Monday, June 22, 2009
So the adventure begins
At least it looks that way. Our immigration packet for our Invitation to Apply has been mailed to New Zealand Immigration in London and once there it should be moved to the front of the line pretty quickly as Cara, the nurse and grand poobah of this outfit, has a job offer from the Canterbury District Health Board. From all of our research (quite extensive, thank you) we should have our permanent resident stickers in about a month or two. So with today being Sunday, June 21 that gets us to the middle of July or August. And since we have already bought our plane tickets for an August 23 departure, we sure hope it works out this way or we have really screwed the pooch! It has been a very long time coming but sometime very soon all of our giddiness, nervousness, apprehension and everything else that comes with moving a family of four across the globe should be condensed down into four tiny blue stickers within the folds of our passports. How did this happen? Why did we decide to uproot ourselves and two young children and move to the middle of the South Pacific? When we figure it out, we'll be sure to let you know. Until then.....stay tuned.
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Good luck with the move - it will indeed be an adventure of the highest magnitude and should give you all grist for the creative mill for many years. I will be looking forward to your future chapters of this book we call life. Meanwhile, I will be guarding the homeland from frontal assault by the Brigade of Voles. (We have lost about 8 shrubs - ones the deer didn't get)... With any luck Portland will still be here when you get back.
ReplyDeletestaying tuned. perhaps I can visit, meet a handsome kiwi, and stay on wi' yu
ReplyDeleteMy last encounter with Kiwis was at an invasive plant conference. Efforts were being made to (strongly) discourage planting of non-native plants in the booming suburbs of Auckland, on the logic that the city has become source of foreign plants that spread all too fast into the countryside.
ReplyDeleteIf I remember my plant geography correctly, New Zealand shrank to a very small size at some point in its history, so it has nowhere near as many plants from the ancient continent of Gondwana as Australia or South America. On the other hand, the digging of kauri resin (from a genuinely Gondwna tree) seems to have been a huge business in the 19th century, something like turpentine harvesting from longleaf pine trees here in the Southeast. It must have been brutally hard labor.
Surfing's a big deal in our area. Australia and Indonesia get lots of attention, but NZ seems to be kind of ignored, which is probably a good thing. I couldn't resist checking Magic Seaweed for Canterbury, and the water's 49, the air 46. Sounds winter-Oregonian to me. Certainly adequate to keep Floridians at bay.
My hunch is that the bunch of you should fit in nicely, though I wonder whether you'll be pelted with questions about Hood River. And pelted with rain in the wetter-than-PNW summer.
I'm reminded that I have a little bunch of Olive Fell etchings. She made sort of a living by selling landscapes and animals to Yellowstone-area tourists.