Our Flat

Here are some photos of our lovely flat here in Dunedin! Everyone* is invited to come visit us!

This is the living room/dining room. We have a kitchen table with four chairs, a couch-bed, and a tv, which we don't intend to watch.This is our living room window. Pretty nice, huh? That large house directly in front is a fancy-pants bed and breakfast. You could come out and stay there, or you could come out and stay with us. You'd have a better view. (But I'm pretty sure our couch-bed isn't quite as comfortable, and my food probably isn't as good.)

This is a zoomed-in view from our living room window. You can see a bit of the neighborhood, parts of downtown, the harbor, the peninsula and the ocean.

Here is another view out our front window. It's just amazing, and it's a major reason we chose this flat.

This is our tiny, tiny kitchen. Tiny. To the left is our stove and oven. It is about 1/4 the size of a normal oven, and has two burners on top. It will really limit the things I can make.

The microwave and fridge are actually in the living room. And the fridge is TINY! The freezer? Even smaller. It's just a little box within the fridge. It's large enough to hold a half-gallon of ice cream, but here ice cream is sold in two-liter containers which are too big for our little freezer. Also, since we are not in America (and our fridge is so small) the eggs stay out. And, they are brown because brown eggs are cheaper here! (Everything is backwards!)

Even though the kitchen is very small, there is lots of room for storage. And, as you Mums can see, we have more than enough food for the two of us!

Our wee bathroom. It's small but sufficient.

Here is half of our bedroom. As you can see, we have quite a large window in here as well. It faces the same way as the living room window. It makes for lots of sunlight and impressive views any time of day.

This is the view out our bedroom window. You can see lots of downtown Dunedin, the Harbor, a bit of the peninsula and the Pacific Ocean. Pretty amazing.

This is another view out our bedroom window. All those trees make up the Green Belt, which is just a strip of woods right through the city. We walk through them to get to university. Then, of course, is the harbor and the peninsula.

This is the other half of our bedroom. It has a full chest of drawers which aren't visible in the picture. Plus those two little end-tables, the wardrobe there on the right, and the bookshelf on the right.

Here is our building from the street.

Here is the yard in front of our building.

*By "everyone" clearly we mean those of you who read our blog whom we actually know. No strangers, please.

The Move... Really? New Zealand?

In 48 hours I'll be at the airport.

I'm pretty well packed.

I feel like I'm forgetting something. Hopefully it's cheap.

How to Make Me Love Your Book

I finished Gone With the Wind two nights ago, and I adored it. As I've already mentioned, I loved Rhett. Scarlett drove me nuts, and yet there were times when I thought she was wonderful. But mostly I just thought she was confused and a bit twisted.

It really got me thinking about what makes a good book for me.

First and foremost is plot. The author needs to get me where we are going, and fast. It's not that the plot needs to be necessarily exciting, but something needs to be happening. I think part of the reason I could not stand The Scarlet Letter was the lack of a really stimulating plot. In my mind, the book was not really about a series of events, and that drove me nuts.

Characters. Give me characters that are so well-written I can understand them. Even if I don't like them. I just want to be able to get why they do what they do. I want to know what drives them. If you can make me love the characters, like Marian in The Woman in White, more power to you. But if you can just make me understand what makes the characters tick, you will have my wonder and awe! One thing I didn't love about Twilight and New Moon was how I just didn't get what Bella saw in Edward. It never made any sense to me whatsoever. So, I wasn't really blown away by those books because I never fully understood the characters, and I thought they were both extraordinarily flat.

And really, that's about it. If you give me a good plot with good characters, I will pretty much be able to read your book no matter the style of the book.

UNLESS...

You are too descriptive. Which is why I hated The Scarlet Letter and The Hobbit. For Pete's sake, I just don't care about how intricate the "A" was on Hester's dress, and I don't care one lick about Bilbo's freaking door! I guess this goes back to the plot- that I want to get there, and I want to get there fast. But really, you can have a book with only a slow-moving plot as long as I feel like we are moving. If you spend 15 pages describing Bilbo's door, you are going to lose me, and lose me fast.

Now, with that said, I can understand why some people like verbose descriptions. I guess because those readers can actually see what's being described. But I cannot see it, and that's fine with me. What I really want is PLOT! And CHARACTERS!

So, that's what flips my switch (on or off) when it comes to books. Pray, do tell about what you like when you read.

A Post for the Sake of Posting

Wow! I can't believe I'm moving across the planet so soon. We fly out on Monday, and we've been really busy visiting people, buying things and just getting things done before we take off.

A few things I'm looking forward to that have very little to do with the fact that we are moving to New Zealand, and have almost everything to do with the fact that we are just plain moving:

• Having my very own kitchen and whatnot
• Making new friends
• Eric FINALLY quitting his job, and not having to work anymore grave shifts ever again! (not that he's need to quit any time before, but he has been working at the same place doing the same thing for the last five years, or maybe six. I don't know because I haven't known him that long.)
  
• Simplifying and getting rid of some of the junk we own that we just don't need.

And a gazillion other things that have to do with New Zealand. LOTS of pictures to come, I promise.

I'm sorry I just don't have much to blog about.

Schizo

I've been having an ongoing conversation in my head for about 7 weeks now. Today it sounds like this:

Me: Hey, you're moving across the planet in seven days.
Other me: No, I'm not.
Me: Yes, you are. In seven days.
OM: Oh, really? Hmmmm.... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

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Yesterday church was canceled because there was so much snow. I didn't think it was that bad, but the church is on a hill, and the roads in the neighborhood hadn't been plowed. I've never even heard of church being canceled until yesterday.

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I think Orem is confused about what city it is. It's acting like Jackson Hole with all its snow. I've really never seen so much snow in Utah. Of course, I've only been here five years. But even Eric says it's more snow than he's ever seen. The other day at work I was whining and I said, "Why does it keep snowing?" My boss responded, "Because we've been praying for it for five years." Okay. Fair enough.

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Andrew gave Eric a Lord of the Rings trivia game (film version) for Christmas, and Eric has been quizzing me. We are such nerds. Actually, Eric is the nerd because I don't know most of the answers. This is mostly because all the names of the characters and the places are so strange and I can't ever remember which place is which. Really, I'm pretty bad about mixing up all the names. I've never read the series, and frankly I don't intend to because I had to read The Hobbit when I was in seventh grade and I loathed it. I tried to read it again later on, and I just couldn't get into it. I really detest books that go on and on describing settings. As I recall, the first 45 pages of The Hobbit are devoted to describing the door of Bilbo's home.* I am driven by plot and characters. Do not bother me with descriptions of places. I just don't see it, so I just don't care. And that's why I have no plans to read the series.

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I should finish Gone With the Wind tonight. I still love Rhett. I don't care for Scarlett, but I also adore Scarlett. And the book? Amazing. I love the way it is written; the chapter about Frank and Scarlett really helped me understand both of them and feel sympathy for both of them in a way that I really didn't anticipate. That's one of the best qualities of the book, I think, that it is written in such a way that I feel like I can identify with all the characters, even if they are terrible people. Margaret Mitchell really makes the characters round, and not just a few of them, but most of them.

*I may be exaggerating.

Americans are worried...

I've been following the presidential elections since the summer. I've been following them even more closely lately. We hear a lot about the middle class, the state of Social Security, qualms of Americans fearing huge lay-offs and the like. Most of it I feel like I can identify with. I feel like they are pertinent issues that need to be addressed.

But I'm sick of this one: Parents are worried about how they are going to pay for their kids to go to college.

And here's the solution: The kids can pay for it themselves.

No, if they want to go to a fancy-pants private school, they probably cannot. But they can pay for their own educations if they do the following things:

• Work in high school and save money.
  
• Choose a school that charges a reasonable amount of tuition. There are plenty of great educational institutions that do not cost an arm and a leg.
• Earn a scholarship or many scholarships.
• Work while attending college.
  
• Take out a loan. Assuming the student will graduate from college with a credible degree, paying the loan back will be relatively simple. Interest rates are quite low.
  
• Work during the summers full-time (or more) to save money.
• Be frugal.
  

It just isn't that hard, folks. And you know what? If you make your kid be responsible for paying for his own education, you can almost guarantee that he will attend his classes, work his tail off to spend the least amount of time in school as possible and make good grades because by-golly, he's not paying to play!

I just don't buy the idea that fewer kids won't be able to go to college because their parents can't pay for it. If you want it badly enough, you will be able to afford it. That's all there is to it.