Once again many months have elapsed between posts. I last updated this site in January, shortly after receiving a job offer from Papakura High School, where I am about to complete a second term teaching physics (and, it should be said, enjoying it enormously). Since then, however, my time simply has not been my own.

When I was hired, the acting principal of PHS, Trevor McKinlay, made it a condition of my appointment that I relocate from Warkworth to south of the Auckland Harbour Bridge. This, at the time, struck me as a rather inappropriate condition. I still think he was out of order trying to attach that condition to my hiring, but, as it turned out, he was on to something. The commute from Warkworth to Papakura should have taken a little over an hour, and that I could probably have lived with. But I would leave home at about half past six each morning, and it was a rare event if I arrived before eight. The traffic would typically be a three-lane crawl-along from just south of Albany, and wouldn’t really flow properly again to somewhere beyond Sylvia Park. While I was never late — not even once — there were a couple of anxious mornings as the time slipped by but the miles didn’t.

We realised that maybe a move closer to work mightn’t be a bad idea. Then I received a letter from Mahurangi College, my old employers and still my landlords. Shortly after I started working at Mahurangi, the College’s Principal, David Macleod, suggested that I consider renting one of the College’s houses. Michael Winiana, the school’s Maori teacher, had been renting it but was leaving it and moving to a house he and his family would be renting from a relative of his wife’s, up in Wellsford, just north of Warkworth. I went and took a look.

While it undeniably needed work done, it was a solid, good house. Four bedrooms (two of a decent size, two tiny), a large living room with an open fireplace, a small-ish dining room and an unnecessarily large kitchen, a bathroom, dining room and kitchen, with a good-sized section out the back, and all just seven or eight minutes’ walk from school, at the bottom of Palmer Street — conveniently close, too, to the RSA and the shops and cafes of Warkworth. I took it.

No lease was signed — that was to happen when the work was complete. The work was never completed — the interior was repainted, and the shower was finally replaced, though it still creaked due to rotten wood supports underneath, but the insulation I was promised, repeatedly, never happened — but I was finally required to sign a lease by Jocelyn Ingram, the College’s executive officer. She asked if I would like to sign a one-year or an ongoing lease. I asked her for her advice; she said “Oh, don’t worry about signing an ongoing lease; we’re not going to kick you out of your house!”

Of course, this is exactly what they did. The letter I received one Saturday morning in February told me that I had ninety days to vacate the premises, because “the College needs the house for another teacher.” I was, not entirely unreasonably, concerned. I called Macleod, who told me that the Winiana family would be moving back in. I called Claire Winiana, Michael’s wife. She told me that, yes, they would be moving back in,  because the rental on their house in Wellsford had fallen through, and they had been promised that they could have their old house back when my contract at Mahurangi College expired. Oddly, nobody had bothered to communicate this to me when I moved in, or when I signed my lease. I explained to Claire that this would cause me and my family a lot of problems; she seemed unconcerned.

I took Macleod’s advice and put in a request to speak at the next meeting of the College’s Board of Trustees. I was granted about ten minutes to put my case — that I had been assured that my tenancy was secure, that I would be able to stay in the house as long as necessary — and was told that, since the Residential Tenancies Act allows landlords to terminate leases, that is what the College had chosen to do. But, I replied, I had been assured that the College would not do that. “Yes, but we can, and we want to, so we will,” was the essence of the reply.

Tracey Martin, the Chairman of the Board, assured me that the College wanted the house for a College teacher, that the house was for the use of teachers of the College, even though Ministry of Education policy, the very policy she insisted the Board followed in such matters, made no such stipulation. She said she had no idea who would be allowed to rent the house next, that in fact to the best of her knowledge no decision had yet been made, and that it was needed for recruitment and retention of new teachers; Tom Holdgate, another member of the Board, suggested that maybe a science teacher that the College had recently hired from the UK might want to rent the house. Neither Macleod nor Ingram said a word about any of this throughout the discussion, despite Macleod having told me that the Winiana family would be moving back in, and Ingram having given me an assurance that I wouldn’t be turfed out. The ninety-day notice stood; we were due to be out in mid-May.

And so we found ourselves looking for a new home. We shopped around in Warkworth, and discovered that nothing in the area was affordable. Warkworth is, clearly, a very expensive town. It’s a pleasant town, to be sure, but it was, quite evidently, a good chunk of cash outside our price range. We started looking south. Nothing in Auckland itself was affordable, either, and further south, as Auckland became South Auckland, an area with no official definition but also with no real charm, we realised that we’d have to start looking beyond Auckland.

Pukekohe stood out as I looked on a map for a new town to call home. We hopped in the car and headed south, with no more idea of where we were going than wherever my GPS took us when I buttoned in Pukekohe town centre, and found ourselves agreeably pleased by what we found. Pukekohe is, essentially, a slightly larger version of Warkworth — a self-contained town with pretty much everything one would need. We looked around, and found a house we liked the look of. We made an offer, numbers were batted back and forth, and we came to an agreement with the couple who were selling. We put together a budget for ourselves, decided we could afford it, and went to the banks. KiwiBank wouldn’t look at us, because we hadn’t been here for two full years yet. National Bank were willing to deal with us, but, for reasons too varied and complicated to discuss here, they were only willing to give us a twenty-year, instead of a thirty-year, mortgage, which meant that, effectively, we had to reduce our maximum price by about a fifth.

Back to the drawing board. We ended up with a shortlist of four houses. One was large and rambling and set in large grounds, but wasn’t in the most desirable neighbourhood. One was new and, I thought, a little soul-less, but was on the edge of an area of town described to us as “the badlands.” One was in a sweet location, but had many of the hallmarks of a leaky building and had a very small garden that was only accessible, oddly, through the children’s bedroom.

The fourth, and the one we finally settled on, is a 1920 bungalow. It’s a small house, to be sure, with only the two bedrooms, but it has a small-ish office, a lovely sunroom and a generously-sized living room. It also has a delightful back garden with a paved patio and a large lawn which now contains the mandarin tree Neil and Jenny bought us as a house-warming present. It also had a lot of problems, none of them, I hope, insurmountable — peeling wallpaper, a bathroom that was in urgent need of completion, hardwood floors covered in bad, bad carpet, a cooker that works only when it really feels motivated to.

Today is the Sunday of Queen’s Birthday Weekend, and it’s the first day since we moved in that I haven’t spent on renovations. I’m enjoying the work, but I also dream each night of teams of masked chiropractors strapping me to a giant rack and cranking huge ratchets that pull me limb from limb — and of it feeling so good. And now I have something else to blog about. I’ll post updates as the hardwood floors start to shine again, as the insulation is installed, as we pick out a new wood-burning stove, as we decide about a tankless water heater. In the meantime, it’s time for coffee.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally lined up a new job — I’ve been hired to teach physics at Papakura High School, down in the southern reaches of Auckland. Start-of-year meetings kicked off this morning; we have the long weekend coming up, then the students show up on Tuesday, and classes begin in earnest on Thursday. I’m glad I got a decent amount of progress made on this site before term started, of course, but getting myself prepared will now be the priority, and so I’ll keep the site ticking over, but won’t be adding an awful lot for a week or so while I focus on my new job.

The wrappers are off at last — SteveMcCabe.net is finally live again. It shouldn’t look any different, which was part of what I was trying to achieve. I wanted to overhaul my website, but only behind the scenes. Up front, I didn’t want any changes to be noticeable, and I think I’ve pulled it off.

So what’s different? I’ve changed my site from a collection of static HTML pages to a WordPress site. I’ve been using WordPress for about a year or so now on sites I’ve developed for clients, but, just as a cobbler’s children go barefoot, my own site, my very own personal web presence, has languished. I discovered, when I set out on this project, that I hadn’t added anything new in well over a  year and a half.

So rather than just do a little tweaking, I decided it was time for a root-and-branch overhaul. After all, it’s the school holidays here in New Zealand, so I decided it was time to get busy and use my weeks and weeks off school productively. So this is the result — an all-new, and yet strangely familiar — SteveMcCabe.net.