Working Away

Getting Run Down by the Spirit of New Zealand
toastfloats on Flickr

We've been in New Zealand since mid-October. The original plan -- such as we plan anything any longer -- was to get DrC settled into work, the girls into school, and then I would begin the long slow process to rebuild my consulting business. When I say rebuild, it is perhaps an exaggeration. For most of my consulting life, I have made little or no attempt to be fully employed. Usually, I use contracting as a method to work part time at things I enjoy so that I can spend the rest of the time doing tasks I truly love. Whether it is raising babies, homeschooling little girls, or sailing big girls across oceans, I realize now that contracting has been for me a gateway to spending time with my children.

However, now my children do not really need me so much any longer. They need the love and the support, sure. They don't really need me to wipe their noses or pick up their toys. Granted, I didn't really ever spend much time wiping either noses or toys. I remember wiping a lot of asses, actually. Come on. You were thinking it. Someone needs to have the courage to stand up and say, "Children are about butt wiping." They are not cute or fluffy or particularly fun, especially not in those early years when the quantity of crap flowing out the back end is truly mind boggling. Seven straight years of diapers and look where it got us… ten straight years of high school girls. I am somehow failing to see how this can be interpreted as the golden statue for Lifetime Achievement in Diaper Pinning.

Yet, there they go. Strong, independent Jaime. Beautiful, talented Mera. Charming, clever Aeron. Little people all grown up into bright young ladies with not the slightest interest in whether or not I stay home as long as there are plenty of snacks in the bin when they get back to the boat after school. The adjustment to institutional school life is going much smoother this round. I don't know if this is because the schools are better, they learned a great deal about public schooling the first go in Pukekohe, they are more mature, or some combination of the above. We are only three weeks into the year, and they have already established patterns and connections which bode fair well to ensuring I never see them.

Jaime has perhaps the hardest road this year. A combination of senior year pressure and a failure to do anything strictly educational last year means that her academic load is fierce. To this she added water polo, a job, and a boy friend. Kids these days. I have no idea how she'll handle it. She might not. Look, I know it can be done. I did at least that much my junior and senior year. I just don't know if Jaime is the one to do it. My only contribution to the decision making process is to offer my support, rides to 5:30am practice, and a lesson on GTD should she choose to go ninja on her personal productivity. After that, we'll have to see what she is made of. Smart bet is she either takes me up on learning how to get organized or she selectively reduces her work load until she has the bandwidth to do it all well. The one extremely good sign is that her eyes are wide open, fully aware that she may have taken on too great a load.

While Mera's choices appear on the surface marginally less ambitious, she is something more of a perfectionist. She is enrolled in Y10 accelerate which as near as I can tell means that functionally she is a Year 11 taking her NCEA Level 1 college qualification courses this year. The academics are a larger work load than she is accustomed to. More importantly, she goes through school with an odd combination of sublime arrogance and complete lack of confidence. I can not fathom it. One minute, she's the smartest kid in the room and not afraid to let you know it. The next she is dithering and fussing and agnsting over the micro details of a paper due on Monday, fearful of tests and worried about how her teachers will respond to her presentations. The worry causes her to spend energy and time perfecting every assignment, perhaps well beyond what is strictly necessary. For extra curricular, she was cast as a Shark girl, plays badminton on the weekends, and… much to the entire family's delighted surprise… made some friends with whom she actually *gasp* does things. Our little Mera, hanging out uselessly at the mall eating bad food and browsing shops. We're so proud. Really. Sometimes we can convince her not to take her Kindle on these excursions. We all count this as a major step forward.

Aeron is no longer the baby of the family, but she does at least have the advantage of being the youngest and with thus the lightest pressure. Her middle school is only moderately challenging academically, so she is channeling her boundless energies elsewhere. Horrifying both her father and myself, she wants to take up netball. In our opinion, netball is what you get when you take cheerleaders, put them on the basketball court, and make it impossible for them to smash into one another or do anything even moderately interesting. On the other hand, it is a huge sport down here, and I suspect Aeron will prove outstanding. She's scrappy, strong, and highly athletic. She was voted her class captain last week. No surprise, really, with her empathy and charm she's a natural leader and politician. DrC and I are thoroughly underimpressed with her course of study so we're supplementing in the evenings with math and French. We'll see how she goes.

Couple of Walkers
toastfloats on Flickr

And then there is the good doctor. I was supposed to start work in January. Instead of working and starting the family down the path of putting money into accounts, I have spent the past two months either prepping for or recovering from surgery. As a result, our finances are worse than anemic. DrC stepped into the breach. He has been picking up extra shifts at every possible opportunity. When he isn't doing doctor stuff, he is scraping away -- sometimes quite literally -- at the back log of boat maintenance chores. It would be hard to be more impressed with this work ethic, diligence, and emotional strength. He is a good life partner in so many ways. It didn't take this experience to make me recognize it, but it never hurts to be reminded that I made an outstanding choice and am lucky to have him.

So that's it. While I've enjoyed some amazing professional experiences, I haven't worked full time since 2005. On ramping isn't going to be easy. On the other hand, I look like the sole slacker in a family of over-achievers. Might be time to remind these Congers where they got that hyper-activity, more is more, I-can-do-anything-better-than-you gene.

Elephantine Musings

The Girls Contemplate Our New Home
Uploaded by toastfloats

At times I am convinced that the Fates are determined to prevent me from successfully reentering the work force full time. I swear it is not merely an elaborate form of laziness which over the years has pulled me out of the employment market. Homeschooling, cruising, extended stays in foreign countries, all these are arguably my fault but I OWN them. I fully admit that life distracted me. I did it on purpose with a purpose.

Now, however, I want to work. Okay, world? I want to work. I work hard. I'm good at what I do. Let me work.

Except not for the last two months while I sorted our immigration paperwork, got DrC all spiffied up and off to work himself, and scrapped nearly 8 months of indescribably icky goo off our bodies and out of the boat.

And not this month while my Mommy is in town.

And apparently not next month while I have a good chunk of my face reassembled.

It turns out that the little bump on my nose which initially appeared like the world's most persistent and slow forming zit is actually not a zit at all. It's a zebra case of a tumor which is going to just keep growing until I either cut it off or I can't see past it and run my car off a cliff. The medical definition of a zebra is a disease or condition that is so uncommon that a doctor only learns of it because medical schools engage in a form institutionalized hazing which in any other context would be declared a felony. Any given zebra only shows up in the average medical practice once or twice in a doctor's entire career, if that. Such cases are shared with colleagues over a slice at lunch or at the annual Christmas party after a few drinks. Professors make presentations about zebras, others make a living doing research on them and publishing the results in esoteric journals.

This zebra tumor has -- as is usual in such cases -- an unpronounceable, unspellable name which I promptly forgot but which DrC rattles off with élan whenever the topic arises. It apparently has been there for years and years… maybe even since childhood! … just waiting till the perfect moment when lack of ready cash, a high deductible insurance plan, and extraordinarily pent up demand to get back to work combine to make this the worst possible moment to erupt into sight. Now that it's growing, however, the thing is on a roll. Depending on my mood, the girls either refer to me as The Two Nosed Witch or Rudolph, the Double-Nosed Reindeer. It just gets bigger from here. Fortunately, there is just about zero chance it means death to Toast unless I am foolish enough to allow it to grow so large as to block my ability to eat.

Unfortunately, getting rid of it is fraught with all sorts of horribleness. It'll be expensive. It'll leave a really nasty scar. And, I am not shitting you, I am going to spend three weeks with an "elephant trunk made out of skin" stuck gobsmack in the middle of my face. Explaining how this works may require a diagram. The idea is the plastics doc cuts a strip of my forehead, backs it with a chunk of belly fat, then without detaching it, twists it over and down and attaches it to my nose where the dermatologist has left a great gaping hole after cutting out the tumor. Then we let the thing sit there for nearly a month while the skin grafts together after which we "trim the tusk off". You're damn right you are going to trim that off.

Climbing Out
Uploaded by toastfloats

On the upside, I told you I didn't need all those 'get rid of belly fat' Facebook adverts. I have my own creative ways to reduce that flab. On the downside, I'm not entirely clear how I'm supposed to go on a job interview with a skin trunk curling up from my nose. I'm going to look like a Star Trek character, and I don't mean that in a good way. I know I should be happy that I'm not cast as a Red Shirt in this drama, but I just keep thinking that no one really ever thought the Ferengi were doable, no matter how lovable Quark got towards the end.

Tonight, I'm glib about this, able to tell jokes and contemplate the whole thing with some degree of distance and equanimity. I have to be honest, however. After leaving the plastics consult, I just sat down for awhile and cried. I don't want to do this. It's expensive, painful, and scary. I have no real hope I'll look like Nicole Kidman after my surgery is complete. I'll probably look like someone who has been through a far worse experience like a car crash or the collapse of a building in an earthquake. It'll take a long time to heal and might require several additional surgeries before I don't look like someone grafted a piece of my ass on to my face. I had a real zit on the other side of my nose this morning which almost sent me into hysterics. I want to be brave and strong and reasonable, but my inner me appears to just want to scream and jump up and down and bitch about the unfairness of it all. Fairness, of course, has nothing to do with it. Our own troubles touch us more profoundly than the most terrible trials of others, because they are our own. That doesn't make my trouble less to me, the thought does help me with the reasonableness of it all. It's a benign tumor. While I can't see how it could possibly make me stronger, it isn't going to kill me. I am not a great beauty to begin with and this isn't going to make me less so.

Getting down to brass tacks, what I really need is some work to do for the month of February that does not involve seeing people. Reasonable or not, I don't think I can shake hands with a client and keep a straight face when my face isn't.

Dance Class at the Civic Centre

Go Away
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Her hands frame her face then glide two inches over her breasts and then her butt, "Crown, beautiful, beautiful." This graceful movement is made to the somewhat Arabic sounding rhythm blasting from a boom box at the front of the room.

I'm in bellydancing class.

My attempt to mimic the movement is not nearly so graceful, though I like to think it's improved since my first effort at this step. It's been 7 weeks, and I have just about reached the point where I can move my hips completely independently of my shoulders. My shimmy no longer looks like a palsied octogenarian trying to get her pants down to go potty. And I've definitely figured out how to make my boobs jump up without moving my knees. You'd be surprised how resistant the boobs and the knees are to disassociating their movements.

I don't think it is possible to imagine a group of women more unlikely to bellydance. We are none of us spring chickens. We range from clearly overweight to just merely pie-laden, and the majority are dressed in loose shirts and forgiving dark sweat pants. There are no real dancers present. We're just a bunch of worker-bees, office drones, mothers and grandmothers.

Yet, our instructor Angie somehow makes this motley crowd beautiful. It's not that she is particularly stunning herself. She isn't. She's a tall, rather average looking woman with no lean figure herself. What saves Angie is that she knows how to move. Moreover, when she moves she believes she is beautiful, and it shows in very gesture and step.

It's incredibly inspiring.

I want to move like that, look like that. More importantly perhaps is that I want to feel like that. I want to lift my head and arms and glide around in the Princess walk like I own this room. I'd like to shimmy so that everything jiggles and gain the discrete control over the muscles in my core that enables a bellydancer to push her nipples straight at you without curving her back or poking out her butt. In short, I want to feel sexy.

DrC believes that bellydancing is a specifically female dance. Unlike ballet or jazz or ballroom, there is no room for the male physique or macho sensibility here in bellydancing world. Every pose and combination appears specifically designed to highlight the beauty of the female form, feminine movement.

What I should have known and seems blindingly obvious to me now is that beautiful, sexy women are made, not born. Take a slightly overweight former cruiser and teach her how to rotate her hips just so, lift the chin, tuck in the butt, smoothly jiggle, shimmy and quiver, and you've got something special. And it doesn't really matter whether or not you, the onlooker, agree with me that I am a beautiful sexy goddess. All that matters is I feel wonderful and beautiful when I hear the bangles on my skirt clash and see the fringe swirl as I turn. I feel special.

During this epiphany, Angie has moved on. We are now strutting around in a large circle, shoulders thrusting aggressively forward in a Goddess Walk -- unlike the pretty, sly and delicate Princess glide, this is a power move. We hold our heads high, breasts up, toe-heel, arms gracefully extended holding imaginary golden eggs. My egg is made of crystal, and there is a glowing green jewel in the center.

Of course it is. If I want to be a jewel toting Goddess in my mind, well that's precisely what I am. It's my imagination. Look at me strut!

Take That Job

Seconds Before Wipe Out
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

My husband and I have been singularly fortunate in our employment timing. We left the United States just as the economy began to unravel, and we have largely been able to avoid the very real angst and frustration that resulted. Friends and family struggled to keep it together, find work, pay the mortgage, keep going, adjust to the new conditions, while we cruised in our bubble of semi-retired self-indulgence. So it is with a wry understanding of how lucky we've been to date that I begin my whine about getting a job in New Zealand.

Let us first state the obvious -- I am not whinging about getting a job. I am obviously whinging about not getting a job. Here is Toast pitching a tantrum and stamping her feet because nobody wants to fork over large amounts of money for the privilege of hiring an immigrant, female Yank with weak recent employment history in a difficult, tight market. Stamp stamp stamp…. why not?! Stamp stamp stamp…. really… why not?! Of course, the obvious answer to that question is that I'm an immigrant, female Yank with weak recent employment history in a country which doesn't have an enormous technology sector to start and which is further beaten down by the global economic melt down. Moreover, I know not a single soul locally who can, in a feat of professional nepotism, leap me over otherwise qualified Kiwis to pull me into the fold.

Even if I could find a sugar daddy with the perfect job, the family engages in a collective gasp of horror at the thought of mommy leaving the house at 6:00 AM every morning to shlep for an hour into the central business district, returning at approximately lights out. Let me give you an example of how spoiled the family has become. In a fit of frustration last week, I walked into a local Curves franchise and applied as a coach. I didn't even ask what it paid. I'm just so sick of sitting in Chicken House emailing resumes into /dev/null I was ready to do anything. I was hired right there on the spot. Four days a week, 2 to 6.

DrC and the girls pitched a fit. "No. You can't do that, Mum!" cried the girls. "Really, Toast. The hours are just not going to work," said DrC.

Oh for cripies sakes, people. Cut me a break… So back to Curves I went and reluctantly told the owner that the family had vetoed the job. She was surprisingly gracious and put me on the short list to receive a call when a morning shift opens up… though I got the impression that would be at approximately the same moment as pigs flew out of the prime minister's ass. So now in addition to: not in the central business district, part time, and not involving medical experimentation, I have to add the restriction "only between the hours of 8 AM and 3 PM." At this rate, I will absolutely never find work in New Zealand.

"Do you think I'll ever get a job?" I moan to DrC.

"Well…," he temporizes. This question probably bears a strong similarity to the perennial minefield surrounding, "Do I look fat in this?"

The difference between positivism and optimism is as follows: Optimists assume that good things will happen. Positivists assume they always know what is going to happen. "I am positive I am not going to find a job." I'm stepping to the plate, accepting reality, skipping the grief and denial phases entirely, and getting into mad and whatever the hell happens next. "This just isn't going to work. Or I'm not going to work. Whatever."

"Um…" DrC's waxing particularly articulate this morning.

"I'm done with this shit," I declare with another vicious wave of positivist thinking. "Preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse means we are flexible!" DrC winces. "Adaptable!" I'm getting louder. "Ready to do whatever it takes!!"

DrC covers his ear with one hand to protect it from my strongly positive thinking, "So…"

Always Helpful
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

"So I'm done. I'm going to get a job answering phones four hours a day so I don't go out of my flippin' mind stuck in Chicken House, and I'll spend the rest of my time working on that d* book."

"What d* book?"

"The d* book everyone keeps telling me to write." With this declaration, I spin the van into a parking spot and practically push him out the door, "Go to work. I've got stuff to do."

Bemused, DrC climbs out of the van, his parting blessing, "You know I'll love you no matter what you decide."

Muttering, I zoom off, "You're d* right you love me no matter what, or I wouldn't be here in the Antipodes baking cookies and dropping my man off at the Kiss and Ride…"

In Our Own Words

Memory Picture
Originally uploaded by toastfloats.

Today, we delivered our impact statement to the Pukekohe Police. The judge uses these statements during the sentencing phase. The thieves who took our stuff have been in jail now for a few weeks. The judge gets to decide based on what they've done and how it impacted us how long they will stay there. The court asked me to have the girls and DrC write their own statements.
---------------
It made me very mad to know someone had stolen important things that only affected me. -- Aeron Conger (9)
* * *
The burglary was very upsetting to my wife and children. We were still living out of our suit cases, having a hard time finding a place to live. The house smelled like cat piss and we weren't sure we could live here. The burglary was like someone telling us "We don't want you here." We thought our neighbors might have done it, until the thieves were caught.

Financially, we will recover, since we have property insurance. It will be a big pain in the ---- having to deal with the insurance company and keep track of everything we purchase for the next 12 months. My wife has spent many hours dealing with these issues already.

Petty thieves deserve to be punished, because their crimes are, most likely, not of necessity but of opportunity. Stealing is easier than earning an honest wage yet it causes immense emotions and societal harm. It alters our way of life on a fundamental level and changes the way we view our neighbors and fellow man. -- Dean Conger (45)
* * *
This theft hurt me personally, because many of the things that were stolen had no commercial value, but they had memorable value. They were a piece of my life. The most important stuff I owned was the stuff that was stolen and not returned. I was also hurt by the complete lack of respect that someone showed. I don't know how this could be justified. -- Jaime Conger (14)
* * *
Our family moved to New Zealand in mid-February. We pared everything we owned down to ten suitcases, seven of which were taken in the robbery. I want you to imagine that you distilled your life to just a few bags and that 70% of everything you owned was then taken from you. This was a financial loss, certainly. It was a more devastating personal loss to all of us as things we valued very much were taken.

Financially, we will recover from our insurance company roughly two thirds of our total estimated replacement cost loss of $X,000 USD ($Y,000 NZD). The difference is primarily due to depreciation on the high value electronics, medical equipment and marine equipment that were in the bags. Another large fraction of the unrecouped loss comes from a single item: a folio containing business, educational, medical, and recreational software which the insurance firm will not recover. The irony is that the majority of the recreational disks are not actually functional in New Zealand. We also lost no small amount of accumulated data on the external hard drives which will take years to recover. We had copied all our movies and music on to those hard drives so that we might leave the original disks in the States. The work effort represented is a dead loss.

Emotionally, the issue is more challenging. After two years in Mexico, it was strange to feel that we were considerably less safe in New Zealand… a country reknown for its low crime and corruption rates. I think immediately after the theft, we all just wanted to go back to Baja where we would feel safer. Gradually we are pulling out of that and beginning to enjoy ourselves again. However, the entire incident dramatically shook our confidence. I must stress that the actions of the Pukekohe Police -- their consideration, respect, and diligence -- have materially helped the entire family in this recovery process.

Personally, the hardest moment for me was walking into the garage where our things were found. Everything of monetary value had, of course, already been taken elsewhere -- sold or traded, who knows. But there in the garage were so many precious bits of our lives. And they had thrown these bits -- diaries, pictures, souvenirs, children's clothing, letters and mementos and homemade jewelry and gifts -- into the trash. My daughters' most precious possessions were mixed with dirty rags, empty soda bottles and food wrappers. It made me cry then and it makes cry now to type it. Our lives meant absolutely NOTHING to these people. They felt NOTHING when they treated us like garbage. It is hard to have even the slightest empathy or sympathy or respect for someone whose values are so distorted that they miss the most obvious value of such things.

Immediately after this happened, Mera and Aeron agreed that the punishment for a crime such as this one would be to take the most valuable, precious and important thing the thief owns and burn it. Just burn it. But when they got some of those things back, they came to me… separately… and said no. Don't do that. Because no matter how bad the thieves were, we can not be that cruel. It just hurts too much to lose something that important. I will defer to my daughters on this point, and leave the notion of justice to someone considerably more objective than myself. Personally, I feel far more Mama Bear and mean. -- Karen Toast Conger (42)

* * *
It felt like an earthquake. The stable thought you get that no one is bad or evil and nothing bad will happen gets shaken up and destroyed. I thought that like an earthquake as well, it is sudden and quick, but takes days or even months to heal. But it also reminded me that our possessions are not our family. They don't matter nearly as much as my Mom or Dad or my sisters. Still, it was a constant burr in my side afterwards, remembering all the useful, important, silly, or just normal stuff that were now gone forever. The things that probably hurt the most were my diaries and my Mom's life-time jewelry. By some miracle, the thieves missed the jewelry and were caught by the police, so once I got my diaries back, everything else didn't matter too much any more. But I can still remember turning into a waterworks, Mom trying to pull it together, our empty, run-down house, and the question that usually comes at times like that. Why? -- Mera Conger (11)