BadTomatoes

We’re essentially unpacked now – and this is a much smaller place, so there’s no room for unpacked/partially-unpacked boxes anywhere.  There’s quite a lot of things that are being stored in the garage while we live here, but those are all in large plastic boxes that were packed well in advance.  And yet, somehow, I’m missing several cables – and only the cables – nothing else seems to be missing.

The cables in question are fairly short cat5 (‘ethernet’/'network’) cables – one is blue and one is yellow, so hard to miss, which link parts of our ‘entertainment system’ (the AppleTV, the Wii, the PS2, MySKY).  I’m rather baffled as to where they might be.  In particular:

I moved all the ‘entertainment system’ on Saturday, the day before the truck moved the bulk of our things.  Why wouldn’t the cables have been moved then, along with the TV, the various boxes, the cabinet, and so forth?

If they were moved then, why wouldn’t I have plugged them in?  They wouldn’t have done much, since Telecom screwed up and hadn’t connected the phone line yet, but it seems like I would have plugged them in while I was doing everything else.  If they weren’t there then, why didn’t I notice that at the time?

Since all the boxes are unpacked, where can they possibly be?  This house isn’t large enough for things to get lost.  We’ve checked all over the place, including in the car.  Although the garage was a huge mess on moving day, we’ve since tidied it up, and there’s nowhere left for them to be there (no last box to unpack or anything like that).

It baffles me, and is also pretty annoying, since I don’t have enough spare cables (in fact, I don’t have any short spares any more) to replace them.

As most people know, we moved house last week.  When we moved in (August 2008), we hoped that in 18 months or so we’d be in a position to buy rather than rent.  Unfortunately, amongst the other badness of 2009, it was not good financially, and we’re certainly not in that position now.  Failing that, we had planned to be there at least until summer of 2010/2011.  However, in January our landlord told us that he planned to sell the house, so sooner-or-later we would need to move.  Although there wasn’t any rush, we started looking for somewhere new fairly quickly – living in a rental property that’s for sale is no fun, and nor is having only 6 weeks to find somewhere new to live (if it had sold).

It took a couple of months – the pickings are slim when you have a cat, a dog, a 3-year-old, need decent Internet access, and want to be fairly rural – and we failed to get the first place we applied for, but after a couple of months we did find somewhere new to live, and have spent the last few weeks packing in earnest, then moving, then unpacking (nearly finished now).

Our time at 327 Point Wells was somewhat odd.  The last 18 months – essentially the entire time we were there – have been extremely bad for us, with few exceptions.  However, that’s mostly coincidental – it was generally quite a nice place to live.  We did have some nice times there (particularly in the early days), and there were certainly nice aspects of the property (the spa, the kitchen, the back yard, the large rooms).  However, it’s nice in some ways to have a fresh start as well.

Our new place is extremely different.  It’s ‘small town’ rather than rural.  There are only three bedrooms, and all the rooms are considerably smaller.  It’s modern (the kitchen and bathroom at 327 had been recently redone, but otherwise it was a very old house in fairly poor condition).  You can see the neighbour’s houses from most of the windows.  We’re renting via a real estate agent rather than an individual.  It’s fairly priced rather than cheap. And so on – these aren’t all negatives, but it’s certainly a huge change.  Some things will take a bit of getting used to (less privacy, the noise from the road, less space), but a year goes by pretty quickly, and I’m sure we’ll manage that easily enough.

In many ways the plan after this hasn’t really changed.  We have a bit under a year and a half before Samuel starts school.  Once that happens, we really want to stay in the same area (close enough that he doesn’t have to change school) for a long time.  That means that in about a year’s time, we may need to move again, but we’ll have to be very careful about the area that we choose (whether it’s renting or buying).  Olyvia’s quite keen on Ahuroa at the moment, although that might not be the case at that time.

Hopefully photos soon, but I do have a backlog of about 3k, so they might be a while.

It’s pretty obvious that something has changed – and this time it’s not just the look.  We haven’t (clearly) been updating here much recently – with many people we know using Twitter now, and with 2009 being a rather awful year, there hasn’t been as much to say.  These days, if I’m at a computer, then I’m generally working, so that doesn’t lend itself to posts much either.  I hope this changes a bit this year, although I’m not promising anything.

Since posting is pretty infrequent at the moment, and since we’re trying to counter the plummeting exchange rate (and hence my income), I’ve moved the site from a self-hosted system to being hosted on WordPress.com itself.  It’s only a saving of about US$50/year, but every bit helps (and it means that WordPress.com will take care of the software updates as well, which helps).  The biggest catch is that there’s not a lot of flexibility in the design – basically there’s a set of slightly customisable templates, and that’s it.  If posting does increase again enough to make spending more worthwhile, then we’ll probably move to SquareSpace, but for now this is it.

For the non-technical, all that means is that the site will be a bit uglier, but there might be posts again.  If you had an account, it’ll be gone, but the accounts didn’t really do anything anyway – you should be able to do similar things here anyway.