Interesting Turn of Events...

I called Yvonne Leforte this morning, Denise Poole’s family member that lives in New Zealand. Phyllis had given me her contact info before I left. She is a doctor here but originally was from Canada. She invited Melissa and I over for dinner at her home next week and to spend the evening with her and her family. That will be very nice, although Denise had not even told her that I was coming. She was very eager to have us over though and oh my, you know what I am thinking don’t you? :o) A HOME COOKED MEAL!

So last night, well after work, we went to Flight Centre and paid for our tickets to the South Island. We leave Auckland on Saturday, feb 3rd (the day after placement ends) and fly back to Auckland on our way home (to California) on February 14th. Our plane doesn’t leave Auckland until Feb 15th (at night) so we will be sleeping on the airport floor for 24 hours. So we bought that and then we went to pay for our weekend trip to the Bay Of Islands up north. This trip we got for a really good price, $107 each for return bus fare and accommodations. We will have to spend more on activities once there, but we thought that was good. So I paid for mine and then Melissa tried to pay for hers. But it appears that she has spent it all. I already paid for mine so I just lent her the money for this one. She is still waiting for her SWIF.

So then, I went to Danny Doolans and bought that fabulous take out salad to eat at home. So we get home and there is a “semi-eviction notice” in our apartment. It says that our outstanding balance is past due and that we would have to pay it within 5 days or else “necessary steps would be taken”. Well I was fuming mad. We had been putting off paying, mostly b/c the office always closed hours early and they were always closed when we wanted to pay. So, I didn’t know what to think. I just lent Melissa over a hundred dollars, and now I would have to pay for all of the rent for both of us up until now. So I tried to go down to pay. We are on the 12th floor and the elevator was not working. So what does one do? The fire escape stairs of course! Ok, so I climbed down 12 flights (really 24 b/c they are double flights) and get to floor #3 where the fire escape stairs end. All that is there is the exit door to the outside. The main reception floor is on the 2nd-obviously NOT accessible from the fire escape. And of course the fire door to the outside is locked. Well I unlocked it, and tried to get out to walk around to the reception. Well of course not, it wouldn’t open. There was an electronically controlled magnetic thingy at the top which keeps it locked unless the fire alarm is pulled. Hmmm. Isn’t there jail time for that? Well there should be jail time for locking people in a huge scary building. There was honestly NO WAY OUT! And I had to climb the 12 flights up. Cranky I was. So I tried to call down to the reception to tell them whats going on. The phone number they gave us didn’t work. I was hitting buttons like mad and finally I just decided to press “0” and hope to get an operator and tell them that we were being held captive, But the front desk answered, imagine that. So they apologized and said that it should be fixed in a few minutes, it was. So I went down and paid our balance for the both of us. Melissa will have to pay for the next time we get an eviction threat.

Then we took the bus out to Mission Bay beach, not too far from town. And what did we find there? The world’s 2nd best iceceram at a place called Movenpic. It was 5 dollars for 1 single scoop, we got 2. It was something else. I would have paid 20 dollars. But still, the remaining champion is Baskin Robbins cookies and cream, which is no longer around. We walked along the beach, which had a perfect view of Rangitoto Island, lots of people swimming, but it got dark early (not a nice day). We walked along the boardwalk restaurants, and found tons of people our age and it was really our scene. We will go back on a nicer day, we were all damp and yucky feeling to be social. We headed back to town and went to bed, after a late night burger of course.

This morning at work, I had a visit from Mathijs, the AUT school of Occupational Therapy fieldwork coordinator who is going to arrange that next Friday we can tour the OT School with him on the Akoranga campus which we haven’t been to yet. And he gave us his AUT password so that we could get free access to the online academic journals if we wanted. HA! Great….thanks, but I don’t think I’ll have time to do any school stuff…