The Inagural Enterpirse of Katz Communications NZ OR: The Depression!

Well, it's been quite a while since we've put anything up...I don't really count the last part about the jobs as that was pretty boring. But it's a nice saturday and I'm i a state condusive to having a quiet sit-down due to standard friday night activities.

We had worked out with BG that we would vacate the good old Taradale house which had served as our base of operations for so long in return for him finding us some sort of alternative acomodations. But we had just enough time before we left for one last party. For Keller's birthday, we had the crew over for a barbecue. Buzz and I made Keller a special birthday hat out of a plastic tiara and the hard-hat that came wth the kid's tool set that we got him. After dinner, we headed over to Buzz's for some drinks and to send him off to University, then off to Havelock. Keller and I got a ride into the village with Buzz's mom, who had an amazing, mellow acceptance of her son. I could never convey the nuances of the conversation exactly, but here's what I remember.

Buzz's Mom: Now, Buzz, don't get in a fight!

Buzz: I will.

Mom: Watch out after him, boys (to me and Keller)

Buzz: I'm going to kill a nigger!

Mom: Oh Buzz...

Buzz: I'll do it.

I feel like I need to say that Buzz has such a strange, calm manner about him that even though he may seem to be slightly judgemental, his overt racism is just another reason we love him, and has never been acted upon thus far. It's all good.

Havelock was lovely, though I lost my sweater. While dancing like an idiot to the terrible, terrible music that absolutely permeates popular bars, I decided that the bar managers must have a pretty good racket - more than half of the money I spent as on drinks intended to dull my senses to the absolutely awful music, and the rest on drinks to slow the coming the inevitable realization that aparently no one in New Zealand can dance. It was still god fun, though.

The next morning, Keller and I drove Noah to the bus station, from where he was off to Auckland to meet up with his family.

After a quiet week of being repeatedly fired by our evil, terrorist, turkish orchard manager (whom we took to calling "Turkish Delight" "Achmad" "Al Qaeda" and other endearing names) it was time to bid farewell, forever to the old house. We loaded up the merc like a bunch of Okies (backpacks ties to the roof, etc. etc.) and made the pilgrimage up to our new home. We settled in to our new digs - and had a good chat with our new flat mates - ex smuggler, con-man, bartender and man of the world Glen, his blind, autistic son Jess and Mooch the cat.

The Katz tribe was in town for the weekend, and we took some time out of our busy schedule to check out the Art Deco festival in town. I have never seen anything like it, or even close, for that matter. The entire city center was closed off, there were barbershop quartets on every street corner, 4 piece jazz ensembles and enough classic cars to make my neck sore from constantly looking around. Perhaps most fantastically, all along the waterfront, for hundreds and hundreds of yards people had set up extremely elaborate tents, with beautiful wooden furniture, tablecloths, sofas (all period, of course) and were lounging, playing croquet and having tea while adorned in resplendent 1930s clothing - all the ladies with long dresses, satin, lace and ribbons with little hats and parasols; gentlemen in suits or rolled-up shirtsleeves and suspenders topped by flat-brimmed straw hats or fedoras and the children in little dresses and knickers. While we were strolling along, Sarah and I stopped to listen to a barbershop quartet do a rendition of a Maori folk song until we turned and noticed an old man in full Deco battle dress shouting excitedly at Keller in Japanese while gesturing with his cane.

We gave the Katz's a tour of Waimarama beach, Te Mata peak and finally settled back at the Taradale house for a barbecue dinner, before saying our final farewells to the old abode and heading home. Sunday night saw us at the Old Church chatting over a lovely dinner and making business arrangements (Dean, if you could send out my royalty check for this as soon as you can, that would be excellent.) before parting ways, with Keller and I heading back to Glen's and Noah and the fam taking off for new adventures.

On Tuesday, after being fired several more times we signed up at Job #9, picking blueberries. Bleberries turned out to be kind of nice and realxing, compared to apples, and though we were making less money I quite enjoyed it. Friday night Glen took Keller and I out to The Union, the neighborhood pub, which I quite enjoyed - as the working men who seemed to be major patrons had a much more sensible taste in music. We were introduced to the barmaids, and the owner of the bar (all friends of Glen's), sang some karaoke, and eventually staggered home.

Last night (not actually last night anymore) I was grilling up some burgers for dinner and shooting the bull with Glen while one of the trucks at the warehousing yard next door was backing up to park next to Glen's fence. Glen had been in the midst of a fierce battle with the truckers after one of them started crashing into his fence, and was just sitting on the table, quietly daring him to hit it again. As the truck pulled out, the whole fence shuddered and there was a huge crashing noise. Glen was immediately running out of the house shouting at me to get the camera. While I filmed, Glen ran out the front door to the trucker and the manager, who were trying to straighten the huge, metal pole that had been knocked over, with a forklift. Glen hassled them until the police showed up, and took a statement. After that it was off the union again, where Noah whiled away the night chatting up some German girl, and Glen and I had a short nap on what we thought, at the time, to be rail road tracks (but later turned out to be a loading ramp aside the tracks themselvs). Good fun.

This last week has been slow on the work side of things, despite a killing in our foray into ("not" stolen) blueberry distribution. We were going to be picking kiwis today, but that fell through, as did blueberries again, so I'm counting on some ingenuity to get us some money, but we'll see how all that pans out. Two more weeks of work, then we're off to the Great South for 2 or 3 weeks, then Keller and Noah are off to Amsterdam, and I return to Glen's and hopefully some more lucrative work. We should have some good tales from down south, and I'll try to get them up in a timely fashion.

Cheers!