Start of my vacation in New Zealand...

After the initial ~35 hours worth of flying and airports (I swear the food gets worse every international flight) and accidentally letting my visa lapse, resulting in a fine from Finnish immigration, I've made it back to New Zealand. (Well, actually a couple of days ago, but I was lazy about updating.)

Fortunately I had an overnight lay-over in Sydney so I was able to get a hotel room for the night, have a shower, and sleep on a real bed. My schedule doesn't look so good on the return flight, though.

I'm having a fairly relaxing vacation so far, with the exception that I'm going to need to have some wisdom teeth removed. The dentist in Helsinki thought they would be fine, but considering pain is the body's way of telling the mind something is wrong, and after seeing the X-ray myself, I'm going with the second opinion. Hopefully this won't ruin my planned trip to Melbourne too much; apparently the recovery time is about a week.

I have been doing a little programming on personal projects, even though I said I wouldn't... :-) The next book that I want to read, Sleepless by Charlie Huston doesn't seem to be available in any bookstores in NZ yet. Perhaps I can pick that up in Melbourne; it's not worth the shipping costs for a single book from Amazon (UK or US) to New Zealand (although to Helsinki from the UK site is quite reasonable.)