I believe I mentioned that there is a bit of an evil Catch 22 here: You can't open a bank account until you have a place to live. You can't get a place to live until you have a local bank account. So we lied.
This is what good cruisers do when asked questions for which there is no correct -- and perhaps more importantly -- useful answer.
What about pirates? -- There really aren't any in the seas we'll be sailing through.
What about socialization? -- We will seek out other kid boats and spend all our time ensuring our children have others to play with.
What about drug runners? -- We've never seen any.
What about big storms? -- Never seen any of those either.
Heh. After nearly four years routinely lying to our loved ones, the New Zealand banking system stands little chance.We told them we lived at our hotel. Technically, I suppose this isn't a lie so much as a stretching of the truth tantamount to fitting a 280 pound Samoan mama into a size 4 lycra jumpsuit. And it did the trick.
Who is going to be hurt in any case? We immediately moved a bunch of U.S. cash into our account. Then we promptly spent it all. It seems like the bank is winning from all this churn… they are certainly charging us for it. Seems like the New Zealand economy benefits since spending is the Engine of Commerce, or some such economic clap trap. And while our finances are reeling, the fast movement of dollars to dollars converts into a rental home, furniture, and school uniforms which we can actually use. So it's all good.
I love sophistry.
What's great is that with a bank account, suddenly a whole world of To Do's is now open. We can rent property. We can buy groceries. We can … we can buy ANYTHING. The starved crew of Congers are now sitting at a banquet of bourgeois delights ready to indulge in the biggest feast of our lives. We want… we want…
We WANT. Oh my god do we want.
So far we have bought a whole lot of bread and cheese. It appears that what we really want is toast. It is not an exaggeration to say that we have consumed roughly a loaf of toast a day since our arrival. One day we had toast for breakfast, toasted tuna melts for lunch, and toasted cheese with tomato soup for dinner. We toast bagels and english muffins, crumpets, and white bread. We slice up sour dough, crumple croissants into hot cocoa, and sip tea with our scones. I can't help but think we're going carbo crazy.
After toast, our biggest purchases have been personal care items. We got our hairs cut, picked up a few changes of clothing, and invested in some skin care products to protect us from the wildly insane U.V. down here. So far we have exercised restraint on furniture and other worldly goods, primarily because we have no place to put them.*
But just you wait, Hen-ree, Hig-ins. Just you wait.
BTW, they pronounce all those H's down here. Of all places to be teased about our accents, we had a matronly woman at the Auckland Botanical Gardens spend no small amount of effort and emotional energy trying to get us to say hhhhhirb, correctly. Hhhhhirb. Erb. Hrm.
Editor's Note: Hahaha! Okay, I love editing this article a few weeks later. We've now spent oodles on mattresses and bedding. After toast, our priority was to get a good night's sleep for the first time in four years.
Showing posts with label shopping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shopping. Show all posts
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Turning in My Credentials
I like to think of myself as a post-modern feminist. Or a post-feminine modernist. Or just someone for whom busting gender roles is not really a calling so much as an inadvertent Truth. I am an unabashed computer geek in a sea of gamers for whom the phrase “Frost Shock!!” actually means something. My best friends discuss the relative merits of GTD applications over IRC, and purchasing my first Mac in ten years was close to a sexual experience. I don't own a lacy bra, I selected a birthing center based on the speed of their WiFi, and I get new clothes only when my mother buys them for me. It's fair to say, I've earned my butch chops.
The move to boat life, as a result, has been fraught with opportunities to fail in my endless non-effort to be a model of all that is 21st century woman. For one thing, I like to cook. I like messing with our gimpy oven and experimenting with two-burner cooking. I also like to navigate, communicate with our land-based friends, and provision the linens. In the sailing world, these are the Girl Jobs. Dr C in turn loves to mess with the engines, tear apart and rebuild the electrical system, and build a water maker from scratch. These are Boy Jobs. I teach school and take care of the children; he works at the office and brings home the cruising kitty. It's like we threw away twenty years of marital equality and stepped into an episode of Leave it Beaver.
So when it came time to purchase an outfit for my eldest daughter's Irish dancing competition, I dug in my heels. Just because I'm the girl doesn't mean I should have to do the shopping. I hate shopping. I hate clothes. I especially hate clothes shopping. He's the one that gave me three girls and no little boy sperm. It's his fault they want to wear something frilly and hop up and down like flower fairies with backbones made of pogo sticks. He could just take them off to Target and take care of this little matter while I read through the manual on our new SSB.
Unfortunately about a half glass of wine after they left, the heater kicked on and a strong smell of diesel began to waft up from the starboard cabin. Boats often smell like fuel, but whenever you append the word “strong,” you've got a problem. I flipped off the heater, grabbed a flashlight, and headed into the starboard hull to figure out what was going on.
And it wasn't good. The bilge was bright pink.
Now here's the thing about the bilge. Bilge water comes in an array of colors that would do a paint store proud, and each color tells you something about what you're going to spend your next thousand dollars to fix. For example, let's say the water is green. Green means you've had standing water in that bilge for long enough to grow algae. Look to your bilge pump as the culprit since either the pump, the relay, the electrical attached to the relay, or the sensor is busted, loose, or missing in action. How about clear and getting higher at a visible rate? Well that would be a hole. Holes in a boat are Bad. Brown? Let's just remember what always slides down hill.
But pink. Pink is probably the worst. Pink equals diesel. The brighter the pink, the greater the spill. This is not something you can just pump out unless you don't mind being held by your fellow mariners in the same esteem as the captain of the Exxon Valdez. Pink means pulling out hazardous waste buckets, oil-soaked clothes, and a pair of gloves that go up to your elbows.
It took some crawling around to figure it out. A fitting on the top of the diesel fuel tank for the starboard engine had worked its way partially lose. Fuel had splashed out and down. Lots of fuel. Enough fuel to coat the hull beneath the tank and overflow into the bilge. As long as we didn't move the boat, no more would come out. Unfortunately, boats move. It needed to be fixed, the fuel mopped up and disposed of in the proper receptacles and with complete compliance to all the relevant statutes, laws, and ritual sacrifices to the gods of marina purity. Finally, the fitting needed to re-affixed in a way that would prevent a reenactment.
And it couldn't wait. The repairs took two hours of slogging work soaking up fuel, scrubbing everything with Simple Green and salt water, power sucking out the water, and disposing of all the waste. Dr C and the girls showed up just as I finished, all in great spirits with a really cute outfit, ice cream cones, and babbling about their pleasant evening with their father.
To hell with feminism. I should have gone shopping.
The move to boat life, as a result, has been fraught with opportunities to fail in my endless non-effort to be a model of all that is 21st century woman. For one thing, I like to cook. I like messing with our gimpy oven and experimenting with two-burner cooking. I also like to navigate, communicate with our land-based friends, and provision the linens. In the sailing world, these are the Girl Jobs. Dr C in turn loves to mess with the engines, tear apart and rebuild the electrical system, and build a water maker from scratch. These are Boy Jobs. I teach school and take care of the children; he works at the office and brings home the cruising kitty. It's like we threw away twenty years of marital equality and stepped into an episode of Leave it Beaver.
So when it came time to purchase an outfit for my eldest daughter's Irish dancing competition, I dug in my heels. Just because I'm the girl doesn't mean I should have to do the shopping. I hate shopping. I hate clothes. I especially hate clothes shopping. He's the one that gave me three girls and no little boy sperm. It's his fault they want to wear something frilly and hop up and down like flower fairies with backbones made of pogo sticks. He could just take them off to Target and take care of this little matter while I read through the manual on our new SSB.
Unfortunately about a half glass of wine after they left, the heater kicked on and a strong smell of diesel began to waft up from the starboard cabin. Boats often smell like fuel, but whenever you append the word “strong,” you've got a problem. I flipped off the heater, grabbed a flashlight, and headed into the starboard hull to figure out what was going on.
And it wasn't good. The bilge was bright pink.
Now here's the thing about the bilge. Bilge water comes in an array of colors that would do a paint store proud, and each color tells you something about what you're going to spend your next thousand dollars to fix. For example, let's say the water is green. Green means you've had standing water in that bilge for long enough to grow algae. Look to your bilge pump as the culprit since either the pump, the relay, the electrical attached to the relay, or the sensor is busted, loose, or missing in action. How about clear and getting higher at a visible rate? Well that would be a hole. Holes in a boat are Bad. Brown? Let's just remember what always slides down hill.
But pink. Pink is probably the worst. Pink equals diesel. The brighter the pink, the greater the spill. This is not something you can just pump out unless you don't mind being held by your fellow mariners in the same esteem as the captain of the Exxon Valdez. Pink means pulling out hazardous waste buckets, oil-soaked clothes, and a pair of gloves that go up to your elbows.
It took some crawling around to figure it out. A fitting on the top of the diesel fuel tank for the starboard engine had worked its way partially lose. Fuel had splashed out and down. Lots of fuel. Enough fuel to coat the hull beneath the tank and overflow into the bilge. As long as we didn't move the boat, no more would come out. Unfortunately, boats move. It needed to be fixed, the fuel mopped up and disposed of in the proper receptacles and with complete compliance to all the relevant statutes, laws, and ritual sacrifices to the gods of marina purity. Finally, the fitting needed to re-affixed in a way that would prevent a reenactment.
And it couldn't wait. The repairs took two hours of slogging work soaking up fuel, scrubbing everything with Simple Green and salt water, power sucking out the water, and disposing of all the waste. Dr C and the girls showed up just as I finished, all in great spirits with a really cute outfit, ice cream cones, and babbling about their pleasant evening with their father.
To hell with feminism. I should have gone shopping.
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