Can I just say that this is day twenty-five, and we finally have the internet at our fingertips? That's nearly a month of not being able to pull up Wikipedia at a moment's notice and learn about the autoharp or watertowers. I had to call people to ask about train times and ferry locations! Le gasp!
We were planning to take a day to go explore Eastbourne on the other side of the harbour, but technology got in the way just as we were planning on heading out for the train. Which actually worked out for the best. (See also: INTERNET.)
While my computer mysteriously decided to chew up a few documents, Claire had the endurance to go five rounds (and by "rounds" I really mean "hours") of verbally wrestling with both Telstraclear and router support. After all of that, she found out that we needed to buy a new router. First we went to the local Johnsonville Dick Smith's Electronics, which is approximately the size of my living room at home and feels like a grungy convenience store, only to learn that they didn't have what we wanted in stock. So off we went to Wellington to the other Dick Smith's on Manners Mall, which wasn't much bigger but it was better lit and better stocked. We happily took the last router off the shelf, and rode the train back to a technology intermission of kumara gnocchi with coriander sauce.
About twelve hours after we first managed to access the internet on Claire's laptop, she finally was able to set up a wireless network for our humble abode.
Monsieur Network, I salute you.
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And now, some other thoughts:
- I had one of those Wow-This-Is-A-Different-Country-And-Also-My-Life-Has-Really-Been-Warped-By-Technology,-Thanks,-Internet moments when I learned that not only does New Zealand not have Amazon, it also does not have any sort of Amazon equivalent.
- I'm not sure how much of the film I actually followed, but as far as I could tell, RocknRolla, like all Guy Ritchie films, involves lots of nicknames, thug hijinks and people being chewed up by unlikely animals. I may rewatch it at some point to figure out what actually happened, because this time around my attention was largely dominated by Tom Hardy's perplexing brand of attractiveness. Was he the main character? I suspect not, but he is certainly nice to look at.
- Corollary to the point above: we have an account with the local video store! Hoorah!
- And related to the point above this one: New Zealand seems to have this aversion to actually alphabetizing things. The library doesn't actually alphabetize its shelves past clumping authors that start with "A," and Civic Video has the most peculiar organizational system I have ever seen. In the Wellington Library, Machiavelli would be grouped together with McCullough because they collapsed all "Mac" and "Mc" names. To be perfectly honest, though, I'm not sure if that class of names is distinct from the general "M"s. Civic has Comedies, Dramas, Thrillers, Science Fiction, and an entire wall of Festival Films that seem to encompass all of the above, subdivided into a really rough alphabetical order. I forgive Civic, though, because in the search to find one particular movie, you end up grabbing about five others before giving up on the original. Clever marketing, that.
Finally, Dolly, our cat, is sitting at my feet, looking grumpy and sleepy in one fell swoop. Hopefully, now that I have internet, I'll finally get around to uploading some photos and show you badly photographed pieces of our little life. Tomorrow though. Dolly is giving me death glare lazer eyes, and that means it is time to sleep.
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