today i talked to some people back home through instant messaging. nice. makes me feel more settled in. both my tax returns came in and my mom put them in the bank. nice! guess i don't have to start looking for a job for another week. heheeee i am looking though. i placed a call to the temp agency here. same company i was signed up with in auckland. they have a few offices around new zealand. at least in the populated areas.

since i have money now, we went to the warehouse (think a new zealand version of kmart and kmart here is like a new zealand version of target, haha!) and bought shoes that are decent enough for work so that we can go to the temp agency and get jobs! we also got a mop so we can clean the apartment and a rice cooker because i'm tired of cooking rice stovetop style. i just gotta say that the warehouse jingle is too catchy. it's in my head almost everyday. i'm gonna be singing this shit in america and everyone's gonna stare at me like i'm crazy.

the apartment is messy, but not so bad as to throw your hands up in the air. it's nice enough that you can see the potential of how great it could be. it just needs to get cleaned up and organized. the landlord left in a hurry i think and stuff things here and there. the kids that moved in that we are subletting from are young kids with hippie spirits. not exactly the kind to be clean and organized. we thought we'd take the initiative and give the place a fresh start.

we have rearranged our closet and the bathroom linen closet so that it is more space efficient. we took out all the decent towels and washed them so that we can all use them. i cleaned out the food pantry, just a couple shelves, so that the landlord's food is way in the back and made room for us to put our things. i'm not touching the shelves the other kids are using because i don't know whose stuff is what so if they want more room they'll have to deal with it themselves. they've hogged the fridge not by having a lot of stuff in there but just by putting their stuff on every shelf. so there's no space designated as theirs or ours. i'll wait on this one as we don't have much stuff in there either, yet. we also rearranged some of the cabinets that have dishes and glasses so that they are within reach and again, not taking up so much space. we cleaned out the utensils drawer because it was dirty. we cleaned the floors of the bathrooms (separate toilet and shower rooms), the toilet, tub, mirror, counter, etc. i mopped the floors of the bathrooms and kitchen. the living room still needs to be vacuumed though and some more linen need to get washed. just stuff like that. simple stuff. not backbreaking work. i think it's stuff most people would have done but apparently we're not living with people of that mentality. (when we started to clean, one of them asked, "are you cleaning?" "yes" "why?" i couldn't reply to that. because it needs cleaning. we told the other one that it's dusty in here and they looked really surprised. they didn't think it was dusty.)

cuba street has everything