Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

The Great Wellington Wheelie Bin Saga of ’17

by

One way you can be pretty sure that I am a liberal in American political terms is that I really don’t mind taxes.

I frame this sentiment in two ways. First, I happen to have empathy for my fellow human beings and I am totally cool with redistributing a pretty big sum of my meagre wealth to other people if it serves the greater good.

But, shhhh, be quiet about all that altruism. The second reason is why I really don’t mind taxes: I want stuff from my government.

Roads? I like’em. Firefighters? Nifty. And for all the bitching that homeowners did in Drexel Hill about their property taxes, do you know how excited I was every time the dang snow plow would come down our dull little street before there was even an inch of snow on the ground?

SO EXCITED! Because, after you have lived through a few blizzards in Philly proper, where your side street is left with six inches of hard-packed ice on the ground for a month after the snow, the sight of a snow plow before it’s even really necessary is really freaking exciting.

New Zealand has an uncomplicated flat tax rate on income and in exchange for forking over so much of your hard-earned money the government actually cares about you while you live there. Yes, socialized medicine, they have that. But I’m talking about special perks like friendly and informative people working at the Ministry of Biosecurity who don’t mind talking to you on the phone. I’m talking about really well-designed government websites that thoroughly answer your questions about every possible municipal service.

Look at them there, all lined up together, so stately and consistent with their thick yellow plastic lids.

It was just such a service that brought me to said web site a few weeks ago. As a part of Wellington’s impeccably well-choreographed dance of weekly trash and recycling pickup, I noticed that some amount of neighbors had special wheelie bins for their recycling, while we were left with the still-pretty-cool color-coded bags that you buy at the library – a place where paper goods can also go to get re-used!

(Can we just pause for a moment to marvel at the narrative consistency of this country?!)

Anyhow, putting recycling in a disposable plastic bag seemed to be a bit counter-intuitive and I covet pretty much any kind of functional houseware I can lay my hands on, so of course I wanted our own wheelie bin. They didn’t seem to be sold anywhere I could find, so I turned to internet research, which is actually effective in Wellington because all of their web properties are so lovely.

The lovely government website provided a handy number to call for wheelie bin inquiries. The handy number was answered by a friendly human being with one of the thicker Wellingtonian accents I have encountered to date. Forging through this potential communication barrier, I explained how I coveted a wheelie bin. In return, the friendly government employee (paid for by our hard-earned tax dollars) explained that he would have someone visit our property to conduct a multi-point inspection for appropriateness of wheelie-bin issuance and we would be notified by post if we were approved.

“Awesome,” I told him. I love tests. Bring on the inspection.

Friends, yesterday I received a letter from our friendly, helpful government. Do you know what it said? [Read more…] about The Great Wellington Wheelie Bin Saga of ’17

birdfriends

by

Major Plot twist: Living in New Zealand has turned me into an avid bird-watcher and amateur bird-song identifier.

This is a big twist because I do not have an especially positive history of avian/human relations. This is what I had to say for our fine, feathered friends the last time I moved to a new house:

That’s not the nature of my problem. Birds are fine as a concept. I just don’t like things that make uninvited noise (other than, obviously, me). Birds fall into the same offensive category as small dogs, train tracks, and babies.

Based on that assessment, you might be a bit nervous about me moving to a country with a serious stock of birds and where bats are the only native land mammals. Bats!

Yet, I’m living a bird-loving kiwi life. I send chats to E about cool bird songs I hear when she’s not at home and can frequently found browsing Birds of New Zealand to try to identify the ones I spot on our deck or feasting on snails from our garden.

The only way I can explain it is that birds here have beautiful, varied songs. Key word: varied. The birds of Philadelphia didn’t have songs so much as rude catcalls that they screeched repetitively at the top of their birdy lungs.

“CHIRP. CHIRP. CHIRP. MOTHERFUCKING CHIRP.”

They’d all gather around my house starting just after 5am and start their shouting all at once. There was nothing beautiful or remarkable about it. It was like the world’s worst noise machine.

To be fair, those are some of these insistent asshole birds in New Zealand, but I think the other birds must shun them or eat their food or something, because I rarely hear them singing. Maybe it’s simply an evolutionary thing.

Tui are one of the most-common NZ-only birds, and one of the first I started noticing while we were living in our Air BnB house. They possess a double larynx, which gives them an uncannily large range of vocalization. There’s not a lot of repeats on tui radio.

When we we were looking at houses, we met the New Zealand wood pigeon. It is a hilariously, outlandishly large bird, maybe four times the size of the pigeon of the flying rat variety you see back in East Coast urban spaces back in the US. It’s husky, low hoot matches its comedic appearance as well as its rather humorous habits, such as getting drunk enough on fermented berries that they fall out of trees.

There is an even greater variety of birds here at our more permanent home, as we’re not in an urban area and also much higher up. I’d say we hear at least six or seven distinct bird calls each day, at least.

One particularly mysterious bird living in the bushes surrounding our house has such a beautiful call that I crave hearing it. Its bright, trebly tone sweeps down and into a throaty alto and then back up again, with fluttery vibrato throughout. If I notice this mystery bird’s song ringing out I will literally drop what I am doing and rush to a window to try to spot it, to no avail.

What I find most interesting about the situation isn’t the variety of birds or their beautiful calls, but my sudden change of heart about having them all around. It represents a complete shift from what I would have sworn was a make-or-break aspect of a new house just a few months ago – being relatively birdless.

As it turns out, it’s not just brands and habits that change when you move to a new place. Sometimes it’s your whole philosophy on what constitutes noise versus song.

first day of school, finally

by

Yesterday was EV6’s first official day of school.

I don’t just mean the first day of proper “you might learn something there” school. I mean it’s her first day of public or private care outside of our own home. Ever.

It’s quite the belated start to school for her, considering she’ll be heading into Year 1 (the NZ equivalent of Kindergarten) just nine months from now. Many kids have logged four years of being cared for out of the home by this point in their lives.

As with many things here in New Zealand, our perception of pre-Year-1 school from abroad was a little different than the reality here on the ground.

While kiwi kids have a guaranteed Year 1 start date on their fifth birthdays, all care prior to that is optional despite 20hrs of each week being state-sponsored for 3-4yr-olds.

Given the state sponsorship, we were relatively sure getting into a daycare would be relatively easy, and there seemed to be tons of them. That’s compared to Philadelphia, where for many quality pre-schools you need to have your child on a waiting list before they are even born!

The complication arose from just how much school we were interested in Some care centers only offered 20hrs a week of care. Basically, they were set up to capitalize on the state-sponsored benefit, but that was it. That would be great for right this moment, but if I wound up in full-time job prior to EV6’s Year 1 started date we’d be in a pickle. By contrast, outside of the city the full-time child care centers were much smaller than their US equivalents and they all had wait lists – just not quite as long as the ones in Philly.

We sent out notes to the closest full-day schools on my birthday back in September. Two replied in short order – both to offer us a spot on wait lists stacked up into 2018. Eek.

Luckily, for once my resident OCD Godzilla really paid off for us. [Read more…] about first day of school, finally

This November on Crushing Krisis

by

A year ago today, I began an unusual experiment on Crushing Krisis called “Blog of Tomorrow.”

November has always been a big month of blogging at CK, but in 2016 the idea was that I would spend an entire month posting as if blogging was my full time job in order to convince you, the reader, to contribute to CK’s Patreon campaign. Each day including a one-two daily punch of a Song of the Day and a “From The Beginning” read of Wildstorm. Plus, I debuted a new comic collecting guide each week and shared installments of my namesake novel, Krisis, for the first time.

It was every bit as insane as it sounds. I’m not sure I slept at all the entire month. The resulting 90+ posts were some of my best blogging of all time and I became a much better blogger in the process of writing them, which is not something I expected to be able to say in my 17th year of doing this! And, along the way, a small subset of CK’s readers kindly volunteered to pay for all of its hosting costs(!!!).

The only way I keep up that level of daily effort throughout 2017 was if readers were literally paying my salary – which would require an order of magnitude of more donations. That would be amazing, but it was never the point. The goal of my experiment wasn’t getting to writing the “Blog of Tomorrow” on a permanent basis, but to push myself to invent the quality and quantity of content that such a blog might entail.

Today, it is once again November 1st.

Part of me was tempted to go all-out yet again, trying to squeeze close to a 100 posts into a single month. It’s not like I lack for content. I have no end of ideas of series of posts to tackle, even if they would mean going another month sans sleep.

Yet, as much as I love big projects, I hate repeating myself. We’ve already proved that my blogging full-time could probably generate more content than most of you could read (or, at least, enjoy) on a daily basis.

This year, instead of thinking bigger, I want to think wider. Less posts and less hours, but more content and visibility. I’d love to get you back to visiting every week and knowing you have several posts of catching up to do each time.

What does that look like? [Read more…] about This November on Crushing Krisis

about that so-called ice cream

by

Since arriving in New Zealand I have an ongoing anxiety about being an obnoxious American.

I’m constantly apologizing to native Kiwis – for my diction, for having so many questions, for not knowing how to tell apart their money, and for using idioms like “pull the trigger.”

In fact, I think I’ve only done two actually obnoxious things since I’ve been here, and one is driving too cautiously into roundabouts.

A typical day’s selection of fruit sorbettos at Capogiro.

The other is talking smack on New Zealand’s ice cream. Every time I do it I get a note from a new Kiwi friend on Twitter that very gently expresses their indignation.

Here’s the skinny (or, as the case may be, not so skinny): Ice cream is my favorite thing to consume on this planet. I can (and have) eat ice cream four meals in a day, starting with it topping my warm oat meal and enjoying it between courses at dinner.

Thus, I was pretty excited to try a whole new country’s worth of ice cream in New Zealand, about which I’ve heard some excellent things.

What I forgot about in all my excitement about new ice cream is that Philadelphia is an amazing place to live if you are obsessed with ice cream. It’s a sort of ice cream mecca! We could purposefully ignore four or five of the best icy treats in the city and the next one on the list would still be better than the ice cream in most other cities on the planet.

The best ice cream in Philly isn’t even ice cream – it’s Capogiro, the Italian-style gelato sorbetto that National Geographic named the best ice cream in the world in 2011. A

My first flight of birthday flavors at Merrymead Farm.

After that, there is my years-long addiction to Franklin Fountain‘s absurdly good hand-dipped ice cream served from in an old-timey soda fountain shop. Then Bassett’s Ice Cream, America’s oldest ice cream company, with their iconic Reading Terminal counter.

Plus, the fantastical small-batch flavors (and absurd marketing) of Little Baby’s Ice Cream! And the massive selection of local creameries, including Montgomery County’s Merrymead Farm, where I ate 22 flavors for my birthday last year!

That’s not even getting into Pop’s Water Ice or the now-ubiquitous Rita’s, which I am physically incapable of turning down. And we haven’t even been to a grocery story yet, where national brands like Edie’s and upstart Blue Bunny are shelved alongside Pennsylvania’s own Hersey’s or Turkey Hill, and upstart Halo Top is competing with my beloved Ben & Jerry’s.

The flavor wall at Ben & Jerry’s this August.

Suffice to say, I was completely spoiled for ice cream choices in Philly, from the lowly generic carton to the high-end boutique brands.

That might explain why I’ve felt every sample I’ve had so far in New Zealand has been been a bust. Every flavor I’ve tried is too sweet. All of the vanillas have a sickly marshmallow note to their flavor that obscures the sweet bite of their bean. The salted caramels are too sugary to be salty.

(I have briefly considered that corn syrup just isn’t a thing here, and that my sweets-calibration might be totally off when it comes to things made only with natural sugar. That definitely applies to the cookies here (which is another post entirely), but given my wide-ranging taste in ice cream including a love for small creameries, and I’m pretty sure corn syrup and artificial sweeteners aren’t entering into the conversation here).

The very expensive Kapiti Ice Cream of New Zealand.

Each time this occurs and I whinge about it on Twitter, a kind Kiwi will bring up the same few “must try” ice cream brands that I am obviously missing out on, one of which is invariable Kapiti.

Here’s the thing: They are invariable $8 and up for less than a 2L container.

I came into New Zealand accepting that everything is more expensive here, but I refuse to accept that the only way to get good ice cream is to pay 2-3x what the cheapest brands in the store cost. That’s like telling an American to ignore every brand in their freeze aisle except for Ben & Jerry’s, Dove, and Häagen-Dazs.

Heck, you could never eat any of those brands and still eat ice cream fit for a king on a pauper’s budget. The store brand at GIANT was terrific. I’d never shell out more than $4 for a half gallon in the story unless I was buying a rare pint of Ben & Jerry’s, because some awesome brand would doubtlessly be on sale for 2-for-$7.

I’ve now sampled four or five different brands, and I’m ready to call it quits on my life-long affair with buying ice cream. If I can’t enjoy your ice cream at its cheapest blow-out price, I’m not interested in it when it costs a tenner.

As I described it to one new Kiwi friend, expensive ice cream occupies the same area of my brain as expensive jeans – something that only rich thin people ever buy.