Returning to the present briefly
I’ll continue with the series of travel journal entries soon (I’m just pasting together some montages of the Grand Canyon), but first a wee pause for today’s news. Not that there’s much, but it’s good to come back to the present occasionally.
We’ve just come back from Riccarton, where we almost but not quite bought a new vacuum cleaner (our trusty old Dyson has so many parts needing replacing that it’s been looking more and more economical to just get a new one – and we realised it must be about 11 or 12 years old now, so it’s actually lasted quite well). We hadn’t intended to buy one today (so today was a success from that point of view!), but we had to go in to the mall to pick up my phone (the one I got in America, which a repair shop were trying to hack for me so I could use it with my NZ provider, but in the end they weren’t able to 🙁 ), so we decided to have a look at vacuum cleaners while we were there and check out prices etc. But it turned out Farmers had one on sale with a huge discount because it was ex-display, so our intention to buy a new vacuum cleaner in the next few months suddenly turned into let’s buy one today. The only slight problem was it wasn’t in its box, so didn’t have all its bits with it (the various special cleaning heads and things), and when the sales assistant guy went into the back to find them, a couple were missing. So he’s put it aside for us, and is going to ring the supplier on Monday and see if he can get replacement parts (and if he can’t, he said he’ll discount the price even further, which was fine with us, because the extra bits aren’t totally essential). So we’ll maybe be buying a new vacuum cleaner later this week…
Oh, and in the middle of this very long vacuum cleaner not-buying exercise there was an earthquake. Just a 4.0, but still pretty scary – it’s the first time I’ve felt one while I’ve been in a shop, and as the shelves were rattling (and a few things falling off, by the sound of breaking crockery from a couple of aisles over) I realised there’s absolutely nowhere safe to go in a shop. At home I can go under a doorway, and at work I can go under my desk, but shops have no shelter and lots of things that can fall on you! Luckily nothing did, but it was a bit nerve-wracking for a few seconds there while we waited to see if it was going to get bigger.
I got another catch from America, from the release walk at the zoo: The Worst Soccer Team Ever by William Taylor