Giedre tyttö Ozista

Indoor Outdoor Flow

Ok, get ready now for the new house picture overload.. :) Kaj received a replacement camera from the insurance company. They don't produce Powershot Pro1 anymore, so we had to put up with Canon Powershot S3. Its not quite as nice as our old camera, it makes slightly too realistic pictures for my taste. Somehow the old one used to bring out a dreamy character in the most mundane situations.

It has been raining today most of the day, so we couldn't have breakfast outdoors. The sunny deck is something we really appreciate after our dark and tiny Titirangi home. The type of home we have, could be called as having "indoor outdoor flow". This may require explanation - everyone is property obsessed here and to function in this society you have to learn heaps of property specific lingo, such as "lifestyle section", "cul-de-sac", etc. Owning lots of property seems to be the only way to get rich here. There's no capital income tax, no matter how many houses you own, so a lot of people invest in property (also saving for their pension that way!) There are feeble voices saying that its wrong, as it only inflates the price of housing, but doesn't generate any money (as opposed to investing in companies that actually do something, which is good for the economy, because companies then pay tax and employ people!) Anyway, you'd be surprised to see how many houses are going on sale and being bought all around the country. Real estate agents and all sorts of side businesses related to real estate seem to seriously flourish. Living here you get to read a lot of "coffee table" property magazines. And in many cases you'd see "indoor outdoor flow" in the description of the house. Depending on your imagination, you either visualise something like this, or something like what we have - life revolving both inside and outside.

A place where you can open all the french doors as soon as you enter the house, listen to the birds singing and a happy cuttlery clatter in the neighbour's house as they prepare for dinner, say "hi" to a passer by cat and where its so easy to step out for an ad hoc gardening session, that you don't even give it a second thought... I have high hopes for our tiny tomatoe, salad and herb garden... Just you wait, we'll be self sufficient soon!

It seems that after all, we'll have broadband at home (just have to rewire the house!!!) I spent some 3 hours on the phone yesterday trying to reach our Internet provider (recently bought by Vodafone, I wonder if the first thing they did was to chop the call centre people heads?!?) So meanwhile we have to put up with dial-up again... No more video chats, guys, (except that our broadband wasn't actually broad enough for a proper video chat) at least for a while.

In this house we have plenty of space (Kaj measured today that it must be about 90 square meters!) and one completely unused bedroom. So if you were planning to come by, we'd have a proper room ready for you! Just start coming now! Summer is almost here!!!