The windows have been delivered but not yet reinstalled. I started working on curtains this morning at Mom’s but the room will have to be painted too before I hang them.
The white with dandelion is the curtain material and the green is the rug.
May4
Apr27
Furniture
My friend Brittany recently gave me her childhood bedroom set and I’m in the process of nursery-ifying it.
I still need to touch up a little paint but the trim and hardware is navy now, and I picked up the diaper changing top at a going-out-of-business sale this week.
Apr17
Spring
Spring has sprung in downtown Durham and we couldn’t be more excited for it! We’re still trying to beat the back yard into submission and Chris can be found out back with his axe on any given weekend. You’ll notice from the 2nd picture that we haven’t removed anything he’s chopped down, one of these days we’ll have to borrow my Dad’s truck and take a few trips to the dump.
Mary Kyle’s parents visited and brought us some hydrangeas which are loving the “April showers” we’ve been seeing. Otherwise we haven’t improved the yard much, we’ve put down some new mulch but we’re mostly just trying to maintain what we have.
However, the real motivation of spring are the changes going on around us! All the flowers are in bloom, there’s no end of renovation projects going on in the neighborhood, the weather is beautiful, and a doughnut shop AND an ice cream parlor opened up within walking distance. It’s enough to make us smile and feel endlessly optimistic about our choice to invest in this old house and neighborhood.
Apr14
Latest News
We’ll be adding 2 feet to the house in September! We found out Friday that it will be a bouncing baby girl! This will be the first time I will have lived in a family household with majority women since I was 14 months old, and Chris has never been outnumbered before!
This is good news for everyone who thought we were stalling on house updates, because now we have A LOT to do and a deadline! As soon as we get the windows finished upstairs we’re going to start some projects up there: creating a master bedroom, nursery, and guest bedroom out of 2 blank-slate rooms and a kitchen and getting the upstairs bathroom into working order.
Apr14
Windows
Remember the state of our windows? Dozens of layers of paint covering the whole rainbow and who-knows how many of these layers were lead? Well after a brief attempt to strip it ourselves last summer, we’ve finally gone ahead and brought it the pros. You can tell from these first 2 pictures that restoring these windows is no joke. The paint is a disaster but they’re also riddled with nails. Still, waste-not, want-not when it comes to beautiful historic wooden windows so we started by going to Graduate Custom Painting (they did our lead abatement and paint on the exterior) for a 1 window trial.
What a difference eh? I was so impressed by how smooth and uniform they were able to get it. They’ve currently got 5 more windows to finish off on the upstairs back-unit. For now we’re having them leave the vinyl windows alone and we’ll replace those to match at some later point down the road (we’re on a bit of a time crunch that we’ll get into in another post coming soon). So right now our plan is get the upstairs windows into shape and move upstairs so they can do the downstairs. We’re going to wait until MK moves out to do the front upstairs unit since it would be super inconvenient for her to be boarded up for a month!
PS- anyone want a free fridge? The one shown in the picture above is available, I just need to get it up on the free section of craigslist! Also, the kitchen cabinets and oven which are in decent shape for a rental.
Feb26
Milind and Neha’s Wedding-the day before
Chris and I in our india garb outside Milind’s parent’s house. They had a special wedding tent entrance up for some of the rituals and celebrations.
Chris waving money over Milind, wishing him prosperity in his marriage.
More dancing in the streets.
All the children gathered round as the priest sets up the rituals for the evening.
We all sat on mats in a circle around the proceedings, but some of the kids found other seats from which to lord over the proceedings.
We were pretty popular with the kids.
Dinner time, we got to sit at the head table with Milind and Neha.
The men ate first followed by the women. Milind and Neha ate last, but I think they actually ate twice- after the men and after the women.
Feb25
Milind and Neha’s Wedding
We took 733 pictures on our trip to India, and hope to post many more of them as well as some written thoughts in the near future. To get started, though, here are some pictures from what was very much the highlight of the trip, Milind and Neha’s wedding!
On the day of the wedding, there was a procession around Milind from the marriage venue to a nearby temple and back, with music, dancing, and a dancing horse!
After the procession, the wedding ceremony began. Here we see the bride and groom separated by a veil, and then putting flower garlands around each other.
Later there was a receiving line and while waiting our turn we took the opportunity to have a picture taken of us in our festive garb with Milind’s college friend Sunny who helped us immensely in getting to and around Milind’s hometown. After lunch more rituals followed including this presentation of a necklace.
Feb9
New Zealand Continued
We got slack about posting the rest of our vacation stories/pictures but now we have a deadline because we leave for India in less then a week! We have to finish writing about this adventure before we embark on another one right?
In other news today is Chris’s birthday! Happy quarter-of-a-century to him!
Day 8, November 25th
We spent the day taking a redbus tour of Christchurch. This took us behind the army lines into the still live demolition sight which has following the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. In total we were told that they would have to demolish 900 buildings, 300 of which have already been taken down. This was a fascinating and eye opening tour, but not exactly fun. I found it especially sobering because I remember the earthquakes but I really had no idea the extent of the devastation. I think it says something about how long these disasters stay in news versus how long the disaster continues to affect the area in question.
After the tour we drove up to Arthur’s Pass which was an incredibly beautiful drive where we picked up our only hitchhiker of the trip. He was an 18 year old German kid spending 8 weeks backpacking in New Zealand right after he graduated high school. The views going up to the pass were fantastic but when we arrived we had our first glimpse of bad weather and it was too foggy to see much once we reached our hotel.
Day 9, November 26th
The bad weather continued the morning of the 26th as we left Arthur’s Pass and headed down the west coast towards Lake Moeraki. We stopped in one town to take a tour of a jade factory (New Zealand is the only country in the world with jade that isn’t mined, so New Zealand jade is only gathered when it is found on the ground). We bought our main trip souvenir in this town, a painted rock depicting a line of kiwi birds tramping under the moon, and also explored a couple other little shops, including one that sold all things possum fur, including nipple and willie warmers.
We also took a side road to get a view of Fox Glacier. It was a pretty nice view, but definitely far off. It would have been nice to have time to hike to the top, but we’re glad we didn’t because of the other festivities we had planned for the day.
Right as we were pulling into our hotel the sun came out and it was suddenly an incredibly beautiful day. We really did not have a single day which we were there that was hampered by rain of overcast weather, since this morning while we drove was the worst it got and it cleared up as soon as we wanted to go outside.
Staying at the Lake Moeraki lodge was the one big splurge of the trip (other then this place our hotels averaged about $70 a night including breakfast, this brought the average of our entire 14 night stay up to $100, but we’re still very pleased with how we did budget-wise. Lake Moeraki also included dinner and several complimentary guided tours.) but it’s also the one place we really wish we’d stay an extra night at.
When we arrived we were greeted with tea and macaroons and then made a beeline for the beach (it was about 1.5 miles through gorgeous lush rainforest) to try to spot some penguins. The beach was incredibly beautiful and we did end up spotting one penguin who got quite close while he was in the water and then entertained us from a far with his penguin waddle.
When we returned from the beach we took a short walk to the lake and then Chris jumped in with a guided bird watching tour while I went back to take a shower. At dinner we sat with a young couple from Ohio (still maybe 10 years older then us) and a retired couple from Boston. We spent the evening swapping travel stories, which Chris and I mostly listened to (I’ve been to 8 countries and Chris has been to 16 and we were definitely bringing the table average way down). The food was delicious, I think we both got venison, and it was a really nice evening.
Day 10th, November 27th
The next morning we work up early to go on a guided kayaking tour of the lake followed by a really nice big breakfast. Then we tramped back to the beach again and saw another penguin before we hit the road towards Queenstown. The Lake Moeraki Lodge offered some guided penguin spotting tours which we really wished we would have had time to do, but we couldn’t swing it and still make it to Queenstown for the night. Next time.
The drive to Queenstown was one of our longer drives and Chris let me sleep for a good section of it. We did stop at Lake Wanaka for some ice cream and to see the town. Lake Wanaka was described to us as “Queenstown 20 years ago, before it became touristy”. It was a beautiful little town and there was definitely a rouring tourist trade in Queenstown, but I think Queenstown has quite a ways to go before it becomes as undesirable as these people described it. It’s really a beautiful little town with an incredible situation on the lake and in the mountains.
That evening we had some really nice Italian just about a block away from the house where we stayed.
Day 11-Day 14, November 28th-December 1st
Queenstown was our relaxing leg of the journey (although none of the traveling really wore us out up to this point, I had feared while planning that we were covering too much mileage but I don’t think this was the case at all). We spent more time here then anywhere else and actually had a free day built into the schedule! This was so we could reschedule hand gliding in case of bad weather but we didn’t have to because the weather was glorious the entire time we were there. We spent a lot of time in Queenstown hanging out at the park or the marina, eating leisurely at cafes while reading, taking walks, and otherwise just enjoying the beautiful area. The more exciting highlights were: hang gliding, mountain biking, taking a scenic cruise of Doubtful Sound, and taking the bus to Arrowtown. Hang gliding was incredible beyond words, the mountain biking was through some of the most beautiful terrain you can imagine (but it kicked my butt, hard), Doubtful Sound was awe inspiring (we saw more penguins and lots and lots of seals), and Arrowtown was this perfectly picturesque gold mining town.
December 2nd
We fly home and we land in San Fransisco before we leave Auckland!
Dec8
Navigating with OsmAnd
During our time in New Zealand, we naturally needed maps. At my insistence, we primarily used map data from OpenStreetMap, the crowd-sourced, libre-licensed map of the world, as displayed by the libre-licensed OsmAnd application (specifically, the OsmAnd~ 0.8.2 F-Droid package) on my phone. Overall, it was quite good, with Jessica even agreeing with me in saying that using OsmAnd for navigation on our trip was a success.
OsmAnd in action
I’ll start with some of the limitations and bugs. The interface took a bit of getting used to, but once we had accustomed ourselves, I think it was pretty handy. At the suggestion of a fellow SplatSpace member, I hope to contribute an article or two to the hackerspace’s blog on using OsmAnd and its interface. The automatic daytime/nighttime chooser seemed to get broken by our timezone change. It was trivial to manually set it to daytime mode, though. The predicted driving times were way off. There was a rendering glitch that made land look like water at times, so that Jessica thought we must be driving on a really long bridge for part of the journey. Pop-up boxes on the map had frustratingly small close buttons that we had particular difficulty hitting. The application crashed occasionally, but was able to resume the last route when restarted, making them at least non-catastrophic. On a small number of occasions, we seemed to be somewhat circuitously routed. Since street number information is largely absent from OSM in many parts of the world such as the US and NZ, we could often only get directions to the street and had to locate the specific building the old fashioned way.
Setting the route
I hope that most, if not all, of the shortcomings we encountered will be fixed. Now for the aspects we enjoyed. The offline maps capability was excellent. I just downloaded Australia and New Zealand in one convenient package before departing and it didn’t matter that my carrier-locked CDMA phone didn’t get any service there. (A side note: I was hoping that my Republic Wireless wifi calling might work. I wonder if the cost of overcoming regulatory barriers is preventing them from easily operating globally. As Wikipedia notes, “E911 regulations and legal penalties have severely hampered the more widespread adoption of VoIP”, and those are just the U.S. regulations. But back to OsmAnd…) The favorites feature was useful. It let us keep track of all our destinations. Bicycle and pedestrian modes were great. Although my wife was horrified by my riding with the phone in hand, I thought it was awesome to cruise some of the easier forest trails with my very own heads up display, showing the trail, our position on it, how far until the end, how far we’d come, and our current speed. OsmAnd with plugins is also able to record your movements when you want it to and upload them to OpenStreetMap for easily adding some of the roads and trails that weren’t already on the map.
We could have added on a GPS to our car rentals for $8 NZD per day. Since OsmAnd served us well enough, we decided to put that amount towards fixing the issues we faced and supporting further development by way of a donation. I hope to give to OpenStreetMap with corporate matching once the US OpenStreetMap Foundation chapter achieves 501 (c) (3) status.
Dec8
New Zealand- Day 7
Day 7- November 24th
Since there aren’t really any pictures to post from the last 2 days I figured I owed the blog one day worth of dazzling vistas and scenes. We spent the night at a Wellington home we found through airbnb.com, took the early morning ferry to Picton, ate lamb at Subway, took the train to Christchurch, and spent the night in jail. Yes, this is the day to pay attention to.
We really wish we had spent more time exploring Wellington. We had 2 weeks to see the whole country and we wanted to relax at the end so we took one “free day” in Queenstown at the end. This was really to make sure if the weather was bad we would still get to go hanggliding. Since the weather turned out fine we wish we had spent that free day in Wellington but c’est la vie.
The ferry and train were fantastic ways to traveler. 3 hours on the ferry and we were able to score seats on the highest glassed in deck on a little peninsula which meant no one could stand between us and our views! 180 degrees of fantastic views! The train ride was 5 hours and was also stunningly beautiful. Since we didn’t have much time between the ferry and the train we ate lunch at the train station which meant Subway. McDonalds, Burger King, and Subway were all very prevalent in New Zealand and we’d been passing a lot of ads for lamb at these fast food giants. Subway’s lamb was quite good with their Moroccan sauce.
We passed a whole colony of fur seals on the train but didn’t manage to get good pictures of them. We also saw a dead whale that had washed up on the shore. Anyone know what kind it was? That was sad but interesting to see. We also did some eavesdropping on a group of little old ladies who were visiting from Australia and made a lot of inappropriate jokes about what they were going to do now that they had some time apart from their husbands (every single one of them had a walker and I’m sure none of them were under 75).
We stayed at my first hostel which was, until 1999, a prison. It was a very cool setup and Chris and I were staying in a cell complete with bars on the window and a thick steel door.
A covey of Covis! 