I know it’s been a while but…

As always, Internet in New Zealand is hard to come by unless you’ve got a permanent residence. 

But my absence from the ‘net should not be confused with inactivity.

I started my first week of work the Monday after I landed (on Saturday) so I booked a hotel through Travelocity until Saturday morning.  I figured that it shouldn’t take me more than a week to find a place, right? 

Wrong.  Trademe might be the Craigslist of New Zealand but there is quite a demand for housing in the city (especially the city proper) and a shortage of actual flats. 

I did find a place – much further out than I had anticipated in Mornington, a surburb about 30 minutes by public transport from my workplace, about 15 minutes by car, and about an hour walking.  Considering the massive difficulty parking in the city is, the public transport option seems to be the way to go – though if I just can’t handle bus-riding, I can always rent a parking space downtown for $40/wk. 

And this place is beautiful and perfect for someone like me.  It’s fully furnished, everything from the bed to the television, I’ll get pictures next time I’m down there and have more reliable internet.  (Right now I’m at the Moana lodge again, which is awesome but charges .10c per megabyte, so text only for right now.) 

It really is stunningly beautiful, and only pictures can do it justice.  When I say fully furnished, I pretty much mean fully – bed, couches, an HDTV, a DVD player, and even dishes in the cupboard and a washing machine onsite.  (Sadly, the dryer will remain Mr. Sun).  The house itself is in a valley.  Which is interesting because the road leading to the house isn’t – you climb down some steep stairs to get to the house.  This makes it sheltered from the wind however.  Best part – the backyard looks like something out of The Lord of the Rings (which probably isn’t that far off, actually) and maybe I’ll do some video podcasting from there. 

I pay $175NZD/wk, with 3 other (TBD) roommates, though I’m assured they’ll all be professionals, not students.  The room also comes – or more accurately came – with free Internet, but because that Internet was capped at 10 GB/mo, and $3/GB over that, (plus with three roommates) I’m going to get a 120GB plan, which will cost about two and a half times as much – though the landlord is willing to chip in what he would have paid under the 10 GB plan.

That’s 30 GB for roommate if we all split evenly, though it’s more likely I’ll pay the brunt of the costs; I’ll have to set up some sort of firmware on the router to keep track of which IP addresses use what bandwidth and split up the bill according to what we use.  (See, this is why I fought so hard to keep bandwidth caps OUT of Austin…)

But forgetting about the details for a moment, this will be the first time in about two months that I will have had a permanent address and some stability in my life.  Not that I’m sick of adventure, by a long shot, but it really is nice to be something less than nomadic. 

Now, here’s the bad news.

I’m out of money.  I needed to pay two weeks bond and two weeks rent upfront; I couldn’t put it on the credit card, so I had to withdraw it from my Kiwibank account.  Which was my LAST bit of money. 

Until I get paid on Tuesday, I am living off my credit card, and the debt on that is climbing… so much so that it might make sense for me to reconsolidate the credit card debt onto a more stable loan and just set up automatic payments here.  It’s not anything I can’t handle, but flying back and forth across the Pacific, staying in hotels, and not having income for a month all take their toll. 

Mom & Dad read this blog (or at least, the e-mails sent to them by the automated blog software) so they’ll be worried.  Relax… this is only a cashflow problem, this is not a debt-outstripping assets problem.  In the absolute worst case scenario, I could get some quick cash from selling my car, which is now no longer strictly necessary (and in fact, is proving to be more of a hassle than a boon.)  But we’re a far off way from that.

Meantime, things are much better this time around.  :)  Will catch you with some photos and video soon.  :D