Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: Tooled Up for Food, in reply to Amy Gale,
Wrangling multiple monitor boxes (excellent volume for linear dimension!) through the necessary succession of airports is no fun for anyone, but that just makes it more likely that you’ll cry and then they’ll feel bad for you and waive the excess baggage fees.
Oh, we're going to be shipping stuff home, it's a certainty. It's less the cookware and more the games and books (oh, the cheap, cheap books) and my fabric stash and...well, I draw the line at furniture. Fortunately, I may be on a student stipend, but I had the good sense to marry someone who has moved on to a Real Job.
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Hard News: Tooled Up for Food, in reply to AdamPope,
The Spong & Co No.2 coffee grinder is a cheap-o antique from eBay. They must have known how important a good grind was back in the forties.
My parents have a wall-mounted ceramic coffee grinder which my sister and I have already had a low-grade dispute over the future ownership of, despite the fact that a) this is unlikely to be a question for decades to come, and b) I don't even really drink coffee. It's just that cool. There's a little glass container that catches the grounds and everything.
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We had to get rid of all our kitchen stuff when we moved to the US, unless it met the criteria of "I will be overjoyed to get this back in five years". As we were just coming out of uni, there wasn't a lot of stuff that qualified - except the gorgeous set of ceramic mixing bowls we were given as a wedding present, and our one really good kitchen knife (something like $70 on clearanced sale and I don't regret it one little bit.) Occasionally I still dream about getting those back.
Being somewhere for 5 years is a bitch cookware-wise, though, because it's long enough that you'd like some nice stuff to work with, but short enough (and far away enough from home) that I don't want to pick up too many things I can't bear to part with. We have mostly compromised on "nice enough to last five years", but the cast-iron frying pan has seasoned up so nicely I might just have to take it with us. And the digital meat thermometer with the three-foot cord. And the Pyrex mixing bowls. And....oops.
“Don’t buy a stockpot,” said Fiona as I went out the door. “We don’t have anywhere to put it.”
“But it would be great for, um, parties,” I insisted.
”Please don’t buy a stockpot,” she repeated as I went out the door.
“[Mumble],” I called back, cheerily.
I have had that conversation - on Fiona's side - and its results are haunting our coat cupboard.
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Southerly: Getting There is Half the Fun, in reply to Danielle,
There are only a few reasons I keep renewing my US passport, but the most important one is that I don’t ever have to experience immigration like you guys.
The last immigration officer I dealt with told me off for responding to the question “Where are you going?” with the name of the airport I was flying to, which is apparently a totally unreasonable answer to that question in the context of an airport. (OTOH, he did not send me to secondary processing like they’re doing to every international student right now because Boston bombings something, so I guess I came across as sufficiently chastised.)
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Southerly: Getting There is Half the Fun, in reply to Paul Campbell,
If you (anyone) happen to still have an I94 stapled in your passport contact the US consulate now and put things right before you find yourself in some future immigration limbo
I don't, as it happens, because I went to Canada last month and re-entered under the new all-electronic system. (I'm living in the US doing my PhD, to clarify.) But for long-stay visas - like my exchange visitor visa - they were absolutely in use up until two months ago. I think they stopped requiring them for the Visa Waiver Program (i.e. what every Kiwi visiting for a week or two will be visiting with) but they were definitely in use for actual take-up-a-whole-page-in-your-passport visas in the last three years. (White, not green, though.) If I were back in NZ permanently and had managed to get out with one still attached I'd definitely want to contact the consulate, though.
It seems immigration is entirely dependent on how tired the particular officer is on the day.
Pretty much, in my experience. Which is what makes every border entry so nervewracking.
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Southerly: Getting There is Half the Fun, in reply to Paul Campbell,
One of the downsides of having no exit immigration formalities has been that historically the US got it wrong a lot – that green thing stapled in your passport that the airport checkin people would take from you was supposed to do it – but the airlines apparently sometimes lost them – without a stamp in your passport you have no proof that you’d actually left (and NZ don’t stamp NZ passports when you get home) – there’s way too many stories of people being detained as they arrived in the US in transit or for a while because the US records say they’re still there as over stayers – for about 6 months they replaced that system with kiosks and now I guess they figure they’re watching you way too well to miss you leaving. If you do leave the US over a land border DO make sure you get your passport stamped, don’t just speed through that closed border checkpoint at 2am
Oh, the I94. They just turned that into an electronic record a couple of months ago, but until that point they certainly hadn't got any better with them - I got a severe telling-off last year for not having made sure mine was taken away before I left the US. We'd been checked in in Boston by a very distracted lady who perhaps forgot to take them because we weren't getting directly on an international flight; my pleading with various other people (airline crews, boarding staff for our flight to NZ in SFO) to take them was met with the advice that it didn't matter and I could keep it. It did, of course, matter. Only the US would decide it's each traveller's personal responsibility to make sure the US government knows they've left the country.
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Southerly: Getting There is Half the Fun, in reply to Jake Pollock,
As Danielle said, SFO is pretty good. Dallas/Fort Worth is great if you’re heading south and can fly through Sydney. Plenty of the internal hubs have a lot going for them – Detroit is nice but weirdly long; Denver is awesome (cowboy hats!conspiracy theories! Chicago O’Hare is awful; Washington Dulles is fine and has a five guys; Atlanta is okay.
Adding to this: Seattle isn't bad (I may just have Stockholm Syndrome after the number of hours I've spent there) and Boston is a bit small for its volume. Las Vegas has pokies everywhere, which is frankly just creepy. New York-JFK was designed by Kafka. My only real memory of Minneapolis-St. Paul is running through it, because it's *huge*, but the blur rushing past looked okay.
My current real beef with air travel into/in America (apart from all the usual) is the way that at some neighbouring airports - Montreal, in my case - they put you through immigration/customs/etc for America before you get on the plane. As you can imagine, this can impact somewhat the required arrival time at the airport. They don't tell you this when you book your flights. I didn't quite miss my plane, but going through US immigration on a tight time deadline is pretty much the definition of "stressful".
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Southerly: Getting There is Half the Fun, in reply to David Haywood,
Oh God, I've also enjoyed the pleasures of Continental and made the same vow. It's rumoured that Continental used to send their staff to Aeroflot for customer service training.
I have good news! Continental no longer exists.
I have less good news. They merged with United. If you book a flight to the East Coast of the US through Air NZ, your internal journey will be with United. Plan accordingly.
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(There was even some swears and fanny jokes, if you had the patience to parse the footnotes. You’d be surprised how many did.)
My working assumption with Shakespeare is that if it's meant to be a punchline and I don't get it, it's probably a sex joke. (Not a bad working assumption for humanity in general, at that.)
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to John Armstrong,
Saute half a chopped onion, two or three cloves of chopped garlic and as much chopped fresh chilli as you like (2 whole chillis is about right for most people)
Lack of Inspiration Hack: Whenever you get home from work and find yourself staring at a fridge full of food without the slightest clue what you can be bothered making, chop up an onion and some garlic and start it cooking in the cast iron frying pan. By the time you're through with that, inspiration will usually have emerged - sauteed onion and garlic will go in nearly any dish you care to name. Chilli, curry, pasta sauce, risotto, casserole, quiche...
(If your kitchen doesn't contain onion, garlic, and a cast iron frying pan, either a) you haven't been shopping in weeks and it's time to give up and go get fish and chips, or b) I don't want to know you.)