Exams are over, and seem to have gone well.

I am now putting myself into boxes, in preparation for my move back to Christchurch. I have a habit of packing far too early, and I’m not actually leaving until a week Tuesday, but I’d rather do it this way round than the opposite extreme.

Thanks to the local Four Square, I am well supplied with cardboard boxes. I favour the ones bananas come in, as they nice and strong to prevent the bananas getting bruised in transit, they have good handles on the sides, and they have separate lids that fit snugly over the top, so that you can open them up again to get back out all the things you packed too early.
For the non-banana boxes I have a lot of duct tape. I have been trying to purchase duct tape in this city for some time, but my everyday travels have seldom taken me close to any duct tape shops or itinerant duct tape salesmen, and supermarkets seem to be unaccountably reluctant to stock this basic household necessity. So having finished my last exam on Friday, I set Saturday aside for the Quest for Duct Tape. I elected to conduct this on foot, as is proper for an endeavour of such moment, and was so pleased with its success that I carried on walking until I reached the top of Mount Wellington, bearing my duct tape in triumph.

Mount Wellington seems to be the Forgotten Volcano of Auckland. This is a shame, as it’s very impressive, and has a marvelous view from the top.

Now here’s a noble project. Do I have any readers in the Spanish village of Correlos who might be interested in taking part?

Don’t miss the video. It has a special theme song.

I have a box full of little drawings I’ve made over the years, mostly on lecture notes. Some of them are sketches for things I’d like to put in comics some day, but many of them are just abstract doodles with no particular purpose. Still, I’ve kept them because I like them, and each has, I think, some potential to be used one day.

I’ve thought for a while that what I’d really like would be a program I could use to scan all these little drawings into my computer. It further occurred to me that I have many other bits of paper lying around and taking up space that could be fruitfully subjected to the same treatment.

Certainly, I could do this with standard scanning software, but it would be very time-consuming, because standard scanning software is designed to scan things well , not quickly. There are document scanning programs focused on speed, but they tend to be designed for large organisations with complicated OCR needs. I just want to scan things with minimum fuss. So I though I’d have a go at writing my own. Some day. In the future. My main problem would be not so much writing the software as dealing with the Sun expanding into a red giant and consuming the lifeless husk of the Earth before I got started.

It turns out, however, that somebody else was thinking along the same lines, and produced kip, which is more or less precisely what I was thinking of, only much better. It’s as if the idea sprang fully-formed from my head like Athena from the mighty Zeus, only without the unpleasant headaches or my actually learning anything about Cocoa programming.

I’m having a fine time scanning in all my little drawings, and seeing which ones might actually make good comics.

Today we were visited by Old Man Power Cut.

It turns out that many things in this city have no back-up generators. Traffic lights, railway signals, police stations… what spare power-generating capacity was available apparently gets dedicated mostly to making burglar alarms run incessantly for no readily apparent reason.

My train into the city this morning only got as far as Newmarket, where we sat for three quarters of an hour and were asked to all get out while the various railway operatives buzzed around asking each other what to do. None of them seemed to have particularly clear ideas, so I elected to walk the rest of the way to university. I amused myself by listening to Smog on my iPod:

When the power goes out

At the grocery store

We just take, take take

We just take, take take

I arrived more than a little water-logged, and just in time to receive a hand-delivered letter from the Vice-Chancellor, addressed generally to anybody loitering about the campus, informing us that the campus was closed for the day. To be honest I didn’t have any particularly clear reasons for being there more than any other place without power, so I called Annette, and we went to her place to discuss interior decorating and read books. I was treated to one of her fine internet-recorded lunches, which had accidentally but fortuitously been left behind that very morning by her partner JSR. Very fine it was, and you can see it here.

The power eventually came back to the central city in the early afternoon, so I returned to the university to engage in the studying I had originally planned.

I returned home in the evening to discover that my house was roughly at the centre of a small circle of remaining powerlessness, so I went to have a cup of tea with C. The lights came back on as I was walking up her driveway, about ten hours after the whole thing started, but we had the cup of tea anyway.

Finest overheard rumour of the day: “Somebody has blown up the Harbour Bridge”. This had a certain minimal degree of plausibility given that the existential status of the bridge could not be visually determined from the particular vantage point at which the rumour was reported. However, it turns out not to have been the case. On the other hand, I didn’t believe that the power cut extended to Hamilton either, and that did turn out to be true. In my defence, I believe theirs might technically be considered a separate power cut that happened at roughly the same time due to more or less the same bit of squally weather.

All in all, I have come to the conclusion that power cuts are not very good. No more power cuts, please.

On Friday I visited a gathering of the Auckland Deaf Society, on the invitation of a friend who wanted to return some comics to me before I leave the city. Getting ready to move can take you to many unexpected places, and teach you interesting new things. Last weekend it was how many small children can fit into a tiny tree in Manurewa. This weekend it was the correct sign language for “ginger beer”. Apparently New Zealand has a special sign just for beer, but for ginger beer you prefix it with the sign for the letter G. Much like English, only more efficient.

I anticipated some difficulty learning any signs, as I am not naturally gifted in the department of kinesthetic memory. I had to give up learning dancing years ago, because I kept holding everyone up asking for everything we’d learnt from the beginning to be taught to me again. I am capable of forgetting several weeks’ worth of dance steps in under half an hour. If you ever need anything forgotten quickly, you could not go too far wrong by expressing it to me in the form of interpretive dance. So I prepared for my visit by buying pens and notebooks. At first I apologised to a few people for my “paper hands”, but eventually gave this up as it turns out not to be particularly witty when you write it down, and I suspect it’s one of those things that everyone thinks they’re the first person to come up with when they really aren’t.

In any case, I managed to learn the alphabet reasonably quickly, and some basics like “yes”, “no”, “thank you”, “hooray” and “President of the Auckland Deaf Society”. I’m pretty sure that last one was actually a generic sign for any kind of president of anything, but I wasn’t certain of its scope, so I restricted myself to using it in the same context I first learnt it. I have found that it is best not to try to be to inventive on your first day learning a new language.
The main coordination problem I experienced was constantly forgetting to move my lips for the benefit of people whose lip-reading abilities were far beyond my capacity to comprehend. My lip-reading is worse than my dance-remembering.

It turns out that when deaf people gather, they do the following things:

• Drink beer
• Play pool
• Watch rugby on telly
• Discuss the plans for the new Deaf Society premises that will soon be built

No doubt there were many further topics of discussion that escaped my comprehension, but the new building did seem to be a big one. The plans did look suitably impressive.

The main thing I had not considered were the special measures necessary when someone needs to address a roomful of deaf people collectively. At the Auckland Deaf Society this is achieved by means of a large orange light to attract attention, and a raised podium on which the speaker stands in order to be seen over the crowd. I restrained myself from observing how clever this seemed, as it’s presumably not really any more clever than ringing a bell and raising your voice. But I was impressed anyway.

There’s been a big update to Google Earth today – it finally has new high-res satellite imagery for New Zealand. Christchurch looks great, although Auckland is still a bit patchy.