I know the blog is ages behind, arriving back in NZ has put big brakes on my travelling catchup. I’ll get there in the end. Here’s a brief rundown of what we’ve done since coming back to NZ in late February.
We went up to Whangarei and stayed with Keryn’s parents while we started looking for work. Keryn got an interview down in Wellington so we hired a car and drove down (in one day, a long day) and stayed with my sister Catherine. Keryn was interviewed and was offered the job so we organised to move down to Wellington. Keryn is now working at Victoria Univeristy doing programming and support work on the student addmissions system.
Catherine and Paul were heading overseas for a few weeks so we were able to stay in their place while we figured out where we would live and I found work. We found a few nice places in Johnsonville but missed out due to excessive competition, it seems that there are plenty of people looking to rent and not so many nice places. We expanded our scope when I got offered a job at EDS in a server support role up in Upper Hutt. We checked out Eastbourne but there was too much compromise with sun, space and transport, even though some of the houses were stunning.
Then we found a place in Epuni and managed to beat the rush to sign up first. This place is about half way between both our places of work and is close to all the ammenities we could need. We moved in last Friday and have been unpacking over the weekend, the unboxing continues.
My job involves looking after servers for a number of different EDS clients as part of a rostered team. We work 12 hour shifts, 7am-7pm or 7pm to 7am, and this week is my first experience at the night shift. It’ll take some getting used to but I work only 14 shifts every 28 days (7 days, 7 nights), meaning I have 14 days off, so hopefully I’ll be able to make use of the spare time.
Anyway, the reason I decided to write this entry was not so much to go over recent events but more to mention that I felt my first earthquake today (that I can recall anyway). It felt like a strong gust of wind buffetted the building, except this place is too large to be moved by the wind in such a way. A quick search on Google bought up this informative website which confirmed the earthquake:
http://www.geonet.org.nz/earthquake/quakes/3082943g-maps.html
So, there you go, more earthquake statistics than you could shake a stick at (origins of that phrase here: http://stason.org/TULARC/languages/english-usage/160-more-than-you-can-shake-a-stick-at-Phrase-origins-a.html)
