For reasons unknown to me, May seems to be a quiet month for my blogging. I looked back to 2010 and usually, this is the month I blog less. Maybe it’s the change in seasons, or I find other things to occupy my time.
   This year, it’s been far more eventful, as on the 10th inst., we moved. Thirty-six years at the same address, and I’m now in the northern suburbs of Wellington. The postal code has changed from a 6 to a 5 at the beginning, which gives you an idea of just how far north we went.
   As a middle-aged man I don’t need to be that close to town any more, and since I’ve always worked from home, all I really need is a stable and reliable internet connection. We need space for team members who work for me on-site, which we now have far more of. The internet connection is the one thing that really needs work in terms of my daily routine, since we are on multiple levels, and D-Link’s Powerline “mains modems” have not been that good here, while Vodafone’s Ultrahub also loses too much in terms of bandwidth in different parts of the property.

Above: There’s too great a loss of bandwidth through the D-link Powerline units. The top screen shot is a device plugged into the Vodafone Ultrahub near the Chorus ONT.

   It’s goodbye Evans Bay views (which have never been the same since the Indoor Sport Stadium was erected at great additional unnecessary expense to ratepayers; a clear reminder not to trust certain establishment politicians) and hello to rolling hills and native bush.
   It hasn’t all sunk in yet, as I’ve been working while the move has taken place, and haven’t had the time to enjoy the process. Rationally, I know we made the right decision, otherwise we’d never have done it, but other than the last half-hour at the old place, letting the memories of each room flood in as I walked through for the last time, I haven’t been particularly emotional. In fact, when the buyers of my old home signed, I was actually happier for them than I was for myself, since they had been searching for a while, and I felt they got a good deal. Here they were, third time lucky in this street, and getting the largest house on the largest section, and, with the greatest respect to my former neighbours, a more solid one, too. (Yes, I’ve knocked on your timber inside over the years.) They have a view which they never would have had in the other places.
   They additionally have a connection to a former resident on the street, which I won’t go into publicly; and one party’s father actually came from the street we moved into. Also in one of those “very New Zealand” coincidences, one dear friend who helped me move headed to Ōtaki that evening, and told a woman there that he had been helping us. It turns out that she was the sister of one half of the couple that previously owned our new home. These seem to be very “harmonious” events that appeal to my heritage, the sort of signs that to others might signal that “it’s all meant to be” if you were seeking something beyond the rational.
   In one year, in a street of 14 homes, four properties have changed hands; if you count the place on the corner of the street (which technically isn’t part of it), it’s five properties. If anyone were to write its history (not that anyone would), 2018–19 was the period of a sea change in terms of the people there.
   We’re still living among boxes, and there are still two storage units’ worth of stuff that we need to empty out, but we’ll just have to take things one step at a time. We filled a skip full of old stuff, and probably could have filled a second, once you added the miscellaneous trips our friends and I made to the tip. But on this end there are still a few things that need to go.
   For the last two years, the Mary Potter Hospice has been the principal beneficiary of the nicer items, which included new things that my parents and grandmother acquired but never used.
   One remarkable thing is how well the old furniture fits with the new place, and, interestingly, how comparatively poorly it fitted with the old. It’s as though my family bought for this house. When you look back over four decades, you get a sense of how things do intersect and come together, if you’re lucky, and we certainly regard ourselves as very lucky indeed. It makes me happy that things have worked out on many fronts, save for my Dad’s Alzheimer’s disease. Perhaps for him, too, there is a silver lining: we have wound up closer to him, so a drive north only takes 16 minutes (on a good day) rather than close to an hour.
   Yesterday, we visited the old street to collect the last bits and pieces out of the garage, and said hi to one of our former neighbours. We’ll visit others we didn’t have a chance to farewell, since the move out took longer than planned, and we had to dash off to get to the new place that day. That neighbour had been there for 60 years, and had seen everything from one couple having an argument where the woman chased the man with a shotgun round the grounds of Rongotai College, to the residents that had come and gone over the years. Interestingly, she didn’t remember a case of arson (to an old Humber car) in the 1980s, to which the fire brigade was called; but other tales remained as clear as day.
   I won’t go into the nitty-gritty as there are many tales to tell, and Kiwi motorway behaviour is pitiful in so many cases as we drive up north. And for privacy reasons, I won’t blog too much just yet about how we’re finding the new place, as we’re still adjusting to it ourselves. I will say the former owners were meticulous, filling up and painting over walls where things were once mounted (unless they used those 3M strips), and we are ever so grateful to them.