The problem with hats

The thing is, I love hats - especially pretty ones that remind you of Edwardian garden parties and summer weddings. I just hate wearing them.

In New Zealand I can get away with this most of the time. In winter I can usually make do with loose hoods and wide scarves, and in summer I opt for shade and high SPF sunblock. It is rare for me to feel any need for the shade of hat brim. But here in Brisbane it is a bit of a different story.

The thing I dislike is the feeling of something going around my head, the very thought of it gives me a headache. And of course my youngest child seems to have inherited this

aversion as well. I have tried lots of different hats but they really do annoy me. But I'm also finding that going without head covering when I'm out in the middle of the day is also quite uncomfortable.

I think I may have already provided myself with an option when I consider my winter alternatives. I might invest in some more light silk scarves.

And along comes Christmas

I have developed this theory, that from about the beginning of November time falls into this vortex that spins faster than the rest of the year, so that the last two months of the year flash by.

All of a sudden it is only a few weeks to Christmas and I feel caught unprepared again. And this year it's compounded by working out which bits of Christmas we'll do here in Brisbane and which bits will fall by the wayside. Will I do the Christmas baking I usually do? Will we have a whole turkey? What about decorations? A tree?

Today I started to make decisions almost sub-conciously. I bought a copy of the November Cuisine magazine without even looking inside - partially cos the cover is typically beautiful, partially cos I buy it most years, but also because I know it always has a range of food options - from the traditional spread to dinner for two. I have a Christmas recipe folder as well with the torn out pages from previous years editions. I'm also hoping that the review of bubbles might help me traverse the Australian shelves even if the old favorites are absent.

Walking through the market this morning I was already starting to plan some Christmas shopping (although shhhh - the bracelet I bought for $10 which Nick thinks I got for one of the girls is actually MINE!) We actually collectively decided our four older children's presents over coffee, and I picked up a couple of small things for the beginnings of extended family presents in the shop by the bus stop that caught my eye.

The trickier questions are the logistics of getting the boxes of Christmas decorations from storage over the next couple of weeks. I saw a great little tree with lights at Target this afternoon that will be rather swamped by our decorations scaled for an 11 foot tree! And it is tempting to do something different this year and leave the stored stuff until next year when we plan to have a larger apartment with our own furniture.

In the meantime I've just checked that the first Sunday of Advent is next Sunday (not this) and am contemplating what Jon might need for this season to be special. Last year was going to be the last year we had a Playmobil Advent calendar but I'm wondering if we need either one more or something to replace it. Plus the more I think about it, the more I want to have an Advent wreath even though I have no idea where to get the greenary. And maybe I'll give in to the allure of the lights in the supermarket and we'll do something festive on the balcony.

That's as far as I've got for now...

It's in the usual place

That was the text Tash sent me about where to find the car when I arrived in Wellington tonight. I was thinking about that as I drove "home", and I thought that it goes quite a way to explaining some decisions we've been coming to in the past couple of weeks.

One of the main things I've realised is that this move is a bit different than previous ones. There is a process you go through after a big re-location where you need to adjust to being in the new place. It's not just getting used to living in a new place - it's the emotional disengagement from the old one. The thing is that this time half our family is still in Lower Hutt and as a family there is still a certain need to have somewhere we can all be together that is ours.

So we've decided that we may not rent our house out again in January so we still have a home to go to when we are in New Zealand. Tonight I had to detour through Evans Bay as the Terrace Tunnel is being closed for maintenance and as I watched the lights of Wellington and Petone reveal themselves along the foreshore, I felt the unwinding of being in a safe familiar place. For me both/and has always worked better than either/or. I can live both in New Zealand and Australia and love both of them for the unique things they have to offer.

The quality of light

I remember many years ago watching a programme on the development of a distinctive New Zealand and Australian school of art, which placed heavy emphasis on the influence of the different kind of light that exists in the Southern Hemisphere.

I was thinking about that as I drove home tonight - perhaps because that difference is most evident as we begin to loose the light. Brisbane doesn't have daylight saving and I'd say 5.45 pm pretty much matches the sunset level we get in New Zealand at 8 or later by this time of year. The motorway is, by and large, tree lined for most of the drive and the definition of the leaves as the light just begins to fade is truly beautiful. Tonight it crossed my mind that sub consciously it is almost like driving down some of my favorite roads on the West Coast.

It is also a light that, while Antipodean, is also subtly different from Christchurch or Wellington. I decided today that I think it is slight more yellow, or stays yellow for longer - it has the warmth of the desert rather than the coolness of mountains and sea.

I'm hoping there is enough sun when I get back to New Zealand this weekend to make a decent comparison!

No longer a tourist

The moment comes when you realise that you are no longer looking around you with the eyes of a stranger. Since getting back from New Zealand on Monday I'm increasingly aware that we have probably begun to cross that bridge of behaving a bit like we are tourists on holiday in a new city to a being actually resident.

The first clue I had was talking to work colleagues about bringing Jon's skateboard through the Australian equivalent of MAF inspectors. In describing the tense moment where we wondered if his decidedly scruffy wooden deck and slightly rusted wheels would get through I said "I was really worried what would happen if he couldn't take it home after bringing it all that way". I even paused after I said it, realising that even a week ago I would have probably phrased it differently with NZ being home e.g. "he couldn't get it into the country after bringing it from home".

Then a couple of evenings later we were walking through the central city (on a mission to get new grip tape for scruffy skateboard) and I was thinking what a lovely evening it was, and how nice it would be to have dinner in one of the sidewalk cafes around the corner from our apartment. This was of course while all my NZ friends were discussing heavy wind and rain. But again there was no mental comparison - this compared to that - it just was.

There are lots of other little things as well - the jigsaw puzzle of the main routes we travel falling into place so we now only use the GPS if we are going somewhere totally new. The weekend routines moving to something a bit more laid back, as opposed to "what shall we go and see today". Jon beginning to have friends over and starting to tell me he can go places by himself e.g. "we can catch the bus into town and go to the movies" (yeah right!) The scenery as I drive to work just being what it is rather than jarring slightly because the trees are wrong. I even managed to remember this weekend that the supermarket closes at 5pm on a Saturday (I kid you not - it ain't all better!)

And I guess that's a pretty big step to feeling "at home"

The mystery box

Those of you who see my status updates on Facebook and Twitter will know that our sea freight delivery wasn't without it's hiccups. We had a missing box - which was found and delivered, however when it was delivered it didn't include all the items I expected. Most importantly it didn't include the best of my yarn stash, some books and software I wanted, and from Nick's perspective the home theatre and projector remote controls.

We had left 5 smaller boxes, all labelled Christmas decorations, in storage. As they were the last to be packed and were fragile it seemed possible that the yarn and remotes had been packed with them. So I arranged with Crown to go and pick them up when I was out that way. This took two attempts as the first time I headed that way, when I had picked up Ana from the airport, we had a call to say there was a gas leak down the street and they had been evacuated. So the next available time was last Monday heading home from our trip to NZ.

Lo and behold what should happen when we got there, but they had found an extra large box that had apparently been missed in the first delivery. They were a little embarrassed about this (not surprisingly) so were very helpful about letting me open the boxes and check for what we were looking for. The large box had several of the things I anticipated arriving several weeks ago including yarn, software, jewellary and nail polish - but sadly -no remotes! Nor does it appear that they are in the smaller boxes either. While I am going to appeal to my children for them to check I am beginning to wonder if I have inadvertently thrown them out with all the packing materials. I don't think I did as I was looking for them from quite early on.

Anyway back to the mystery box which came home with us. It was almost the straw that broke the camel's back of my finding places for everything! It sat half full most of the week while I tried to work out where I would put everything. It probably didn't help that there was an element of
"not sure I really needed this" for a number of items. If I wasn't working full time I'd have been delighted at the extra sewing materials and patterns but as it is they seemed a touch superfluous. Today I sat down with the quilting magazines and extracted only the pages I wanted which reduced the pile substantially. I also sorted through a couple of boxes I'd already put away (again checking for the elusive remotes) and discovered they could be consolidated a bit.

And on a humorous note - Jon was fretting about his Nintendo DS being in the boxes we were going to collect. However when we mentioned this in his elder brother's presence on Friday night while we were in New Zealand, Toby promptly told us that no in wasn't in the boxes it was in his room at the flat; he'd "rescued" it when he saw we'd left it behind. I'm obviously now hoping he may have rescued the remotes as well :)

Stop the clocks

The first image of the Christchurch earthquake that scored a direct hit to the heart for me was the Victoria St clock which had stopped at 4.35 a.m. when the earthquake hit. Largely because it was instantly recognisable, unlike the early images of devastation which just didn't seem to compute.

Most of my friends know that, if asked, I'm a Canterbury girl. I went to school and university in Christchurch, was married there, had my first baby there. The majority of my extended family live there or within it's environs. So on the morning of September 4, when I woke to a text from a friend in Sydney to say she hoped my family were OK after the earthquake, never mind the clocks - my heart stopped. All my family were OK, as were the many friends old and new. But it has been really hard being in Brisbane and so far away.

Which is another part of the reason the clocks (I've now seen a similar photo of a the Railway Station clock) seem so symbolic. That poem used in Four Weddings and a Funeral "Stop all the clocks" is evocative of living somewhere where life goes on when at heart you are in a different place. While I live with the nagging concerns of what the next round of aftershocks might bring and the magnitude of what has happened in a city I love, here everyone goes on oblivious. Certainly I have met with concern from people I work with but for them it is all so far away - and while we are incredibly thankful nobody died...well...nobody died.

But as another friend from Canterbury commented - our memories are interwoven with the urban landscape they took place in. I had seen the pictures of the Rep Theatre several times before someone on Facebook said to me "that's the Rep Theatre" and I was overwhelmed that the damage was such I hadn't even recognised somewhere I had many memories of. And the Railway Clock - how many times did I look up at that while lugging a heavy suitcase down the road to catch the train home from boarding school!

Many of the older buildings, particularly the churches, around where we live were built at a similar time to central Christchurch. Last night, when I was out getting takeaways for dinner, I found myself irrationally annoyed that the church I went past was totally undamaged and untouched by what had happened an ocean away. It was so totally unwarranted but also symbolic of how worried many of us are not just for our friends and family but for the heart of our city that represents the generations that built it.

So to everyone in Christchurch - we are with you in spirit - we can't begin to imagine the ongoing stress of the aftershocks, and the tediousness of the days ahead as the time required for proper repairs eats away at your patience. But we hold you in our hearts, we are proud of what you are achieving, and share your sorrow over what the earth has done to our beautiful city.