This is a very long entry

Happy Thanksgiving! Well, not so much for you, my readers, since you are not fortunate enough to live in the future like Alexa and I do.

They don't actually celebrate Thanksgiving here, though. I suppose the Kiwis are an ungrateful bunch, huh? Kind of like you guys. Yeah, that's right. I spend hours meticuously slaving over each post on this beautiful blog, and yet weeks and weeks go by without any appreciative comments from my readers. It kills me.

So, what am I thankful for this Thanksgiving, you ask? I'm thankful to be sitting in our new room. Yep. We moved! ...about three buildings over, to another unit in the same lodge. Ha ha. It may seem like a pointless move since we're leaving Wellington in eight days anyway, but it had to be done. An already bad situation boiled over and reached crisis point, and we realized we needed out of the building we'd been in.

For some background information, allow me to introduce Ornery (all names have been changed to protect the innocent… or something). Ornery, along with his wife Silly, was one of the other inhabitants of our building. Ornery and Silly are pretty much the most worthless people on earth--including dead people interred in the earth, because at least they're fertilizing grass in cemeteries.

Ornery is twenty six, Silly's a little younger, and they have three kids, no jobs, and a passionate affection for drugs and alcohol. The kids live with their grandparents during the week and only visit on the weekends. This is actually a good thing, though, since Ornery and Silly aren't fit to raise a bowl of sea monkeys, let alone three young children. But because they aren't burdened by the daily tasks most often associated with child rearing, a typical day in the life of this magnificent couple involves: waking up in the afternoon, getting high and/or drunk multiple times, playing loud music, making the kitchen filthy, and having at least one (but probably more) dramatic shouting matches. But Eoin, you ask, how do these lovely fellows afford rent, food, drugs, and alcohol if they don't have jobs? The answer is simple: welfare! Every week a neat little slice of the taxpayers' money gets sectioned off and sent to the dynamic duo.

Being the terrible people we are, Alexa and I would often call the landlord to complain about, well... take your pick: loud screaming, loud music at absurd hours, pot smoke, living in filth. Now, our landlord is a good guy. He tends to get things done. He just recently acquired these buildings, and he's been doing a number of renovations to improve their condition. He works quickly, too. One day the TV in our unit stopped working, and it was replaced in a matter of hours. Yet, for some reason, we have heard the phrase "This is Ornery's last chance" at least seven point three million times. That's an awful lot of "last" chances.

Recently we found out the happy couple enjoy reduced rent in exchange for cleaning the common areas in the unit: lounge, kitchen, and bathroom. This would be fine, except--wait for it--they don't clean anything! Shocker, right? Two weeks ago we heard another "This is Ornery's last chance," in the form of the landlord telling us he was going to have a friend who runs a professional cleaning business come in to handle the common areas from now on. If you're a smart reader, as I'm sure you are, I don't think I need to tell you what happened next. But just in case Chad's reading this, I'll go ahead and tell you anyway: nothing happened. Ornery was still in charge of cleaning and nothing got cleaned.

Occasionally, and I mean occasionally, they vacuumed and took out the rubbish. Ornery would piss and moan about people leaving empty toilet paper rolls in the bathroom because he had to pick them up. At some point he left a passive-aggressive note saying "Throw out toilet paper rolls when finished using!" Later on, in his renewed frustration (Alexa and I complained again and he had to pick up more toilet paper rolls, gasp!), he added, "stop being lazy!" to the note.

This was too much. Perhaps he was being ironic, but it's more likely that Ornery was just unaware of his own laziness. So I thought I'd help him out. After coming home from the bar where I'd had my first drop of beer in two months(saving money is a bitch), I peed, saw the sign, thought "ha ha I am going to write on this," and wrote: You stop being lazy and start cleaning the toilets properly since you get reduced rent to do so.

Whoops!

The next morning a shit storm rolled through the unit. Shortly after I'd gotten out of the shower and was preparing for work--so this was around seven in the morning mind you--Ornery was out of bed and raging around the building. The first thing I heard him say was "fucking Americans," after coming out of the bathroom, and then he started pounding on doors and demanding to know who wrote the note. At first he seemed set on the idea that Happy (another inhabitant, who, quickly summed up is a mildly-retarded-due-to-braincell-loss, but otherwise perfectly nice, alcoholic woman who got me the hotel job) had written it and proceeded to call her virtually every obscenity imaginable and threatened to smash her face in. He pounded on our door too, but I didn't answer. When I left for work he was off sulking somewhere else.

As I headed for the bus stop, however, Alexa called me and said that Ornery had just tried to break into our room. Apparently he knocked. When that didn't work, he tried the door knob. Quite rudely I had locked the door since Alexa was still sleeping and he found that it wouldn't open. So, like any reasonable person would do, Ornery slammed his massive 250+ pounds of lard into the door--twice!--in an attempt to break in.

Alexa called the landlord and by the time I was home from work, a new room was ready for us to move into. I suppose our landlord must've felt this particular outburst demanded an explanation about all the supposed "last chances," because he told us the following: he can't just kick Ornery out because of the kids, and because Ornery is losing his welfare. Apparently WINZ (welfare people) check into who actually needs welfare so it doesn't get abused, and unfortunately "being a fat, lazy fuckwit" isn't on the list of qualifiers. This still doesn't make sense to me, since the kids live with the grandparents and are much better off for it--when the kids are around, Ornery constantly screams obscenities at them. I've heard him call the one-year-old a mother fucker several times. Lovely, that. Rumor has it he's been in jail for beating Silly. He does, at least, have a parole officer. All I know is that if I was in our landlord's shoes, Ornery would've been on the curb a long, long time ago.

The funniest thing about Ornery and Silly is something Silly said to me a couple days after we first met. We were discussing our backgrounds, and Ornery mentioned that they were half-Maori. Silly said, "It's embarrassing to be Maori, though, because other Maori are on welfare and don't have jobs and get arrested all the time." Come on, Silly. That just had to be tongue-in-cheek. If anything, the other Maori are embarrassed of those two.

Disclaimer: this has nothing to do with them being Maori, and I'm making no racial assertions. In writing this, I don't mean offense to anyone--except Ornery and Silly, and I'd be surprised if even they knew how to use a computer. Also, they can get bent.

So that's that. It's for the best, I suppose. This unit is much, much nicer. It's a bit more crowded as its a two-story building, but the people are all nice, polite, tidy, and--best of all--quiet. It's a shame we didn't move sooner. About four weeks ago we were offered this room, but we said no because we thought it'd be silly to move to a new room so close to leaving Wellington. And yet here we are only eight days away from leaving the city. Ha ha, oh well. It didn't take much time to move our meager possessions.

Whew!

In other news, I recently reconnected with my cousin (on my dad's side) Megan. She lives here in Wellington with boyfriend Jeremy, and we met up with them at a bar for quiz night. It was fun, despite us coming in 4th place out of 5. They were also gracious enough to invite us for Thanksgiving dinner at their place this Sunday, and we'll be heading over for that as well. Even a kajillion miles from home, I'll still be having Thanksgiving dinner with family, so that ought to be nice.

And you might want to congratulate me... because I finished my NaNoWriMo novel today! But Still We Carry On is 51,976 words (or 186 pages) long, written by yours truly, and those are all the details you're getting because it's a huge, steaming literary turd. I'm actually embarrassed to publicly display even the title. Yuck. Maybe someday I'll try to edit it, or maybe not. But either way it's there, and I managed to write over 50,000 semi-coherent words in a month.

As you know from Alexa's last blog, or the one before it maybe, we went and checked out the Weta studios, home to all of Peter Jackson's special effects/make up/costumer/everything gurus. The studios aren't open for touring, but they did have a little room with a few props and other odds and ends, as well as a brief behind-the-scenes film to watch. It was little more than a glorified gift shop, but worth a visit nonetheless. We managed to take these pictures to satiate my mom's constant demand for more pictures of us. Check it:

UGH! Just kidding, the internet is being really slow right now. I'll upload the pictures when I get a chance.


This past weekend we finally made it to the Embassy Theater, the cinema where Return of the Kind premiered. It was my first time in a premiere-worthy theater, and it was insane. Basically it was a huge, fancy opera-house type theater, complete with curtains! But instead of actors on a stage when the curtains opened, it was an enormous screen. The chairs were also quite plushy (although this seems to be a standard in New Zealand), and the chairs had the names of different actors on them. Some old guy in front of us had Liv Tyler's seats! The names on our seats weren't any that we recognized, unfortunately. In New Zealand seats are assigned in a movie theater, like when you go to a play or a sporting event. Your minds are blown, I know.

That's all for now, as I'm off to one of my last nights at Domino's. Seven more to go! I'll try to update again before we hit the road, and I'm not sure about roving updates. I may be out of touch until we arrive in Queenstown.