The Oven Saga

I mentioned in the last post about getting a new oven installed, and I feel that for the sake of my karma I should come clean about what that whole story actually contains.

My wife (My Wife!) and I have been talking for a while about replacing the crappy four-burner electric stove that came with the house. Fortunately, it's a standalone oven / cooker, which as it isn't built into the work surfaces would be comparatively simple to replace. However, as I mentioned below, we're keen to move to gas hobs rather than the awful electric ones we have.

So a few weeks ago, we were out for coffee and a few basic errands (I was buying pants, if you must know), and whilst the Kiwi was in a girl shop doing girl things, I wandered a few doors down to where a local appliance store was having the final weekend of a closing down sale. It was like appliance deal heaven in there, and I looked further in and found a five-burner gas / electric oven for around $2,000 off, which was intriguing. I pulled the Kiwi in and pointed this out. A sales assistant materialised, and offered a number of compelling things - free delivery, interest free credit, that sort of thing.

So we bought it. Despite the following:

• We have no mains gas at our house
• The five-burner stove is somewhat wider than our four-burner one, and thus slightly wider than the gap our cupboards allow
• The addition of a differently-sized oven will require a differently-sized rangehood, and thus a new hole in the wall in a slightly different place

Carpe diem, and all that. So once the thing was safely ensconced in our downstairs spare bedroom, we set about getting quotes to have it installed. Fortunately, we found out that the current rangehood, whilst slightly offset for the new oven, was actually within compliance codes and wouldn't have to be replaced right away. This is good as they're expensive, and I imagined that cutting a new hole in our expensive cedar external wall and filling the old one in would also be somewhat costly.

So we found a gasfitter who'll pipe bottled gas in from outside, remove one of the kitchen cupboards, install the oven and put some cheap glaze over the back wall for not a reasonable sum.

Thing is, that cheap glaze was proving a bit of a challenge. The thinking behind doing it cheaply was that we're probably going to get the rest of the kitchen done sooner or later so we didn't want to put anything too permanent in. However, it's probably not going to be this year, so it does need to look reasonable. This prompted us to look at a nice steel splashback this weekend whilst we were looking at how cheap the cheap wall glaze actually was (the answer was 'very'). We decided on one, and I diligently measured it to ensure it would fit under our existing rangehood - remember we'd decided not to replace the current one.

We had my car with us at the time (two seater roadster), so we headed home to pick up the Kiwi's car (estate (sorry 'sport') wagon) and to measure up. I took the bigger car, returned, and bought the splashback. Job done.

This evening, the Kiwi asked 'did you measure the rangehood in the end?'. Cue small moment of discomfort from your author. I had not, having been distracted by a toasted sandwich on our return home.

As it turns out, the splashback we have bought is about 15cm too tall for the current rangehood, which means that not only will we have to buy a new one in order to get our oven installed, we'll have to have it fitted, which is no small task.

I suspect that our gasfitter finds this all highly amusing. As does my wife.

... and we're back

I'm not sure why I've not been at the blog lately, have been struggling with an explanation for a while now. I could say I've been too busy, but that would be a lie really, and I suppose I could say something about being happy, which I am, but none of that would seem like a genuine reason for apparently having nothing to say. Truth is, there's been numerous times over the past six months or so where I've thought 'I should blog about that', but the thought of going through the process of rekindling this blog kind of put me off. I like continuity, you see, and feel I'd need to fill in the gaps between then and now before writing anything new.

But I'm not going to. Otherwise I'd never get around to starting again. Surely through the likes of Twitter, Facebook and the rumour mill (or because you've visited recently), you know about the kitten and the wedding and all of that, so no need to post about any of that, and what a weight off my shoulders is that?

So here we are, happily married and settling into a cosy Sunday evening in our house, with a chilled weekend (involving a visit to the zoo!) behind us and a productive week of good things ahead of us. At the moment we're furiously saving to have a new oven installed, one with gas hobs, so entertainment has to be of the 'free' or 'extraordinarily cheap' varieties for a while. It'll be worth it to have some degree of control over what I'm cooking, plus we received a number of excellent cooking vessels as wedding gifts and I'm keen not to screw them up on those horrible electrical elements.

It's been a good weekend for food, even with our crappy oven. As the weather here's turning cooler, my thoughts have turned to comfort food (although it's still around 20C at the moment), and so on Friday evening I made tartiflette, that amazing French Alpine concoction of potato, bacon, onion, white wine and cheese. It was phenomenal, even with raclette substituted in place of the traditional reblochon - the latter being entirely unavailable in Auckland and the Kapiti Cheese Co making a great raclette.

I'm slowly getting my head around the food here. It helps that we live close to the Westmere Butcher, one of (if not THE) best butchers in Auckland. The Auckland Fish Market is also just a small detour from my journey home from work, so that helps too. The Kapiti shop is across the road from my office building, and I'm beginning to build a list of places that usually have what I'm looking for.

Funnily enough, that list is potentially not what you'd expect. Self-styled 'speciality' food stores like Sabato and Nosh tend to fail me every single time, with shelves groaning under the weight of super-priced olive oils and comedically useless condiments, but not a single hard to find ingredient in there I couldn't have bought in Tesco in the UK. They seem to exist solely for fabulously wealthy people to spend a whole heap of cash whilst not buying any actual food. What bugs me the most is the cynical pricing, basically an attraction in itself to a certain type of customer. I'm still deciding whether or not to continue this rant over on Eating Auckland.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that stuff is good. We're headed back to the UK for a visit over next Christmas, and the knowledge that that's there helps a lot from day to day. The days straight after the wedding were weird, with no 'big thing' on the horizon involving seeing friends from the UK, but Christmas has taken its place. Here's looking forwards to that...

Christmas, NYE, back to work

And we're back. Following a week and a half's mental haring around Manchester I'm back in the office to relative normality. It's a bit of a slow day here today as you can imagine - the alarums and hysterics I'm used to on the first day back are apparently unique to retail. It seems this doesn't filter down to (or percolate up to?) agency level for a couple of days yet.

Christmas was lovely. Following a cautiously enjoyable Christmas party with work on the Friday (taking it very easy on the beer, leaving in time for the last tube, don't think I offended anyone) we drove up to Manchester, taking a full 5 and a half hours to do so. We stayed in a reasonably smart apartment in Ancoats, just behind Piccadilly station, sort of, which is real inner-city Manchester, in the first throes of redevelopment and feeling a bit like Shoreditch did a few years back. It's still distinctly edgy, with some of the old rag trade offices still open for business and some of the old alleyways still ripe for lurking in, but the tell-tale bars and cafes are starting to creep in, along with the posh apartments and new businesses with shiny nameplates proudly displayed outside.

Bouncing between our apartment and friends and family all week was great, so good to see everyone again and spend time with them over the week - just as nice to be able to retreat to our own space when we needed to. The Thursday in particular was one of these times; the Kiwi went shopping whilst I settled into a pub with a bit of Orwell and some decent northern bitter. Brilliant. My wonderful Kiwi had managed to find me a Wii for Christmas too, which has shamelessly made me fall in love with her even more, whilst at the same time ensuring that I'll pay her marginally less attention in future. Funny paradox, that.

And so back to London on the Saturday, leaving at 0700 and taking about 2 hours 40 to make it back, in stark contrast to the outward journey. We spent the afternoon with the Hatter and his family out in darkest Hampshire; he's getting married in 08 and as I'm to be his best man (hooray!) we thought it about time we met the rest of the brood, and a very happy man he must be, with three ridiculously cute and (apparently) well-behaved kiddies and a rather idyllic part of the country to call home.

New Year followed, with a small group of mainly Kiwis round at ours, me drinking unusually heavily mainly in order to numb the pain of a minor mutilation which occurred whilst preparing bruschetta (middle-class credentials firmly intact there). New Year's Day was spent almost entirely on the sofa with both of us alternately freaking out about returning to work and (mostly me) worrying about January's finances which, in the context of 2008's plans, are some way off course.

There we are then. New Year's resolutions? I don't normally, but here we go: more exercise, more reading of books, more saving of money, more earning of money, more ruthless career progression (hahaha), more wearing of good shirts. Less drinking (not sure about that one), less eating of the bad food, less procrastination, less chopping of fingers. Oh, and possibly the purchase of something shiny before too long. And that's all I have to say about 'that'.

.... and another thing...

I'm doing this a lot, aren't I? Anyway, I just wanted to point out that I've just seen the video to The Smiths 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' on TMF, which is a funny little channel that sometimes comes up with some intriguing stuff.

Anyway, as anyone who's ever spent any time in Manchester will know instantly, it's filmed around there (Salford, I believe). And it reminded me how much I love and miss that amazing city - even the boarded up council houses and dodgy industrial areas - there's a familiarity and a melancholy friendliness even in the rusting gasometers and crappy broken up roads. I did once plan to move back there one day...

On another note, the next video TMF served up was Adam Ant's 'Prince Charming', which instantly extinguished any longing thoughts of the north with 'By golly you're right Adam: ridicule is nothing to be scared of!'. It's been a funny old day.