I’m safely arrived on Rarotonga, nice place, minor sunburn. I need to drive into town and go to the telecom office to get Internet, though. I have a neat little scooter so I don’t mind driving, but it does mean my ping response will be on the order of a couple days. If you have anything urgent I need to know, you can call Rarotonga Backpackers. Have fun in the snow!

Hi everyone! I am alive, my life in Wellington just hasn’t been very exciting. I just kind of go to work, come home, drink some wine, and fall asleep on the couch, usually roughly in that order. Not that that’s a bad lifestyle, it just doesn’t produce many interesting blog posts.

This is what it looked like today in my back yard:

I took the day off work and sat out here for a while and stared at the tree, one of my favourite trees ever. It was extremely hot. I could hear gulls calling, couldn’t be all the way from the harbour, but still, I love that sound. I thought about some things and wrote most of this post.

This is a pretty cool house to live in. There’s a picture of my room here too if you’re interested. Mostly it’s that I’m a fan of the roomies, though, especially after the months among sweaty German backpackers.

Hamish is an engineer, mountain biker, and white water rafter. He has a tendency to fall asleep and get things drawn on him at parties, which would have been the picture of him I used but it’s hard to find one that doesn’t have some extremely vulgar work visible. Hamish is the Zelda of the group (where I’m the Zoe).

Da does something with teeth, I don’t know. She built her dad a chicken coop for his 50th birthday. That’s her friend Ally in the front, also cool. She was my buddy for the Tongariro Crossing.

Tom and Lily are probably the best-matched couple I know and almost definitely going to get married and be happy forever. There’s a nice vibe there between all of us. There’s also another housemate but I don’t know really know her well enough to non-awkwardly ask her for a photo, which tells you why I don’t think it matters if I don’t talk about her. It’s good to have a place for a while that comes to mind when I think “time to go home” at the end of the day.

Some people from real home came to visit last weekend though, so I guess I know who in the family really loves me. Jerry and Judi were in town with a bunch of doctors or something, and we had a good few hangouts. Ask them about it, it was cool. My outlook has changed a lot lately; I don’t much care at all about going to see volcanoes or whatever, but seeing those two made my year.

Work! I haven’t written anything about work yet. Trade Me is a pretty nice place to work. The slides are cool, there’s free coffee and tea, people are really chill 99% of the time. I learned some things about archaeology. Anyway I quit a couple weeks ago, so I’m leaving New Zealand pretty soon, and taking the slow pony home. Next post will probably be about the Cook Islands, cool hey!

The big news lately is I have a job now, working for Trade Me, basically New Zealand Kijiji. I wish I had started sharing this story sooner and then there would have been some suspense, but if I had been in the habit of telling you the stories of job searches that hadn’t ended well, you would have gotten awful tired of it. I sure did. But this one was a doozy, including by my count five separate stages:

1. Initial interview
2. Technical interview
3. Meeting the team (to ensure “culture fit”)
4. Psychometric assessment
5. Meeting this one dude that I’m still not sure why I met him? They may have been stalling.

All told it took several weeks, but whatever it’s over thank the LORD it’s over. I think it went like, approximately: good initial interview, killed technical, accidentally started talking about cartoons in the team meeting, produced worrying psych results, was checked for sanity by senior staff. Actually the psych test was pretty fun. Choice nuggets from my results:

• “You have answered in a way which is quite different to others […]”
• “You appear to be reasonably disciplined but may not be highly detail attentive naturally. You may be a little more spontaneous and sometimes may get bored if things are too dull.”
• “You have some tendency to question rules and ways things need to be done.”
• “Your profile indicates that you can sometimes be a little inconsistent in how well you apply
  yourself to work […] you could be a little easily distracted and find it hard to get motivated.”
• “You have strong views and are happy to share these with others.”

But it seems I got away with it. They have slides in their office, that’s neat.

Anyway, near future steady income secured, life is good, and the time was come again to sally forth. I went from Wellington up to Rotorua, famous for simmering volcanic activity and smelling kind of like eggs. I had a good time in a hostel there, proving that it is in fact possible. I also have started to be really into wine, which I thought I didn’t like before but maybe I just never had New Zealand wine. There’s a cool Maori village there, and a park full of sulphur pits, although to be honest once you’ve seen one sinkhole full of boiling mud you’ve pretty much seen them all. My Rotorua friend Daphne and I went for a hike one day through the redwood forest just southeast of town that was estimated at 3.5 hours. We took about 7, partly because we took a bit of a walk on the way there but mostly because of our two extended lunch/nap breaks. We understood each other. My view most of that day:

Then Paihia, plus a bus out to Cape Reinga, which was a really good time. Off the cape is where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean meet, and the currents get all mixed up and sometimes there are giant whirlpools, a seam in the world. There weren’t giant whirlpools then, but it was still pretty sweet. We drove back along Ninety Mile Beach and stopped to do some sandboarding, which is basically the “climb to the top of a dune and then slide down it” thing we all did as kids on the North Shore, but everything has to be extreme in New Zealand so the dunes are gigantic and they use little laminated sleds. I think I got sand, like, literally under my skin.

I stopped in Thames, apparently The Gateway to the Coromandel, mainly to hike up the Pinnacles, which was cool. After that was Hahei, a famous beach town where nothing much at all happened and I liked it that way. There’s a beach there with hot springs, you just dig yourself a little hole and sit in it and it’s like a spa. Seriously hot though in some places, not even just warm. People hurt themselves.

A lot of photos in this one, hey? Dad and Kendra were on me about that, so I took a bunch. Most of my photos end up on my Tumblr, so maybe bookmark that or subscribe to it with RSS or something if you want to keep posted on those. I’m back in Wellington now, where the weather is markedly less nice. Soon I’ll have to start thinking about doing some work, I guess? Maybe some wine first.