What's Cookin'?

Monday was Valentine's Day, of course, but more important, it was Ali's birthday. So I had an excuse to make a fabulous dinner and he had an excuse to buy me flowers. (Things we both do without much provocation anyway.) I stopped by a local butcher shop and picked up a couple of "Scotch fillets" (they looked a lot like rib-eye steaks to me). Grass fed, of course. What else would you feed cattle? the butcher implied. Crusted with sea salt, crushed peppercorns and mustard seeds, seared, and served with garlic-and-thyme-infused balsamic glaze. Along with rosemary potatoes, roasted portabello mushrooms, and zucchini sauteed with mint. We toasted our good fortune with a lovely bit of Australian bubbly (Rosemount, which was one of my favorite labels in the U.S., has an even bigger range available here), and finished with tiny slivers of fudge cake - topped with equally small scoops of honey and fig ice cream. Ummm, good thing we joined a gym last week!

Unfortunately, I haven't been up to working out much since then. I haven't had a cold for years, but the last couple days I've been feeling a tad under the weather. Then, today, whatever bug has been lurking in my system came on full force. It's just a sore throat & headache, really, but I've had no energy at all. On the bright side, it gave me an excuse to stay in bed all afternoon, reading newspapers and having Ali bring me tea.

In the news this week, aside from the "big" story - the Prince of Wales is still coming to Middle Earth next month (despite his upcoming nuptials) - NZ's jobless rate has hit an all-time (at least since they began keeping records 20 years ago) low of 3.5%. New job creation is, apparently the highest in the OECD - at least if you measure just right.

Since our permanent residency looks like it's just around the corner, we've both been looking at the jobs ads more seriously, and there certainly are a lot of them. I've recently applied for two positions: research grant contracts administrator and lecturer in commercial law. They're both at U of Auckland, which could help me get a work permit if they wanted me to start before our PR comes through.

There's a catch-22 situation here: without PR, you need a work permit to get a job. But you can't get a work permit without a job offer. And most employers won't make a job offer (or even talk to you), if you're not eligible to work. Universities are one of the few exceptions, since they need to hire internationals on a regular basis. I'm not going to hold my breath, especially for the lecturer position since I don't know much about NZ commercial law, but it was a good excuse to transform my resume into a C.V.

And if nothing else works out, there seem to be a lot of job openings for chefs.

Cheers,
Sandie