Moving house, moving island, moving jobs

I'm writing this in the middle of Cooks Straight.

Regular readers (there are a few of you) may have noted that a lack of activity on my part lately.

This is because I am moving back to Wellington after nearly four years in Christchurch.

Quake city was nice and all but Wellington is where the work is and when opportunity knocks one must answer.

So blogging has been a bit lower on the priority list lately to things such as packing house, sorting out the new role, handing over the old work (everyone loves getting another persons case files don't they) as well as sorting out a new place to live (thank you Q for the gracious landing pad for my first few months) and getting the contents of my life (mostly boxes of books and music and a cat) across Cooks Straight.

Right now its 10.18 PM on a Wednesday night and after several days (and nights) of frantic packing and very little sleep (because I keep forgetting how much time it actually takes to pack up and clean a house) I am sitting in the cafeteria of the ferry running on a combination of energy drinks and the nervous excitement of going back to the city I have come to love so much.

Its not just the cosmopolitan atmosphere, the coffee and most of my friends being there that make Wellie what it is but also the fact that in regards to the work I do, its where the action is and Christchurch was always a short term option in my grander plans.

Not that my plans have been that grand, the last 18 years of my life have seen me move house on average of every two years starting in Asia and ending up in NZ. My most recent place (a lovely old brick statehouse with a garden that just screamed old lady) was home for just on two years, before that 18 months, before that four and a half years, before that it was 12, months, 18 months, one month, 12 months and so on all the way back to the distant year of 2000 when I first shipped out for Japan.

What I am trying to say at this point is that its time to put down some roots and I have chosen Wellington to do it. Unfortunately its in the middle of a surge in rental and property prices so I have a range of options from shoe box with a view to shoe box with no view to choose from in my current price range once I move out of the digs Q has so kindly lent me in a few months time.

Still, prices or no, Wellington is where I am going to call home and short of something very serious I will not be moving and maybe even one day (keep buying those Lotto tickets) I may be able to get my own place complete with some sort of hellish mortgage to bequeath to my kids.

I have been following NZ politics as always but in the larger scale of things the Jamie-Lee Ross scandal was more of a frantic blip on whats become a rather mundane downwards curve for NZ politics and I put this down to the difference between the previous third term government (that being National) to a first term government (that being the Labour led Coalition).

To be sure things are still happening but after scandal ridden antics of National under John Key, and later Bill English, the current government and its activity has just not generated the same kind of breathless drama that made up our regular diet under Mr Key and his evil little minions.

So to compensate for the shocking lack of scandal (because the Ian Lees-Galloway immigration saga is just not the same as Judith Collins doing dodgy deals with China, Gerry Brownlee playing cover-up for corruption in the quake rebuild in Christchurch or Key himself with things like his personal lawyer shilling for dodgy foreign money) I think its time to focus on the larger issues in NZ politics as well as elsewhere until we actually get something out of the current government worth discussing.

Thus the following is a list of topics/ideas I have been working on:

• More posts in the "Meanwhile..." series
• AI will kill us all: or at least take our jobs!
• Post Jacinda politics in NZ
• Populism: is it real?
• Revolution in NZ
• The problem with political media in NZ
• US Politics (because my god how low can they go?)
• An argument for Regulation in an increasingly deregulated world
• Any other ideas my warped mind can cook up

I suppose that with a new job and being back in the gossip stream of Wellington I may also get more of the info which drove some of my early work but give me a month of catch-ups over coffee before I can be sure of that.

However, when NZ politics decides to actually start doing stuff worth discussing we shall discuss but for now I think its better to let Jacinda and Winston stew in their own juices.

Also I think its time for me to get some sleep before this ship docs in Wellington.

Regular blogging will resume soon.

Vootie!