My car has been stuck in the OGGB carpark for over a month with a bust starter motor.  I finally got it towed out last Monday and paid $666 to have it fixed.  On tuesday night, I was out with my sister and as I left, she pointed out that during my car’s abandonment, the left headlight bulb died of neglect.  It was on my todo list for this weekend, but I’d forgotten about it when I planned to go out to dinner tonight in  New Lynn.  With the streetlights as bright as they are around the city, I couldn’t even tell the difference.

Of course, the police officer driving towards me could, and he did a U turn to pull me over literally right outside my apartment building.  He explained to me that the police have a carrot and stick approach to infringements like this.  The stick is a $150 fine.  The carrot is that I have 14 days compliance.   If I fix the problem within 14 days and send the police written proof that I’ve gotten the issue fixed, then I won’t have to pay the fine.

That’s task number 1 this weekend.  Task number 2 is to fix the broken mount on the drivers seat.  I’m not having much luck with my car lately.  Between it and my teeth, this has been an expensive couple of months.

My car broke down about a month ago. I had trouble starting it at home one afternoon and eventually got it to work, but that night, in the OGGB carpark, it refused to start.  I delayed doing anything about it for a while, since I didn’t really have either the time or the money to deal with it, so my car has been abandoned on level 3 of OGGB ever since.  It’s not just a battery issue since the lights and electrics all work perfectly fine.  Given that the car has been getting harder to start, and now won’t turn over at all (I just get a click) my conclusion is the fault lies with the starter motor.

Last week, I got the AA in to have a look at it.  The poor guy was lying down on the filthy OGGB floor getting covered in grease under my car for half an hour before he finally gave up and concluded that the starter motor is buggered.  This morning, more AA guys came in and towed the car to a mechanic to get it fixed.  I’m still waiting to hear how much that’s going to cost.

But in a nice touch, when my car was towed out this morning, the carpark attendant called me to make sure that I knew about it.  That was a nice touch, but I do wonder what his alternative scenario might have been – that the AA, with their very distinctively branded cars, have started a second line of business stealing old junkers from carparks?

This morning I made myself breakfast.  That’s not particularly unusual, I have breakfast at home about half the time.  Today, I had bacon and eggs with tastes-like-home-made-but-isn’t tomato relish and a vanilla chai latte.  Everything was ready at the same time so I sat down to enjoy it.   At the exact second that I picked up the fork, the whole building’s fire alarms went off.

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When I was in Standard 2 at primary school we had Bible Study classes for two hours every week. The first time, a few students went away to another room and the rest of us were ushered down to sit on the mat. A very smiley woman named Mrs Brown came and perched her ample backside on one of our tiny chairs and told us stories about Jesus. I don’t remember any of the stories, but I do remember singing a song about how “Jesus is the apple of my eye, and that’s why I’m bananas for the Lord”.

Afterwards, one of my friends told me that instead of Bible Study, all I had to do was tell my mother to write a note to the teacher and I could go to “Peaceful Relations” with her instead. That night, I made my mother write the note.
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I managed to get myself down to Sylvia Park today to check out the new shopping centre and supermarkets.

The Warehouse Extra is not as skanky as I had envisaged based on my previous Warehouse history.  Still, I have no desire whatsoever to shop there.  I can’t see any reason why I would go there when I could go to the beautiful big Foodtown instead.

Ahhhh, the Foodtown.  Not because it’s wildly different and spectacularly better than all the other Foodtowns in Auckland, but because it was empty.  I dunno whether it was the time of day (3pm on a Thursday), or the fact that not many people have caught on yet, or both, but it was almost deserted.   I had the aisles to myself, nothing was out of stock, and there were absolutely no queues at the checkout.   I could actually enjoy grocery shopping if it was always like this. 

As for the rest of the shopping centre, well, it’s a shopping centre.   It’s like St Lukes without the movie theatres and is much less efficient.   St Lukes is relatively compact by virtue of being two-storied and boxlike.  Sylvia Park just sprawls. 

It pretty much has the same lineup of shops you find in the CBD or in other large shopping centres.  I imagine I might go there reasonably often because it is the closest shopping centre, but I see no reason why people would bypass any other centre to go to Sylvia Park.

Now that I’m living on my own, I can’t delegate the grocery shopping chore to anyone.  I’ve often said that I hate grocery shopping, which isn’t really true.  I actually don’t mind it, but I don’t enjoy it enough to want to do it. I remember that when I first left home, doing my own grocery shopping was a new experience so I really did enjoy it.  But that was over ten years ago now, so the novelty has well and truly worn off. 

My first choice for grocery shopping is Foodtown online.  The delivery costs $10 – $12 depending on how much I buy.  Given that I do a fortnight’s shopping at once, it really isn’t too big a deal.  When you weigh that $10 against the cost of petrol getting to the supermarket, my time spent shopping, and the fact that impulse buying is completely eliminated, to me it seems like a pretty good deal.

Still, sometimes my shopping list just isn’t big enough to make an online order cost effective, so in that case I have several supermarket choices.  The map below shows the relative distances to the supermarkets I frequent:

Pak N Save is by far the closest.  I go there when I want quick topups, or bulk purchases of common items.  The problem is I’m a bit picky with what I buy, and half the time Pak N Save just doesn’t have what I want.  They have large quantities of the most common items, but they have a very limited range.

Foodtown is my favourite supermarket.  I’ll go to the Foodtown at Pakuranga if I happen to be at the plaza for something else, but it’s rather small and has a fairly limited range too.    My favourite is Foodtown Greenlane.  It’s big, bright, clean and has a huge selection.  It’s also open 24 hours, which is sometimes a priceless advantage.  (Yes, sometimes I do my grocery shopping in the middle of the night.  So sue me.) 

There is now also some supermarket choices at Sylvia Park.   I haven’t yet been to the new shopping centre there.  The second stage of shops just opened last Thursday, so I’ll give things a while to settle down before I go have a look.  I mean, it’s just a shopping centre, I’ve seen them before.

Sylvia Park is marginally closer than Pakuranga Plaza, and sports three choices of supermarket: Foodtown, PakNSave and the Warehouse Extra. 

I don’t want to buy groceries from the Warehouse Extra.   I haven’t actually been there yet, so I don’t even know anything about the place and I could be totally wrong about it.   The idea of buying fresh food from the Warehouse just creeps me out.

You see, I used to work at the Warehouse Oriental Market.  It was a dingy, dirty, grotty place.  Being basically a big shed, it wasn’t very well lined or sealed.  The roof leaked when it rained.  Pigeons got inside and shit everywhere.  The bare concrete floor was uneven and constantly dirty.  The shelves were bare wood and metal and were also constantly dirty.   And literally every product we sold was cheap, dirty and shoddily made.

I’m sure this new Warehouse isn’t like that at all, but I still don’t think I could bring myself to buy food from there.  The mental associations I have with the Warehouse are too strong.

I finally got my grubby little mitts on a new 10c coin.   Well, actually, Marshmallow let me hold one of hers last week, but that wasn’t quite the same.  I now I have one all of my very own. 

In the unlikely even that I’m not the last person in NZ to fondle all the new currency, here is the comparison between old and new:

I don’t really mind that the good old tuatara is no more – 5c coins were just annoying.  But I am kinda sad to see the end of the old kiwi design 20c piece.  I know they stopped minting them in 1990 when they brought out the $1 & $2 coins, but it’s always seemed to be the most common 20c coin.  I don’t really like the new 20c design.  I mean, we already have a tiki face on the 10c – couldn’t they think of something else?

The new 50c and 20c coins are about 40% smaller and 60% lighter than the old ones.  The 10c is about 15% smaller and 40% lighter.  It really does make a difference in the amount of change you can carry around easily.  The old 50c weighed nearly 14 grams, wheras the new one is only 5 grams. 

Now, I know this is weird, but it does feel like the new coins remove a link to our history.  I pulled three old coins out of my purse for comparison: a10c coin from 1970, a 20c coin from 1989 and a 50c coin from 2001.  The queen looks different on each of those coins; you can see her aging.

And that 10c coin has been circulating around New Zealand since 8 years before I was born!  Imagine where it’s been and what it’s seen.  It just seems a little sad that they are now all going to be withdrawn and melted down.

The other night while watching one of my TV programs, I flicked channels and heard some good old school 80s music on C4.  It proved to be the top 40 worst ever number 1 songs.   I was intrigued so I kept flicking back to see what they were while I watched the other channel.

A large number of them seemed to be from the 80s, and a lot of them one hit wonders, like Mel & Kim’s Respectable, and Pseudo Echo’s Funky Town, and Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus.   I know I’m biased on this, but I don’t think many of the songs deserved to be on the list.  Their only fault is they don’t match current pop tastes, many of them are musically and lyrically much better than today’s music.

Towards the top of the list there were more recent songs.  Something by Christina Aquilera and Ricky Martin, a few hip hop & rap, some recently manufactured stuff.  

Number two was the Crazy Frog song, which I wholehearted agree should be there, but only because the original was much better.

Number one was  "They can’t take that away", by the first NZ Idol, Ben Lummis.  I think that’s a pretty well deserved win.

My Dad taught me how to tie my shoelaces when I was about 4.   I distinctly remember one day at primary school tying shoelaces for another girl. She didn’t know how, and I was quite proud that I did.   That’s why I was quite shocked to learn a few months ago that I’ve been doing it wrong for 24 years.

I came across Ian’s Shoelace Site (don’t ask me how), and in particular this page that explains why my shoelaces would often come undone. 

It turns out that I would tie my starting knot and the bow itself the same way – both left over right.  If you know anything about knots, you’ll know that if you tie a knot like that, you get an insecure granny knot instead of a secure reef knot.   

The funny thing is I did know about tying knots correctly, but it just never ever occurred to me to apply that knowledge to tying my shoelaces.  In fact I never really thought about why I had to re-tie my shoelaces a couple of times every day, I just accepted that as normal.

Anyway, if you’re curious, the fix for badly tied laces is pretty simple: just reverse your starting knot and voila, your laces don’t come undone anymore.

Bus services just don’t run on time in Auckland.  My usual experience is that a bus supposed to run every 15 minutes actually means that you wait for 45 minutes and then three come all at once. 

I’ve always assumed that this is just how things that are supposed to work.  The advertised interval is a theoretical ideal, like a perfectly frictionless slope, a rational decisionmaker or "all else equal".  If the buses ever stuck to their advertised intervals in Auckland, I’d expect it to make world news headlines, perhaps accompanied by trumpets and angels playing harps.

Apparently, I was wrong: 

"Stagecoach’s claim that its Link bus service runs every 10 minutes has been ruled misleading after a passenger complained of sometimes waiting for up to 40 minutes." (NZ Herald)

Apparently, somebody had the idea of laying a complaing to the Advertising Standards Authority about Stagecoach’s "false advertising".  Frankly, I’m surprised there are people naïve enough to believe that advertised bus timetables should be taken seriously, never mind that they would think to lay a false advertising complaint.

Unfortunately, the Advertising Standards Authority can’t force Stagecoach to clean up their act and make the buses run on time.  So all that might happen is that the Link bus will change its advertising from "Every 10 minutes" to something more true, like "irregularly but frequently".