Blacks play before heading off to the world cup. Once again, last year I went to the match against Australia with my Dad, and it was an awesome evening. This time I've managed to talk Leila into coming along as well, for her first ever rugby match, which should hopefully be enjoyable. I guess at a sold out Eden Park for an All Blacks match even if what's going on out in the middle is a little difficult to understand, the atmosphere is pretty amazing which should make for an enjoyable evening. And then, in August - partially in return for Leila agreeing to come along to the rugby - her and I will be going to a Shakespeare performance, an interesting cultural experience for myself I suppose. So the credit card took a bit of a thumping last week, but as I am getting a reasonable amount of that back and it will make for a fun and exciting couple of months I'm not too worried.

In the last couple of nights I've had some recurring dreams about university, which is quite interesting. Two nights ago (I think) I had a really strange dream, which sort of mixed together Leila's and my lives. I was definitely myself, but I was at her stage of life, just finishing the first semester of my first year in postgrad. I was studying geography, with perhaps a little more planning in my degree than I really did, but it was still definitely geography. Yet I was in the same situation as Leila has been in this semester, that for various reasons I had needed to get the due date for my assignments pushed back until the last possible day, which was on the day that I was having this dream. I don't remember particularly much more about the dream, but it was interesting that it turned out to be somewhat of a hybrid between Leila's life over the past couple of weeks as she's crazily tried to get two big essays written, and my life.

Then last night I had another university related dream, although this one was odd as it had aspects of high school in it as well. From my memory it seemed as though I was indeed studying university stuff, but that for some reason I was doing so at high school. There were the same buildings as at high school, although they were typically morphed into my 'dream like high school', which is slightly different although largely the same. I was talking to someone about this situation in my dream, remembering details such as where the room D8 or B12 was, and even perhaps the teacher who had taught me in that particular room. Furthermore, throughout this whole dream I seemed to be in a giant panic about my university work, in that either I was about to begin an exam, or I was in the last stages of studying for it. Yet even though I had this enormous task ahead of me in the form of an exam, I was wasting all this time travelling bizarrely over Auckland on buses to Glenfield among other areas. There were a mixture of people in the dream from high school and university/post-university I think, and at times it seemed like I was filling in information about how well I knew my high school to other university people, although our setting was actually the high school.

It is quite interesting how my dreams often seem fairly believable and normal, except when it comes to their actual setting. Perhaps it is my geographical mind really showing itself, that to me the setting of something becomes such an important part of the event that is taking place, that it almost becomes the event itself. It's as though my mind becomes so fascinated by the setting that it starts to play with it, to morph the setting from something normal when the event started into something quite bizarre and unbelievable by the latter stages of the dream. About a week ago I had an unusually long dream about playing a game of cricket. Normally my cricket dreams are really frustratring - either I'm due to go out to bat and I can't find my gear and as a result I'm in a mad panic, or I'm batting and my feet seem to run so impossibly slowly that I'm almost getting run out ever time I take a run. I guess these were always two of my biggest fears when playing cricket, so they come back to haunt me in my dreams. Anyway, in this dream my batting went unusually well for quite a while - I hit a few boundaries and although it seemed like the opposition had a lot of fielders their bowling was pretty poor and I was able to do OK when I could get on strike or reach some of their wider deliveries. After a while the field seemed to have turned into a large room, with the walls being the boundaries. The pitch still seemed to be of a full-length and even though I was batting I would occasionally get a "third person" view of the game from behind the inner ring of fielders, confirming a rather large size to the "field" that we were playing in. However, over time the room we were playing in seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. The bowlers couldnt' have full length run ups because of the walls, and you started to worry about hitting the ball too high up because of the roof. Then there was random furniture in the way of the game, although the room we were playing in had confusing dimensions as there were a lot of fielders still, and the same could continue without too many problems. After a while more the room became more recognisable to me, as the downstairs study at my parents' place, the room in which I spent an awful lot of 2000 and 2001 on the computer. It seemed strange to me that we were playing cricket here, yet still I continued with the game and it was believable that we could keep playing in this room as it magically seemed big enough. Furthermore, I was batting well and eventually got to 50 I think before the dream ended.

I have had these kinds of dreams before, where the setting starts off normal before morphing into something familiar yet totally bizarre for the event that's taking place in it. A classic example, which I often tell people when I'm mentioning how weird my dreams can be, was the time when the All Blacks ended up playing a rugby test in the lounge of my parents' house, or just the other week when a cricket match I was at morphed from Eden Park into a tiny corridor. I'm sure there's probably a weird subconscious explanation, I just find it interesting that I seem to have a recurrance of these kinds of dreams.

Winter
Now Playing: Oasis - She's Electric
I know it's so cliche to write about the weather, but at a time of year such as this the weather seems to become such a dominant force in one's life that it's almost impossible to ignore. As I've said quite a few times before I'm not a huge fan of winter, as being rather thin means that I feel the cold a lot and I just don't feel comfortable a lot of the time. Sure, there are a few weeks in summer when it probably gets a bit too hot for comfort, but that's not really much compared to the 4 or 5 months when it's a bit too cold for comfort.

I don't think I always used to be like this though. I remember at primary school getting really excited about when it was foggy or frosty. It seemed to get frosty a lot more back then (yikes that makes me feel old, I have noticed global warming?) At primary school we would debate in the car whether it was a frost or just a heavy dew on the really cold mornings. I would hope for it to be a frost, as that was exciting and it was fun walking around in it making footprints on the grass. I suppose that it was the closest we'd ever come in Auckland to have it snow. My mum would say "no I think it's just a heavy dew", or perhaps it was my Dad as he has a lifelong endeavour to deny that Auckland has a winter. Eventually we'd come across a grass verge that was in shadow, and the frost (or dew in disappointing circumstances) would be revealed and someone would have the chance to say "I told you so!" One day at intermediate school there was a bridge that we had to walk across to get to the school from where we were dropped off, and off the rails were icicles, although that was particularly unusual.

Foggy days were almost as much fun. My dad would exlaim "it's a pea-souper outside" to us, which was slightly confusing as we never had pea soup, but I assume it's really thick and difficult to see through as the 'pea souper' was always the most dense and thick fog. As a driver now I'm a bit freaked out by really dense fogs, as they have a handy knack of making driving rather tricky and dangerous, especially when idiots don't both to use their headlights. But as a kid fog was simply exciting - half the world seemed to disappear in this white mist that made everything so mysterious. At primary school we wouldn't be able to see the end of the field, and people made up stories about what might be there instead - lost in the white mist. Fog seems to strangely vary from one place to the next, as you emerge from it before disappearing back in somewhere else. Just the other week when I was driving Amalia back to Natalie's on a Thursday morning there was an amazingly thick fog which was cliging to the Harbour Bridge, so that approaching it you couldn't see the brige at all and once you were on the bridge it seemed like the rest of Auckland had disappeared. Yet everywhere else there was nothing, just a nice bright blue sunny day.

If only Auckland's winters were like these fun days of fog and frost, with a crisp coldness rather than the damp and windy coldness that we get. While Auckland may not get that cold in Winter, what it does get is a nasty kind of cold. On my holiday to Mt Ruapehu last winter we stayed in places where it was barely 5 degrees during the day and close to freezing at night, yet not once did I seem to notice the cold as much as I do in Auckland. Perhaps it's because we don't expect it to be cold in Auckland, and therefore don't prepare ourselves as well as we would in other places. The houses here are insulated terribly, or not at all, while anything more than a mid-sized jacket for going out in seems like massive overkill.

In 7th form I had a Calculus teacher who came from Siberia, yet she said that she'd never felt as cold there as she did in Auckland. The terrible heaters that we had throughout the school (you'd just about have to sit on them to stay warm) combined with a lack of insulation and just the mentality that Auckland's not really a cold place meant that ironically people here do probably get quite a bit colder than in other parts of the country. If you have to think about whether to put on the heater, or whether you'll need a fire, then there's the chance that you won't do either and you'll think that snuggling under the blankets or wearing lots of clothes will do. In colder places people just wouldn't consider not having well insulated homes, or not putting on the fire or heater every night, and I guess while they have higher power bills because of it, they probably end up a lot warmer and don't get sick nearly as often.

Blackout
Now Playing: Goo Goo Dolls - Naked
It was an interesting evening we had yesterday. As per usual on every second Tuesday Leila and I headed over to Natalie's place to have dinner. It's a good way for me to see Amalia mid-week and also to catch up with everyone and spend a bit of time with Aston, who's now amazingly over three months old (doesn't time fly?) I had been pretty organised really, and gave Amalia a bath early on in the evening because we knew that the better TV (House and Boston Legal) came on later. Having a bath seemed to calm Amalia down quite a bit, as she had been rather hyper before that and perhaps she felt a bit more tired out, ending up being quite a lot more cuddly as the evening went on. Natalie was about to leave and pick up Pierre at around 8pm when the lights flicked off for a second, then surged. I figured it must have just been a small power surge or something, as last year we got quite a lot of them during winter time, especially at work when it was windy, but merely a second later everything went off again, and this time stayed off.

Immediately after a power cut there's always the five seconds everyone sits around, waiting to see if it'll come back on straight away. Then a resounding "ah... great", and the search begins for some way to find at least a small amount of light to get by on. It's all great having candles and matches for situations like these, but in the pitch darkness finding all this can be a bit of a challenge. Aston wasn't fazed at all by the sudden darkness, as he had been sitting on Leila's knee and was sweet as, although Amalia did get a bit freaked out saying she was scared of the dark. I picked her up, we found my cellphone - which has a useful light at the bottom of it - and then eventually the matches to light the candles, which were handily already on the table. We checked around outside to see if other people's power had gone off, and fortunately it had. In situations like these you hope like hell it's not just your house that's blacked out, and in some ways the larger the blackout the better as it means there'll be more urgency in getting it fixed and it definitely won't mean the burden will fall on your shoulders to do anything about it.

We tried making a few calls from my cellphone, but the system was overloaded - either from everyone else on Auckland's North Shore deciding to use their cellphones, or also perhaps because the power cut had messed around with the cellphone towers to some extent. Eventually I managed to call home and got hold of Amber, who said that she still had power on in Sandringham, although when Natalie got hold of her grandmother - in a very different part of the North Shore - the power was out there as well. A little while later Natalie left to pick up Pierre, after a bit of a mission trying to make contact, and took Amalia with her as Amalia was a bit freaked out by the dark house. Leila and I looked after Aston while they were away, bouncing him around in his bouncer and generally marvelling at the groovy new things he can do these days. After a while the excitement of the situation began to wane, and it was like "oh could the power please just come back on NOW". We were a little worried about dinner getting cold, and if we would be able to cook the rice to go with our Chicken thing. However, fortunately just before Natalie got back the power flicked back on and everything was back to normal.

It's funny that Auckland's big power cut, which knocked out power to most of the city for a good part of a day, took place around this very time last year. That was a particularly annoying day, as I had to drive to Manukau City and back, didn't really get much of a special day at work because the power flicked back on there after about half an hour, and then came home to the news our house had been burgled and my laptop taken. Fortunately this time nothing quite so dramatic happened, but it made for a noteworthy evening in any case.

Frustration
Now Playing: U2 - Sweetest Thing
Wow I find myself struggling to update at the moment, which is interesting. Perhaps it's a similar experience to when I wasn't at home last year, that I felt so busy with everything that was involved in living away from my parents' place that I didn't feel like updating my blog. Then the previous time I had shifted to "set up" a home, around the time Amalia was born, I just about abandoned this blog forever in the subsequent months. I'm not sure whether this is a bunch of co-incidences or not, but it's interesting to note. Perhaps it means I may have to work extra hard in the next while to make sure I retain a bit of motivation to write in here, or perhaps it'll settle into a new pattern soon. What is interesting however, is that before I shifted I would generally update at work, yet now I'm updating at home, but less commonly than I did earlier.

I've had a rather frustrating last few days of work. A few weeks ago Telecom contacted our work to let us know that we'd need to update a few of our email settings in the near future as they were changing over their servers. Seemed simple enough, so I followed the steps that were outlined on their website, but it wouldn't work. My boss called them up and after quite a lot of trying to figure out the problem it still wasn't working. We then ignored the problem for a while, as the changes didn't need to be made until June 17th, which was then extended to the end of the month. However, by the end of last week it was getting a bit close, and I spent a lot of Friday afternoon on the phone to various customer service representatives trying to figure out the problem. Three hours of sitting on hold, having one person after the next trying to go through the same set of troubleshooting steps about 20 times that all didn't work I was just about going out of my mind by the time I finished work. And even then things still didn't work.

So this morning it was back to trying to get this sorted out. I updated my Norton Internet Security, which then took over two hours to do a scan of my work computer. I was amazed my computer had over 950,000 files on it, which I guess made some sense because it's been used by my previous boss for a few years before I came across it, but once again the whole process took forever. Then it was back to sorting the phone line, which once again took forever before I actually got to talk to the right person, from Complex Technical Support, or something like that. Apparently on their system everything should have been working, yet on my computer it wasn't. I turned off all the anti-virus and firewall stuff, tried Outlook Express, changed about 15 million things before giving up exasperated. Then after all that I had a think about what might have been causing the problem, something that would have affected both my computer and my boss' one even though we were using different types of firewalls and anti-virus software. Then it clicked, that our adsl router had its own firewall, and therefore was affecting both of our computers.

I know it's a pretty dry subject to be talking about, but it was so damn frustrating trying things again and again to make this work - and then finally so satisfying when it finally did work. I suppose that I learned a bit more about the inner-workings of our email system, and would probably be able to sort out quite a bit if anything went wrong, but the whole process was just so damn tedious. Call a number, get a customer support person, quote a reference number, get them to ask me to do the same things that I've done 12 times before, tell them that unsurprisingly it still doesn't work, get put through to someone else, wait on hold for 10 minutes, get cut off, call back, repeat the steps again and so on. It was interesting though, that although I began to feel more and more annoyed at how long it was taking I probably ended up being more polite to the helpdesk person as time went on.

It feels like I haven't done any meaningful work now for ages, that I've wasted the last couple of days on sorting out this problem and totally got myself out of the habit of doing constructive work when I'm at work. And my Mazes Page is also particularly distracting.

Mazes
Now Playing: Snow Patrol - Run
I must have been about 7 or 8 when I remember drawing my first ever mazes. I think it was when I was at my friend Tuki's house, and we stayed all until about 4.30am in the morning drawing millions of different mazes on this paper he had lying around in his room. I think that I had drawn a few before then, but not very many and we had a great time each drawing a maze and then challenging the other to get through it, or alternatively joining in together on one and making it as impossibly difficult as we could. Inspired by early computer games we had mazes where you had to fight imaginary beasts to get beyond certain stages, where you had to collect keys and stars to get through certain locked doors, they were exciting to draw and exciting to do.

Then what would have probably been a year or so later, in Standard 4 at primary school, I got back into drawing mazes with a guy I knew in my class called Reuben. He was a rather shy and timid kind of guy, but had a handy knack of being able to draw the most difficult kind of mazes ever. I don't think even he could find a way through them half the time, through what he called his "banana patch" areas which really were just a mad mixture of paths going here, there and everywhere. He would draw them in red, and then eventually I would bring my blue paths from the other side of the piece of paper we were drawing them on, together and duck them this way and that way through his impossible banana patch. I still have a big A2 sized piece of paper with one of the mazes were drew together on it. To this day I've never managed to find my way through it.

In the early days most of the mazes I drew looked like complicated street maps really, as they didn't 'build' on each other in the way that my current block mazes did, and they also didn't travel over and under other paths like some of the other mazes I draw these days do. I hadn't even thought of taking paths of a maze over and under other paths until, some time in Standard 3, when mazes were just beginning to grip the attention of our primary school class, this kid called Daniel Sauer showed me a maze he had drawn. Daniel was I guess the ultimate geek, very un-physical but amazingly smart. He knew how to do long-division better than I would know these days, he knew the names of numbers past one trillion that nobody else knew, and he was just the fountain of all knowledge about seemingly useless stuff. The smartest kid in the class didn't really do him justice, he was miles ahead of anyone else. Anyway, one day I had been drawing some of my normal street-map type mazes and went over to talk to him for some reason. Where he was sitting, under his book on the table, he'd drawn the type of maze I had never seen before. There was no obvious beginning or end, there were no dead-ends, the paths went over the top of each other - it looked truly bizarre, but amazingly cool. I asked him how you did it if there was no start, and I distinctly remember him randomly dropping his pencil on the table, seeing where the tip of it hit the maze, and stating that was a good of a place as any to start it off at. From then on I started occasionally including those kinds of mazes into the ones I was drawing, or at the very least having a part of that maze which had loopy bits to it.

So when it came to the series of mazes I drew with Reuben the following year, they included many different styles of maze-drawing all rolled up together as one. In fact, our mazes weren't supposed to be done in isolation, but rather as one tremendously long journey in which each individual maze was only one 'level' of. Along the way you would need to collect stars or keys, similarly to the mazes I had drawn with Tuki, in order to get through. There was Maze 1, which I remember as being almost impossibly difficult and having too many "go back to start" bits to it to remember. Maze 6 had the longest single path of any of our mazes, which meant that it took forever and probably wasn't particularly interesting. Then there was the "alligator maze" which must have had something to do with an alligator, as well as the one that I still have, which I think was either the third or fourth one we drew, and perhaps the biggest of all. Other friends became involved, with my best friend Nick and another friend Scott also adding in their bits to our mazes, and another couple of guys - Michael and Sonny - generally acting as our test subjects keen to complete the latest maze we had drawn. It's a wonder I got any work done for a few months during the height of our maze craze.

My mazes pop up again in Form 2, where I had another friend of mine, Jason, help me out drawing a few. I still have a few of those somewhere in a box. By that stage my style of maze-drawing had evolved into something a little less chaotic, using the type of 'building-block' maze that I find easiest to do these days, which may have been easier than the ones we did in the past, but were probably for the first time, truly possible. Occasionally I would to the more 'loopy' ones, but they would take a lot longer to draw, and would also be more confusing when it came to doing them. A lot of my creative talent at that stage was going into drawing street-maps rather than mazes (which has turned out to be more useful in leading me towards my current career path), so during my high school years I don't remember drawing too many of them. I think there were a few that I did with James during fourth form Japanese, but apart from that if I did draw any, they were at home, which makes it difficult to tell which year I would have done them.

It was quite a few years later when I reinvigorated my maze-drawing past-time. During more boring lectures at univeristy I would find myself doodling on either the left-hand side of my folder, or (naughtily) on the benches in the lecture theatre. Often the doodles would just be silly things, but a few times I had the time and motivation to draw reasonably small mazes on the benches. The next week I would try to find the same spot where I had sat the previous week and drawn my maze, and either finish it off or check to see if someone had found their way through it. I guess I took some heart in providing entertainment for someone else as well as myself - especially when it was lectures in the Chemistry building as I imagine Chemistry students would need some entertainment during their lectures to ensure they didn't fall asleep. In some of my history classes there was a guy who I would sit next to and chat with reasonably frequently, and after noticing what I was drawing he asked to have a go at some of the mazes I completed. With him doing them, often frustratingly easily, I figured out new techniques to ensure that my mazes would be more challenging, doing them in stages where at some points there would only be one path left that had to be taken in order to get to the next part of the maze, as well as revisiting the loopy mazes, which made it much more difficult to plan out your way through the entire maze than was the case for the block ones.

Then last year I got a doodle pad at work, probably designed to give you a space to write down random phone numbers or anything else important, that would always be close at hand. Except it also became somewhere for me to draw mazes, and due to its A2 size, somewhere that I could draw them much larger than had generally been the case in the past. I have done some pretty damn impressive ones, although as always they seem rather short-lived as I find myself using a red pen to get through them without realising that I'm fucking up the maze until I've made my way halfway through it. I guess it's always been the frustration of my mazes, that they're obviously reasonably fun to draw as I keep on drawing them, and can often be quiet a therapeutic relaxing thing to do, where my hand just almost subconsciously draws away without having to engage my mind too much in it. Yet at the same time they're so temporary - I draw it, it's done, I do it, it's ruined, next!

So last week I had a thought about ways in which to add a bit more of a point to these mazes that I draw. Then it clicked, that could easily be a new page for my website. It would be a chance to give me a little more motivation to draw them, but also a great opportunity to share them and preserve them. By drawing them all on A4 paper I would be restricting myself to something a bit smaller than ideal (though I may get around to stitching bits together in the future), but it would mean that I would be able to scan them in, upload them to my website, and actually have people see them, download them, print them etc.

So as a result there is now a new Mazes page on here. So far I've created four mazes for it, but hopefully there will be more to come in the future. I guess I hope to relive to some extent the glory days at primary school when we drew some of the best mazes ever, people all over the class were trying to do them, and it was just so much fun. Who knows, perhaps the first person to complete each maze and scan & send their response to me could end up on a 'solutions' type page. I'm sure that I'll end up doing them all at some stage, when I get around to it and can be bothered. At the moment I'm quite keen to keep drawing away and see if I can get a few more up there, where they will be saved in perpetuity.

Life Currently
Now Playing: Bloc Party - I Still Remember
Strange to think that it's now two and a half weeks since we moved into this house. It has started to feel like home, that waking up in the morning and not being squished up against the wall is normal. The house is big, and does get cold easy, but it has started to feel homely for us, and it's starting to feel like a normal place to be in. I headed back to my parents' place last weekend and it was strange being there, like I was back at home - but not quite really. I think it'll take quite a while before my parents' place doesn't feel like home, especially since I've found myself back there on numerous occasions and did grow up there, but I'm sure it'll slowly happen.

I've slowly nutted out the best route for me to get to and from work, avoiding right-turns onto busy roads going either way, and also making sure I avoid potentially nasty intersections. It's interesting to see how many different routes I could have taken to get from home to work, a pretty short route really, and that with a little thought I managed to completely avoid any large-scale right turns. Oddly enough, my route home from work is completely different to my route to work, with the only double-ups being the two driveways at each end of my journey. Working my way through all the back-streets of my local area, even though it is by car, has meant that I've connected with the Sandringam-Owairaka local area and that is has started to feel like 'my patch' a little more. On a couple of weekends lately it has been nice to wander down to the local shops and get a coffee at a cafe, take Amalia to the playground, or check out the Fish & Chip shop. A few times in the past I've lived in places that felt so isolated from a neighbourhood centre that I felt as though the central city was more of 'my patch' than the area around where I lived. I guess driving a car these days, rather than walking to the bus stop, means that there's even more potential for me to feel disconnected with my local community, but fortunately because we are so close to the Sandringham shops, that won't happen.

Last week at work I managed to finish off a giant project that had been going on ever since I started working for my company. In fact the initial stages of that job were what brought me to the place in the very first place - typing in numbers after number after numbers into excel documents and looking at aerial photos trying to determine the number of units on a particular site. It wasn't particularly interesting work, but that job developed into something that I probably spent more of my time on than anything else, and has actually turned out to be pretty interesting in the end. I feel like I know it well enough to be able to take on any further reports of that type we need to do, even though my boss who largely wrote the original methodology is now living in Singapore. I guess that project is a good measure of how far I have come during that time, that I've gone from entering data into worksheets for something so big I couldn't truly comprehend it to being confident in my ability to manage report right through from start to finish. Most of the last couple of weeks have been spent printing out the final reports - which has been a major task as each report was generally between 80 and 120 pages long, with perhaps 15 of those pages being colour and therefore needing to be printed off separately on a different printer. Twenty different reports, three copies of each, yes it was a hell of a lot of paper, printer ink and toner, and even just time. It's good to get it out of the way, but a little sad in a way as it was something that I knew inside out, and something I was really confident in doing. Now it's onto new projects, which are interesting, but a little daunting because I don't know them as well - although I guess that'll come over time.

Dreams
Now Playing: Remy Zero - Fair
I woke up very early this morning, initially. I wasn't quite sure of the time but it was still dark. Leila had awoken next to me, although I'm not sure whether it was a case of her waking up leading to me waking up, or whether we just randomly woke up around the same time. I found myself extremely sleep still, although at the same time worried that as it seemed reasonably close to morning I might not be able to get back to sleep. My feet were cold, as I had removed my socks the previous night after becoming overly warm, so I searched around a bit and eventually managed to find one sock. Rearranged the duvet cover, and then fortunately went back to sleep pretty quickly.

Next thing I found myself getting ready to go to work that very next morning. Yet it felt odd, I had Leila next to me and I was going to be taking her to the airport before I made my way to work. She was off to Sydney in Australia for a three week holiday, and although a part of me realised that she had a pressing need to go there, I felt sad that I wouldn't be seeing her for that long. I wasn't upset at her for not taking me or anything though, as it seemed her reasons were particularly good and it was a particularly necessary trip, I just felt this empty hollowness that I would miss her a lot over the next while. The plane left around 11am I think, although the plan was for me to drop her off with plenty of time to spare and then get to work.

Yet things seemed to contrive themselves against us getting anywhere quickly. The time seemed to jump forward an hour from 8 am to 9am before we had even left the house, and although I hadn't really wanted Leila to go on this flight we were both now stressing that she wouldn't make it there in time. I hadn't called work to tell them I was going to be late either, and I remembered all of a sudden myself that I had this important meeting (which is some time next week in real life) that I needed to get to. After that the dream went off in weird places, I found myself at one stage talking to someone really random about a whole pile of things in my car, which was located within a very empty St Luke's carpark. Then I tried to call work but couldn't find my cellphone anywhere, then I tried to drive off but couldn't find my car-keys anywhere. It was as though the whole world was conspiring against me.

After getting through numerous obstacles, Leila and I finally noticed that it was after 11am. I asked her what time her flight was meant to be and she said that it was at 11am. After everything that had conspired against us, and the fact that I had felt so upset about her going on her holiday, I said to her "this is like the worst day ever you know?" I don't quite remember what she said in response.

I used to have these "race against the clock" type dreams all the time when I was at school, and then again at university when it was around exam time. In my dreams at school it was generally related to my fear of being late for school, and all the possible things that could go wrong when it came to riding my bike to school. At times I couldn't find my bike helmet, or I couldn't even locate my bike. Then once I had those my schoolbag would go missing, or various things from my schoolbag. All this time I would be glancing at my watch realising that the time was ticking by until I needed to be at school, and generally the time would disappear at an alarming rate. I guess because I do find myself being a fairly 'on time' person I have this subconscious stress about being late to certain important events. I remember one time in Australia before Jannatun and I were to head to Canberra for the day having the most broken night's sleep ever as my dreams imagined every possible way that I'd sleep through my alarm and miss the train that we were to catch. In the end everything was fine, probably because I had woken up on so many occasions that when it finally rolled around to not being too far away from the time I was due to get up anyway I just gave up on trying to sleep and got myself ready.

Full License
Now Playing: Porcupine Tree - Trains
I wake up yesterday morning feeling more apprehensive than usual. It's back to work after a long weekend, which is always slightly depressing, but more than that I feel nervous, my heart is thumping more than usual and I feel sensations that I haven't experienced for a while. It's almost a flashback to my days of school or university exams. Yet this isn't either, although in some ways it's something potentially more tricky, something that I could fail. Today's the day of my full driver's license test. Adding to my apprehension is the knowledge that issues may arise regarding whether my current Restricted License is still valid. Technically I remember that it came up for renewal some time in May, although there's a fairly good argument along the lines of "well I'm here to get a full license so who cares about the Restricted one", but just in case I tell myself to give a little bit extra time for administrative stuff just in case I need to do some last minute scrambling.

I read a bit of the road-code, related to the practical test, over breakfast, and then head off to work. I get a bit done, although in my rather pre-occupied way I'm not terribly productive. I keep an eye on the time though, if my test is at 12.45pm and I need to report at 12.15pm then I want to give myself plenty of time as hurrying would be impossibly stressful. Just in case things take a bit longer perhaps I should be there around 11.30am just to make sure I can smooth everything over regarding the license renewal. I head out to Westgate shortly before 11am, stopping by in New Lynn to get yet more reports bound, the final three in a batch of 30 that had been done over the previous while.

I find myself out in Westgate way early, which is probably a good thing as I remind myself. The Licensing Centre has moved, which initially freaks me out, although the directions on my internet receipt redirect me to the new place quite effectively. I wander in, realise I'm in the wrong part of the centre, and then head over to the other part of it. The person I deal with is quite friendly, I wonder whether he'll not pick up on the whole license renewing thing for a while, and sure enough he copies in the expiry date of my old license but doesn't say anything about that being a month ago at all. Perhaps it is my lucky day after all.

He enters a few things into the computer, then it clicks for him and he asks me whether I realised my license had expired. I freak out for a second, wondering whether this is going to stop me from sitting the test. He confirms this might be the case, by saying that I'd need to renew my license to sit the test. I ask whether that can be done right away, and fortunately he says that indeed it can be. I feel like a load has been lifted off my shoulders, that there's no doubt at all now I will be able to sit the test, even if I need to pay a pointless $40 to get my Restricted License renewed for merely a couple of hours (hopefully). I fill in the same form for another Restricted License as I had for my full license application only a few minutes earlier, everything gets stamped and approved, and with almost an hour to spare before my test time I'm done, finished with the paperwork and ready to go with my new, temporary restricted license that's about to become the shortest lived license ever (hopefully).

I grab some lunch, and then head out for a bit of a drive over the areas I think I might be taken along during the test. I pretend to be in a test situation, searching for and analysing the potential hazards around me and identifying my response to all of them. I feel reasonably confident, although perhaps confident isn't quite the right word. I find myself relieved that everything is now in my hands, and that something stupid isn't going to ruin this for me. After killing some time I head back to the testing centre, big breaths to calm myself and I await the person who's going to take my test. There's an interesting mix of people waiting there: a young blonde girl with freckles who looks like she must have just turned 15 and has turned up to sit her Learner License; a guy about my age who gets called up for his Full License test; various other people who look outwardly calm but are probably even more nervous inside than I am. On one of the counters an obviously exasperated clerk is trying to converse with someone whose English is obviously pretty terrible as the conversation evolves from "which license are you here to sit" to "can you read English!" A middle aged man storms in, going straight to the counter demanding to know why his daughter failed her restricted license test earlier in the day. By the sounds of it she had no "L" plates for the test, was told by her instructor that she could go buy some from the nearest petrol station, but by the time she had bought them her instructor said it was too late to sit the test and failed her. I feel sorry for the guy, and his daughter, yet also sorry for this clerk who obviously wasn't the one who created this situation. I guess these guys put up with stuff like this every day though.

Finally my test time rolls around, and after seemingly everyone else in the room getting called up for a test it's my turn. The guy seems fairly friendly, and explains everything in the kind of "super clear" way that makes me realise he's dealt with much bigger idiots than me in the past. I'm nervous, very nervous, not of my driving ability but just that I'll do something stupid which will end the test there and then. He explains to me that I must not go over the speed-limit, and should try to drive not more than 5 km/h under it if I can do so safely. This'll be a challenge, and nobody drives at 50 km/h in Auckland on the suburban streets so I'll have to be careful not to edge up to 55 km/h. We start off with some fairly simple suburban driving, as I try to ease my nerves by chatting with him about how terribly Westgate shopping area is designed. We take a similar route to the one I drove during my Restricted License test a year and a half ago, and fortunately the roads are nice and quiet. I feel like I'm being over-cautious in my driving, but in a way that's what I need to do. I check my mirrors regularly and make sure I don't do anything stupid like forgetting to indicate. After a while he lets me know that I've passed the first section of the test, and we move on to identifying hazards - cars coming from left, right, straight on and behind me when I approach the various intersections that I'm instructed to talk about. I miss a car behind me on the very first one, but other than that I get it all right. I hope that won't cost me too much.

Eventually we shift on to stage 3 of the test, and head out of the suburbs for a bit of higher-speed driving. Now I need to identify all the hazards as I'm driving, which is a bit of a challenge as it involves doing about 12 different things at once, and there's a bit of confusion at times regarding whether I'm saying too much or not enough, but generally he seems happy with things. I do a U turn on State Highway 16, which is a bit of a challenge as there's roadworks around, but fortunately once again the roads are pretty quiet, which makes my life a lot easier than it would have been on busier roads. We head back towards Westgate, he hasn't told me I've failed yet and it seems like we're heading back to the driving centre so I feel confident. He's writing on something, perhaps my temporary license, but I am focusing too much on not screwing anything up right at the end to care too much.

We get back to the carpark, and he congratulates me on passing the test. I feel elated, and relieved, that it's out of the way. That I'll no longer have to stress about breaking my license conditions by driving people around or by driving after 10.30pm at night. I'll have a groovy green driver's license coming to me soon in the mail.

Spiderman 3
Now Playing: Evermore - Real Life
Leila and I decided that we should go and see Spiderman 3 last night. It would be a good way to spend a Sunday evening in disguise as a Saturday, and a chance to do something that wouldn't become just "another one of those nights". We had already enjoyed pizza from Domino's down the road, bought amazingly cheaply thanks to unlimited $6.90 large pizza dockets on the back of our supermarket receipts. In the end the store didn't even ask for our receipt so we'll be able to do that trick again. Nice.

So here we were, heading off at about 8.40pm for a 9.00pm movie. It's liberating how close we are to St Lukes shopping mall and the attached theatres. Just a quick drive down the road, probably about midway between our place and my parents' place when I think about it, though perhaps a little closer to us. The weather, after deciding to shift between beautifully sunny and pouring down with rain throughout the whole weekend, it once again in a state of flux. The roads are nice and dry on our way there, stars shining in the sky, though sopping wet by the time we emerge from the movies. We get our tickets, and a few sweets that come to an exhorbitant price - though I'm not really surprised as I've promised myself on so many occasions in the past to never buy any food or drink from a movie theatre again. We head into the theatre, which is actually pretty empty, which means we can get good seats. There are a couple of trailers that look to be pretty lame, then the Harry Potter trailer, which is pretty good though I've seen it before, and only makes me more impatient waiting for the movie to come out in about a month's time.

The movie gets going, with a really weird opening sequence seeming to show flashbacks of the previous films, although as I didn't see all of Spiderman 2 I'm not totally sure about it. The film grinds into action, with drama/romance bits between Peter and MJ, and action bits that are visually impressive, but seem almost a bit unnecessary to the plot of the story. It's almost as though the producers of this film have gone "hey, we got great feedback from the chase scenes, special effects and more heartfelt romance of the previous films so let's just throw them altogether and people will surely love it". It reminds me a little of The Matrix Reloaded, where it was so obvious that everything was driven by feedback on the first film, where people did like the philosophy of the story, the ground-breaking effects and some of the fight scenes - and as a result the film felt as though all those things were just thrown together as much as possible, and the story was forgotten about. I was studying Philosophy at the time and even I got confused regarding what "The Architect" was talking about.

But anyway, back to Spiderman. For some reason, while the film's good eye-candy and occasionally impressive through its grandeur, there's something about it that just annoys me. Perhaps it runs a bit too long, perhaps it's the fact that all the villians seem to flit between being good and bad all the time that you can't really feel menaced by any of them. Some of the biggest fight scenes are between Peter and his best friend, who seem hell-bent on killing each other yet a few minutes later are all buddy-buddy again. Perhaps I'm just jaded about this kind of film, and I remember back to being not hugely impressed by the first Spiderman film, and I didn't even make it through the second one (though that wasn't because I gave up on it, I was distracted and then never got back to it). I find myself comparing the story of this film to a Harry Potter book, with highly developed characters, clear villians and just a depth to the story I couldn't find in this film. There were some good bits to it though, especially the focus on Spiderman's character where you could see his 'bad side' show through for a while (after becoming possessed by black slime from outer space which made him go emo... yeah, I know). Yet overall I felt myself rather underwhelmed by the whole film, I must say. Maybe it wasn't a great film, or maybe it just wasn't my kind of film. It's a bit difficult to tell.

Well Moved In
Now Playing: Coldplay - Fix You
A week after we first move in the phone line finally starts working properly, there's internet going and finally it feels like we've moved in properly. In some ways it feels like ages longer than just a week since we moved in, that it feels so natural for us to be living here now. As we've finally got internet at home hopefully my posts will start to come more regularly, and I'll be able to talk about more than just "wow.... we've moved!" Indeed it has finally started to feel normal living here, like it's slowly becoming 'our place' and not just this huge house that our stuff happens to be in. It'll take a while yet before it doesn't feel new or at least slightly strange to be here, rather than back at my parents' place, but I'm sure that eventually I'll get there. It is quite cool in a few ways to still have that exciting new feeling about living in our own home though, even the small mundane things like feeling satisfied when the dishes are done or when the washing has been completed.

At the moment it's the middle of a long-weekend, which are always particularly cool. As I've mentioned before (only a few million times) my weekends always seem to end up being a day too short - as either I only get one day with Amalia or I don't get a day to relax and chill out, or do something with just Leila and myself - and a long weekend is a chance to have both of them together at the same time. It's been one of those funny weekends, when you're sure that you've been busy most of the time yet I look back and can't quite think of anything particularly much that I did. I guess that there was a bit of visiting, with a couple of visits to my parents' place with Amalia on Friday night and Saturday afternoon, then another visit to Leila's parents' place on Saturday night. I watched a truly terrible rugby test on TV, gave Amalia a couple of baths, took her to the library and so forth.

It was actually pretty cool going to the library, as I came across a few old Tintin books. When I was at primary school, my best friend Nicholas and myself got obsessed with reading Asterix and Tintin books, to the point where eventually I had read them all (at least the ones that haven't mysteriously appeared in recent years). There were only a few Tintin books in the primary school library - The Castafiore Emerald, Tintin in America, Prisoners of the Sun, Land of Black Gold and Flight 714 I think, as well as more numerous Asterix books. Nick and I must have read each of those books from the library about a hundred times, as I can even recall what shelf from what part of the library they had come from. Over the years I managed to expand the number of books I had read, through reading some a friends' houses, some in bookshops, some from the library (maybe the very same ones I found today) and so on. I remember the moment when I had my parents buy me Tintin and the Broken Ear, which at that point completed the list of Tintin books for me, as it had been the one book that was impossible to track down up to that point.

I got out a few, and although Tintin in the Congo turned out to be truly terrible, complete with 1930s racist undertones, it's amazing to see how much of these books I remember, how many times I must have read them all and in some ways how much they represent a stage of my childhood. I'll probably find myself inspired enough to track down a few more that I used to own, from one of the many bookcases at my parents' place, and really go on a good nostalgia trip. Perhaps one day Amalia might get into them, and I will find myself discussing whether Cigars of the Pharoah or The Blue Lotus is the better book, or whether in fact Tintin in Tibet is the best of all. I still remember it was Nick's favourite, though he did have a particular interest in Tibet.

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.