Crushing Krisis

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convenience fees

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As we enter our third week of Kiwi life the thing I’ve begun to appreciate about America now that I am outside of it is how everything there is convenient.

The first thing I noticed were credit card fees. I’m not generally one to use my card for casual, daily expenses, but it was a necessity here before we got our bank cards set up. I quickly discovered that it’s common for many places to tack on a convenience fee of at least 2% to a credit purchase – and, for small purchases it might be an automatic 30-40 cents. These fees are almost universally absorbed by the store in the US.

You might be thinking, “2% – what’s the big deal!” Except, are you the sort of person who puts big purchases on your credit card purely for the points or miles, only to immediately pay it off?

Suddenly you’re paying a $20 premium for every $1,000 you pass through your card that way. $20 isn’t nothing, and if you’ve got to buy a whole new set of appliances because rental properties don’t come with them, it’s several multiples of $20.

Yes, you heard me right: rental homes don’t come with the major appliances here. No washer, dryer, or refrigerator – which are collectively known as “whiteware.”

I still haven’t heard the full history of why this is the case. It seems utterly mad to me, because as a renter you are suddenly responsible for a few thousand dollars of appliances over their lifespan of a decade or more, and if you switch homes a few times there is no guarantee they’ll fit into each subsequent house!

That’s specifically the case with dryers, which just aren’t very common in New Zealand. We’ve seen tons of places that don’t even have a spot for one, and even if they do there’s no ductwork for venting. If you want a dryer in those houses, you have to buy a super-special, super-expensive “condenser” style dryers that suck the water out of your clothes just like Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s farm.

The majority of people here line dry their clothes. We went on a walk to the zoo yesterday while the weather was nice and nearly every house we passed on the way had clothes hanging out on a line or a rack! [Read more…] about convenience fees

Updated Comic Guide: DC Rebirth

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Despite being on my 26th consecutive nomadic day, things have settled back into some semblance of a routine here in our temporary Kiwi homestead, which meant I actually had time today to update comic book guides!

I started with a complete refresh of my guide to the current Rebirth era of DC Comics!

It has been over a year after the debut of this era and fan interest just keeps getting bigger in every single comics circle I run in. That’s for good reason: as all of the main, double-shipping titles of this relaunch press on into their 30th issues, pretty much all of the series that started out great have stayed great. You couldn’t say that for New 52, and Marvel Now barely let anything other than Avengers, Guardians, and X-Men run past issue #25.

Plus, there’s a palpable sense of anticipation for what’s to come as DC releases the King/Gerads blockbuster Mister Miracle and hits their first line-wide event of the Rebirth era with Dark Nights … and, of course, fresh off of that they’ll launch the hotly-anticipated DC/Watchmen mashup throwdown Doomsday Clock.

Whether you’ve been keeping up for the past 16 months or this is all new to you, check out the Rebirth guide to find every series and where it’s collected!

does it taste the same?

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We’re on Nomadic Day 23 here in Wellington.

I don’t know about you, but that’s way longer than any other vacation or break from the regular schedule of life that I’ve had since … um, let’s go with ever. It’s long enough that it’s starting to become difficult to differentiate between the days of the week, despite trying to hang on to some semblance daily norms like EV6’s bedtime routine.

That’s why I was so excited to visit a farmers’ market this morning. Saturday morning farmer’s markets were a regular fixture of our Philadelphia life for much of the year, no matter which configuration of the three of us decided to attend. Even if this one paled by comparison, it would at least let me know it was Saturday.

As it turns out, the Newtown Fruit and Vegetable Market in Wellington dwarfed our little Landsdowne Farmer’s Market. Or, maybe it just seemed big because there were so many vendors squeezed into such a small space all selling similar things. It created an effect similar to a hall of mirrors, such that you saw endless rows of peppers, pumpkins, and kumara no matter which way you turned.

Not only were there (perhaps literal) tons of fresh food, but it was much cheaper than in the many supermarkets we’ve visited like Goldilocks sampling bear housewares. A bag of veggies almost too heavy for me to carry was only $35! Plus, I snagged a beautiful brocade-covered canvas bag for just five dollars from a delightful woman who said she appears at the market fortnightly, and I honestly would have probably paid just to hear her use that word casually in a sentence.

The market helped introduce a little bit of gravity into my week, but it was a trip to the local Mediterranean Food Warehouse, that made me feel more at home here. It’s a high-end Italian-influenced grocery store and eatery chain whose local outpost commands one corner of a large intersection nearby. [Read more…] about does it taste the same?

happy birthday to this

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EV6 rides through our old neighborhood on her trusty balance bike.

Every so often a relatively-common cultural quirk of one country becomes the fad of another.

Sometimes it’s pop stars. Other times it’s food or some random bit of technology. Suddenly we’re all singing the “Macarena” and checking our Tamagotchis while fitting a drizzle of aioli and pickled something-or-another into our Swedish diets.

A few years ago a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing was the quirk that rose to hegemonic popularity. Western audiences marveled at how some people find it remarkably easy to cull their belongings so they can live in small (to us) spaces.

At the top of a ferris wheel at a local carnival with EV6 and my mother.

I don’t understand how the concept managed to fill out a whole book. The basic tenet (spoilers!) is that you should keep only that which brings you joy, because those possessions are the things you love.

This particular magic is lost on me. I am immune to the Japanese art of decluttering because I am swimming in the joy of my possessions. It’s very rare that I give or throw something away – it’s only if the thing has completely outgrown its use. I still have my first pair of jeans and my first comic book. I don’t have my first guitar, which lacked utility, but I still have my second – which plays nicely.

Seeing Katie Barbato open for Mutlu at Boot and Saddle with Lindsay and Jeremy.

This makes it hard for me to pack for trips, even harder to pack to move houses, and nearly impossible to both. I just want to be near all of my possessions. I want that joy.

I’m the same way on the internet. There are at least four or five times I really ought to have given up on the older bits of Crushing Krisis it and started it anew. Once when my career got underway in earnest, again when I switched to WordPress, perhaps another time when I started focusing more on my band and local music, yet again while I started blogging about comics, and possibly a fifth time as I began to write about parenting.

I should probably restart it right now, as I begin life in a new city and country!

On the Philadelphia Zoo balloon with EV.

I don’t know why I haven’t. Keeping all these words around every time I add a new topic has done intolerable things to my SEO.

What can I say? I just find joy in having these more than two million words around, which is how I’ve arrived at today – the seventeenth anniversary of Crushing Krisis. [Read more…] about happy birthday to this

Toyota down under

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Today we let a four-year-old choose our new car.

Sort of.

EV6 definitely picked our car out of a line-up of dozens as soon as we hit the lot. She is obsessed with the color blue, and this car is an unmissable electric blue that you could spot from a kilometer away, which she nearly did.

“Let’s get that one!” she insisted as soon as we entered the parking lot full of models certified to have been never before driven in New Zealand.

“Oh really? How much would you pay for it?”

“Three dollars,” she replied. This is how much EV6 thinks every single thing costs.

As for whether it’s our car… well… I wouldn’t say that we own the car as of this writing. It’s more that we put down a refundable deposit on a car with a US credit card for an outrageous fee because the car dealership will not accept our American money.

I knew car shopping would be hard, but I didn’t anticipate that the hard part would be forking over a giant pile of existing money earmarked for car buying!

This little wrinkle has thrown quite a wrench into the “What to do when we hit the ground!” section of my “Moving To New Zealand” Gantt chart (which is a real thing that exists).  I thought the crushingly obvious order of events would be bank, cell phones, car, house. That makes sense, right? Money, communication, transportation, permanent habitation.

In reality, the bank won’t even make an appointment with you until you are in the country and then it takes several days to wait for it, during which time you’ll probably want a phone and a vehicle, except purchasing the vehicle requires you to have a New Zealand bank account, but even if you visit the bank to try to rush things you’ll learn that the bank account requires you to have a permanent address with some form of bill associated with it, but you are probably still living in a hotel because renting a house requires you to wire a bank deposit, which is virtually impossible to do from a US bank (as we discovered), so you’ll need a bank account to rent the house where you can be sent a bill in order to get your bank account in order to buy your car.

At least the cell phones were easy. [Read more…] about Toyota down under

left side shock (or: The Great Wellington Cat-Brothel / Bird-Genital Tug-of-War)

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In writing about last evening’s grocery apocalypse solely from my own perspective, one detail that got lost in the mix is E doing all of the left-side driving in a ridiculously large sports utility vehicle.

It’s terrifying. And that’s just from my perspective.

Of course, E is doing all of the hard work and shouldering the even-greater terror of actually piloting the vehicle – the mental gymnastics of staying left, doing shallow left turns and wide right turns, and figuring out how the fuck you “Give Way” in a roundabout.

Even before we could get into the terror of conducting our American-driven death-tank around the unsuspecting roads of Wellington, there was the misadventure of actually acquiring said vehicle at the airport.

We were forewarned by D, E’s Aussie friend on the ground in NZ, that our chosen car rental agency was a little … odd. Perhaps our first hint should have been their complete absence from the considerable line-up of rental desks in the international arrivals terminal.

An exhausted E posed this to me as a feature rather than a bug as I swung a delirious EV6 back and forth by her ankles in an effort to keep her from attempting to surf on the baggage carousel. Our car agency would pick us up and deliver us straight to our vehicle, she advised me as she rang them up to let them know we had arrived and would require a large luggage cart.

It was a concierge service. Perhaps they might arrive wearing a jaunty hat and carrying a little white-board with our names written on it.

I entertained that possibility for the first ten, or maybe twenty minutes of us hovering around our impressive island of nine bags for two-and-a-half people, being the most obvious weirdo, materialistic, “super-size me!” Americans we could possibly be. After that, my hopes began to falter.

(“We’re moving here FOR GOOD!,” I wanted to shout at every Kiwi passing by, “And our household belongings won’t be here for FIVE MORE WEEKS!” As if our suitcases didn’t contain more clothing than most of them had in their entire houses.)

Finally, our man arrived. Sans luggage cart and jaunty cap, but with a large mini-van! Was this our vehicle? He made no comment on that, but started loading our luggage into the rear of the dingy, disheveled old van whose particular scent I might kindly describe as being evocative of a cat brothel.

Hopefully this was not our vehicle. E snapped EV6’s child seat into place and we confirmed that all of our bags were intact. Then, we set out for a short drive through the airport to the rental agency lot.

“Perhaps,” the driver mused, “you might just like to keep the van to drive home? All of your things (he said this very pointedly) fit into it so well. I could drop by your flat with your car tomorrow.”

To which we of course replied, “Um, well, we respect the rights of feline sex workers as long as they are doing the work by their own free will, but perhaps you should hold on to their mobile home and we could possibly have the actual car we rented? If for no reason other than needing to figure out how to snap EV6’s seat into it.

“And also on account of the smell.”
[Read more…] about left side shock (or: The Great Wellington Cat-Brothel / Bird-Genital Tug-of-War)

ripping off the culture shock band-aid (of groceries)

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As I stood in front of a shelf full of unfamiliar jars of pasta sauce, I thought to myself, “What have you done?”

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That the store we chose was named “New World” was not lost on me, because even after 24 hours of travel I can detect thematic content that has the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

People have been asking me, “So, New Zealand – are you excited?” for a couple of months now. It’s gotten to the point where my answers have become rote, though still entirely genuine. I talk about weather, schools, wind, and driving on the wrong side of the road.

After all, Wellington wasn’t going to be so different from Philadelphia. It was another major city with cars and people and houses. I kept that comforting thought fixed in my mind. Even as we traipsed through airports, customs, and wrestling our rental car, the pure weight of our move hadn’t really struck me.

Not like it did in the grocery store.

In that moment standing in front of the pasta sauce, I like to think that I was transmitting a very specific, very serious distress signal that Douglas Adams described so well in the first chapter of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn’t very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse.

In fact, I am a mere eight thousand, eight hundred, and eighty-two miles from my birthplace. Maybe that’s why no one caught on to my signal. As distressing as it was to me, it was far too minute for anyone else to notice. [Read more…] about ripping off the culture shock band-aid (of groceries)

the day that never was

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I missed this entire day.

We took off on Monday, August 21st from San Francisco just after 11pm, which meant we were running from midnight across the Pacific Ocean. Given our speed of travel, I’m actually not sure if we ever experienced the clock turning over from Monday to Tuesday before we hit the International Date Line.

Your author, the slapdash cowboy, sitting in his rented vehicle in Wellington – which is a whole other story unto itself.

Perhaps the pilot made an announcement when we crossed the line to let us know that it was suddenly not just past midnight but Tuesday evening. If he did, I was asleep at the time. All I know is that we wound up landing in Sydney around 6am on Wednesday, August 23rd, which was 5pm on Tuesday, August 22nd back in Philly.

Our flight was without incident, but our de- and re-planing was not.

We decided to fly through Sydney because it meant we wouldn’t have to go through customs in Auckland and then re-check all of our luggage to fly to Wellington. Our bags would simply make the connection in Sydney while we stayed safely within the confines of the International Terminal, like a fugitives waiting on a foreign embassy to take them in.

What no one mentioned to us is that even though we wouldn’t hit customs in Sydney we would still have to go through a re-security check to stay in the International Terminal. That meant that we not only had to do the whole security theatre dance while bleary-eyed just off a 14-hour flight, but that we had to discard all of our awesome snacks and liquids meant to carry us through the final leg of our journey.

On the plus side: the food in the Sydney International Airport was amazing. I had a falafel and pumpkin wrap for breakfast and it was so amazing that I followed it up with a pumpkin sandwich and now I am having serious misgivings about the short shrift we as Americans give to pumpkins. [Read more…] about the day that never was