Nothing To Do

The other day I was speaking to a friend on Skype. Once again, thanks Skype, I don't think I could exist without you. I am, after all, very far down under here in New Zealand.

Anyway, my friend asked how I could bear it: living on a farm with nothing to do and nothing ever happening. So, here is an open blog to all of you dreamers who think I am spending my time eating bon bons and watching the rain fall.

My days for the past two weeks since my stuff arrived from Arizona has been spent unpacking. That is when I am not checking the stock, checking the water troughs, hiking down to get the mail, doing the activities of daily living - cleaning, laundry, etc. I do still eat, wear clean clothes occasionally, etc. etc.

Unpacking is a real challenge. You try getting the contents of a 4300 sq. ft. house into 2 rooms. I am not being too successful at it. I have managed to scatter some of my furniture into the apartment in Auckland and the living room in the big house here. But what do I do with my books and dvds? I stack them so that I look as though I'm living in the midst of some weird second hand book store.

While that has been going on, I have also been preparing the 2 freezers for the home kill which we should collect next Monday. This has involved getting a tow hitch for the station wagon, borrowing Dave's flat trailer, moving all the meat to the house freezer and cleaning and defrosting the coffin freezer in the garage. Note: there is a lot of water when you defrost a freezer and this is one big freezer. It is also a deep freezer and I can't reach the bottom of it without falling in. My solution has been to throw towels into the bottom, wait until they are saturated, pull them out with a broom handle and leave them to dry on the fence outside.

The tow hitch was Yael's contribution and Dan borrowed the trailer. So I have not been alone in all this. I never am. I am mostly an observer of the continuing construction of the garden. Dan has now gotten to the point where he and a neighbour are putting in the planks around the perimeter to keep out the loathsome possums.

The porch is still not finished. We can't paint in the rain and there is plenty of rain. The big house is heated by a wood burning stove which means we need wood. Dan takes care of that. Helping fell a neighbor's trees and getting the trees to chop up. Which he does and then splits them and stacks them ready to heat the house. I, on the other hand, have a nice little electric heater and my efforts at keeping warm consist of pushing two buttons.

Oh, and did I mention that while all that is going on, we are having the a new load of gravel put on the driveway? It seems that our poor, misused driveway couldn't handle all the moving vans and turned itself into a pitted pond of mud. Yael had to gun the wagon and surge up out of the driveway while making a sharp left turn in order not to get stuck. Scared me to death! Alessia thought it was funny.

So the next time you think of me, whiling away my time reading or snoozing in my cozy little nook, DON'T. The chances are that I am busier that I ever was back in the States. And loving every minute. Well, most of them anyway.