Cars
This week started off putting down the deposit for a brand new SUV. I always knew we needed to buy a car once we arrived, but I hadn’t entertained the idea of a new one. The exchange rate and relative cost of cars in New Zealand makes them a much better value proposition than the UK, ironically some of the them are made in the UK and shipped over and still cheaper than the UK.
In the end we plumped for the new Toyota RAV 4 Hybrid, its a pretty solid investment and cheap to run (for an SUV), because it will take a few months to get it built (the new models were literally released on Monday), and we are stuck using an expensive rental, the garage offered us a Corolla Hybrid to use in the meantime. To make things even better we didn’t need to pay for insurance, it’s covered by the garage!
There is one downside to the Corolla, its a bit smaller and until our freight arrives we are living out of suitcases. Moving to our next AirBnB might be a “fun” juggling experiment to fit all those cases in.
Freight Shipping
At the start of the week Cat realised we hadn’t heard anything from our shipping company on when we could expect things to arrive, after some chasing, we were given some “different” information to what we had been told previously.
Originally we had been told they would pick up the house contents, take it to the docks and it would take 6-8 weeks to arrive. We planned AirBnB’s for this period and packed our hand luggage accordingly.
After speaking to the company there was a little “important” nugget of information revealed. If you don’t pay for a whole shipping container the container sits on the docks until they find sufficient cargo to fill it. Our content is sitting at the docks in the UK waiting to be filled. When we asked how long it might be before it got shipped we got told
“maybe 5 weeks, might be longer. Depends what’s about”.
Great. That’s at least another whole month in AirBnB’s which is expensive. It would have been cheaper at this point to have paid for the whole container and them ship it promptly. Lesson learned. Pay for the whole container, it’s probably going to be cheaper overall.
Banks
At the start of the week we had a big “OH NO” moment. In order to transfer our savings to our NZ bank account we had to use a card reader, unfortunately we had packed it in freight by mistake. Which has a big question mark when it might arrive.
Thankfully I deployed the parents. Mine are retried so they had plenty of time to go and grab another one from the bank and air mail it over. It took about 7 days door to door to arrive. Crisis averted!
Website
I had a few spare moments this week to address a few more bugs that have surfaced as a result of shifting time-zones. I think I’ve got them all. It’s been a challenge I wasn’t expecting, I had to learn how to tell Jekyll to run in a different time-zone so it didn’t ignore “future” posts, how to reconcile when I post data from Micropub that is in a different time-zone and make decisions on which time-zone I save dates and times in when receiving webmentions in a different zone.
New Job
The most exciting part of the week (aside from the car) was meeting colleagues at my new job; I start on Monday. I’m going to be a Service Designer for the Ministry of Justice, they have some really unique problems to solve while going through a big period of change. Exciting times, I can’t wait to contribute!
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