By Lucy

It’s becoming fall here. Different, but no mistaking it. The leaves are turning and falling, cluttering up the water dishes of the chickens. There’s a bite to the air. The cold, rainy weather we had this week feels like a normal fall week in Ontario.

The days blur as I look forward to leaving. There’s no mistaking it now, the anticipation.

“What does Thunder Bay have that New Zealand doesn’t?” Adrianne asks.

Humidity. It’s dry here, from the cold, shallow ocean. I’ve watched cyclones literally spin on a dime to go to Australia instead.

Thunder storms. They barely ever see lightning here.

Bug screens on the windows.

Central heating.

Cheap eggs.

Real snow.

Being able to drive my car.

Mostly, my friends!

I had a pleasant surprise on Monday morning, although it had happened earlier and I hadn’t noticed. See, I had been fully prepared to end up defaulting on the line of credit, because my ex wasn’t helping pay it off and I was tired of paying hundreds of dollars in interest and not getting anywhere near paying the principal. But happy day! At some point in February he had actually paid of a large chunk of the debt!

My only complaint is that the total between the 2 of us was 8’000 and he was supposed to pay half, but he only paid 3’500. Is that a bump and he’s gonna clean it up later? If it isn’t, should I fight him for 500 or just pay it when I can and move on? Decisions, decisions.

My income tax still hasn’t come in, but I felt so good that I jumped on plane tickets. Also, because the Soroptimists have emailed me about the itinerary for the conference and some events that are taking place during the week.

I was disappointed with the offerings for my tickets; flights from Invercargill to Auckland were in the ballpark of 500$. Which left me with the option of paying that, or paying 70$ to take the bus back to Christchurch and transiting through Aussieland again. Until I noticed one that mostly fit my bill; fly from Christchurch to Auckland, then straight to Vancouver, 1’020 total. Only a 2 hour layover in Auckland.

Perfect, or as close to perfect as I’m going to get! It does mean the Monday will be spent on the bus back up to Christchurch again, so I have to pass on the free jet boat tour, sadly.

Also, I am still broke…

A friend I was chatting to offered me their card, so I finally have a plane ticket booked, yay!

The funny thing about flying back to Canada is the time warp. I’m leaving Auckland at 1PM on Tuesday… and landing in Vancouver at 6 AM, on Tuesday!

Margaret encouraged me to visit for a few days, so I looked at tickets from Vancouver to Thunder Bay later on in the week. The cheapest tickets were on Friday, funnily enough. I know most people – well, most Canadians – think of Westjet for cheap flights, but I actually found the best deal with Porter. Plus they offer free wine!

Ok, that’s a plan. Fly out on Tuesday, spend 3 days in Vancouver, fly back to Tbay Friday night, spend Saturday and Sunday getting myself sorted (assuming I get called back to work for the Monday, which isn’t guaranteed).

At this point I decided to dance – it was supposed to rain all week, so jogging was out of the question – when I noticed a bird on the driveway. It was clearly hurt and I could see the dogs were starting to notice it.

Nope nope nope! I ran outside, grabbing the gardening gloves as I went in case it fought me. It was a brown Thrush, too big to grab in one of my hands. One wing was bent and bloody. Did it smack into the side of a building? Get attacked by another bird?

Once we were inside, I put it in the box I usually store kindling in and called Paul in a panic. He quickly pointed out that birds that can’t fly don’t live long, although there is a distinct lack of terrestrial predators on New Zealand so its chances are higher than most.

After a few minutes, the bird calmed down enough that it decided to explore. It smartly hopped out of the box and tested the limits of my bed. It looked totally at ease, which seemed odd.

Then it tried to fly and flopped to the ground, screaming and flailing its hurt wing.

Well crap!

My dad refuses to hunt. He’ll fish, but he says one day someone took him out to go hunting and he shot a rabbit, and when he heard it scream he was so shaken up he said never again. When I heard the bird scream as it if was a human child, that story came back to me.

I threw the gloves on and put it back in the box, but obviously I couldn’t leave it there cuz it would just start trying to fly again. I put it in my shower stall, which gave it some space and privacy. It also occurred to me that it would be a lot easier to clean when the bird inevitably had a bowel movement. I went and got a dish of water and a dish of chicken feed, which I’ve seen the finches eat so it must be alright for them, and closed the doors so it was dim in the room.

I could finally dance, so I did. I haven’t been on a jog in a week. I felt exhausted and sore all the time, but I’m feeling better now. In case people are wondering what kind of dancing I do, I usually just look up videos of people doing the Just Dance games on Youtube. I prefer the older games, I found the ones around 2016 and up focused more on posing and spectacle. And the duets/ group dances are wasted, cuz I can never find anyone to do them with me.

I heard the bird rustling around inside the shower. After I was done dancing, I started a fire and settled down to watch some TV. Eventually I noticed the bird was quiet and stuck my head in.

It had died.

Died of what? Shock? It had seemed calm before. Did it exsanguinate? There was some blood splatters around the shower stall, but it didn’t seem like enough… well, as if I know how much volume a bird can lose.

Now what do I do with the body?

I ended up putting it in the woods behind my cabin. I debated cremating it, but I wasn’t sure how well that would work. Probably better that it goes back to nature, anyway, feeding something else.

For dinner we had an experimental dinner, chicken in some sort of sweet caper sauce. I thought it was very Italian; a different starch (we had mashed potatoes for Gary) and some grilled zucchini would pull it together.

Tuesday was drizzly and rainy. Simonetta told me “welcome to England” when I came in.

My first task of the day was vacuuming flies.

The property is plagued every March with what Simonetta calls “cluster flies”. I have never heard of such a thing, but I have no desire to witness it again! Seeing literally hundred if not thousand of flies clustered together in the corners of the room made my skin crawl. We had a guest flee into the night because they emerged, and I can’t say I blame them!

Still, it was consistent, methodical work, out of the cold and rain, going around with the vacuum cleaner and removing all the little black carapaces.

My second task was to pit the giant pile of black peaches, to be canned. The peaches have dark flesh and release a red liquid when cut, o my hands and the counter were soon dripping with what looked like blood. Like I’d spent the day gutting fresh kills. With the pile of small, knarled pits, it looked like I was prepping a bunch of briarheart Forsworn (no I’m not explaining that joke).

Simo comes in, absent tidying the kitchen as she waits for the kettle to boil. “My mother used to say I was a cat in another life, cuz I was so clean.”

Are cats clean? They tend to groom themselves, but they make a mess of everything else. My mother used to compare me to a shark. Cuz I was very direct in my motions; no superfluous gestures from me, everything carefully considered and cautious.

I went ’til 3:30, partially because I like to complete tasks and partially because I had precious little else to do. I’m caught up on most of my shows. Caught up on my writing. Counting down the days ’til I leave again.

Here I go off on one of my rants about media again.

Firstly, the romance between Helly and Mark is the worst part of the show. Mostly because it feels so token – of course the two main white, heterosexual, cisnormative lead characters hook up. Where have we seen that before? But it also just doesn’t feel earned. Why do they even like each other? And that’s even before the mid-season reveal.

As I went into the second season of Severance, I had some concerns. Mostly that it would go the way of Helix or Fringe, both shows it reminds me strongly of, although depending on who you ask that is a bonus. Helix was a show about solving a zombie virus outbreak in the north pole, until a conspiracy was slowly revealed. There’s lots of slow pans across sterile white tile as blood is artfully spattered, mysterious and esoteric floors of the facility, unknown motivations and twists. The second season is about… your guess is as good as anyone’s, because no one watched it. Something something cult, something something south Pacific island… the second season was so dramatically different from the first season it felt like a different show entirely, and was quietly cancelled midway through to no one’s protest.

Fringe was a X-files styled show about a mysterious company with their fingers in everything (sounds familiar). You had Olivia, the no-nonsense cop with steely blue eyes, Peter, a jack-of-all-trades with a checkered past, and Walter, the former mad scientist and now dementia-addled old man. It had a “mystery of the week” format that also built up a grand reveal to a conspiracy… until the third season, when it suddenly switched to time travel and alternate universes. This is where my opinion differs from most people; most people preferred the third and following seasons of Fringe and viewership went up, but I liked the monster of the week format and stopped watching. Your mileage may vary.

Which led to my delight as I kept watching. You see, one of my favourite parts of Severance is the romance between Burt and Irv, because it is so out of the usual. Two men falling in love at an advanced age… you never see those things on TV! But then… spoilers – There’s a third man! And it’s Walter! Well, Walter’s actor John Noble, but still!

Also, as a seasoned motorcycle rider, why is Milchick riding a motorcycle when there is snow on the ground? And in a suit and tie, no less? He is not that cool, but I’ll bet he is very cold!

Gary was bothering Simo all morning. He bought a new phone, so of course she needed to set it up for him… the blind leading the blind. At one point when he was complaining about absolutely nothing, Simo said aloud, “You are hopeless, Gary. Isn’t that right, Lucy?”

“In my experience, most men are.” I replied, which got chuckles from both of them.

The weeds are yellowed and dying already. So much for 2 weeks later! I think Simo is just so unmoored from time by her daily stress. I know she thinks the dying yellow weeds look ugly, but with all the leaves on the ground you barely notice them.

The boys came back from Akaroa. Too cold and rainy to get anything done, not that there’s much to be done around the house.

For dinner we had corned beef. Simo was going to make us something special with eggplant, but since the boys were here she decided not to waste the eggplant. I love corned beef, although it’s hard to find in Thunder Bay, and expensive too. Why is it expensive? The allure used to be that it was a cheap option, no?

It was absolutely frigid when I got up Wednesday morning. I re-checked the forecast; low of 3 that night! Dear lord, that is the coldest temperature I have endured in New Zealand. And what a turn, it was 30 plus on Sunday! I’ll be stoking the fire all night for sure.

However, the constant rain has let up and changed course.

As I was feeding the chickens, I was serenaded by someone belting out tunes in the woodshed. It was Alex, tasked with hand-bombing the firewood from outside the shed to inside the shed, singing loudly with his headphones because he didn’t realize I could hear him. After I finished all the usual tasks, I ended up joining him because there is precious little to do around the place, it seems, although the first thing I did was grab some firewood for meself. He’s been burying the good seasoned wood at the back under all the green stuff!

I was sort of glad for the work, unsplit logs that have been soaking up rain for 2 days are not light, or gentle on your hands, so I viewed it as a workout and a headstart on my calluses. Soon the dry skin on my hands was splitting open and I had to take my hoodie off cuz I was sweating thru it.

Eventually Ethan joined us. Soon the three of us were in full tradie mode, yelling raunchy jokes and swearing and threatening to hit each other with logs. Ahh, I missed this! Both of them lamented that they’d rather be in Akaroa getting drunk and I had to agree. Me and Alex got into a conversation about mushys, during which we forced Ethan to admit he had never been on a trip, what a square. It was also funny to realize that between the three of us, I’m the oldest and I look ten years younger than both of them.

We stopped to contemplate getting one of the tractors to shove the wood closer to the shed and got into a debate of who Earl loves more. The answer, of course, is me, cuz I feed her every day. Ethan admitted that Gary was seriously considering shooting her back in December and he talked him out of it.

Ethan still won’t let me borrow his truck. I half-debated just taking it once he left for Akaroa. If I fill the gas up to where it was and put the keys back exactly as he found them, would he even notice?

Simo told me she’d drive me to the bike shop around 2:45, but I called the guy and he said he wouldn’t be dropping off the money ’til 4 or 4:30.

Ugh! I wouldn’t mind hitchhiking again, but the problem is that I want to ship the box of my motorcycle gear, which means walking it 3 kilometers out to the road in the rain. Not happening.

I took to Facebook to ask the local motorcycle group if anyone could give me a ride. Lynda replied offering to help me out, since she’s back in Oxford, so that was sorted.

My ballot finally showed up, a week after the election. That’s several days late and several dollars short. At least it’s nice, thick cardstock; it will be good firestarter.

Thursday was almost a write-off. Simo has blockaded herself in her office for 2 days. Since she takes possession of the house in Methven on March 21, she wants to have the house completely set up and ready to let on AirBnB on April 10th. Other than the one guest on Saturday, we haven’t had any turnovers for the better part of 2 weeks, and I get the feeling that she’s trying to invent work to justify keeping me around as opposed to actually needing me to do anything. She does need me for a few things – hanging out any washing, tidying the kitchen, feeding the chickens – but not 5 hours worth. So I got sent back to continue hand-bombing the firewood into the woodshed by myself for several hours. It’s a lot less fun by myself.

I had put my soap and shampoo bottle in the dishwasher cuz I was having a hard time getting them clean so I could refill them before I left. Unfortunately, the heat of the water melted one…

Lynda showed up around noon and gifted me a branded cow toy from her workplace. As she drove, she told me about her job, her new boyfriend, and her plans to go back to the north island. Cow breeding is serious business; they keep track of the teat length, how much food the cow eats and how long it takes to eat it, how much milk it produces and how long it takes to produce it…

Stopped to grab the rest of my money from the bike shop. Once she stopped at the post office, she took some of her flyers from work and went to hand them out at the local farming suppliers.

I had to buy a roll of tape because Simo didn’t have any and awkwardly tape the box shut at the post office. I also had to fill out a customs declaration, which I guess makes sense but I hadn’t considered when I had started throwing random stuff into the box. I remembered after I had finished shipping it that I had forgotten about a t-shirt I stuffed into the helmet because I wasn’t going to wear it. Hopefully they don’t send it back to me for that!

250 to ship! Well, 200, or 240 and change for a courier with a tracking number. Definitely that one!

The bank is only a Kiwibank. What limited options! A Westpac ATM that doesn’t let you deposit, a Kiwibank that won’t even let you use it if you use any other bank, or you can drive 45 minutes in to Christchurch.

My main problem is that I want to finish booking things. My bus tickets, my week in Invercargill, the flight from Vancouver back to Thunder Bay…

Well, I got everything else done. We drove back to the estate and I gave Lynda a bit of a tour. Admittedly I was in a down mood – I just wanted some money on my card so I could finish getting my ducks in a row. Had a late lunch, moved firewood for another couple of hours, and called it a day.

The good thing about the cold rainy weather is that it had subdued the cluster flies. The guest in the Stablehand booked for 4 days and we were wondering how long it would take for the flies to drive her up the wall, but there hasn’t really been any. Simo has been sneaking out to her cabin to suck up any flies with the Dustbuster. I can’t tell if that’s premium customer service or kind of creepy. Personally, if I were a guest I’d prefer she leave the Dustbuster there and I could handle the flies myself.

At 6PM – midnight Eastern Standard Time – my account finally registered that my income tax was in!

Yes yes yes yes yes! Cue punching the air.

Book the hotel, book the bus, book the other plane ticket back from Vancouver…

So that’s it, then, the next 3 weeks of my life all planned out. One more week at the estate, one week in Invercargill, a couple days on a plane and a couple days in Vancouver. Then home.

It almost doesn’t feel real. Back to Thunder Bay in three weeks? You know what they say… you can’t go home again. How will it feel?

The itinerary for the conference came in. I noticed some of the events are labelled as “formal” and require a skirt or dress, neither of which I have with me. I’ll just go to an op shop (what Kiwis call a second hand store) and get something and donate it back to them before I head out. I was also thinking I might buy a pair of nice shoes, cuz my shoes are looking a little worse for wear and there is a cobbler in Invercargill, and everything is cheaper here. Wear the op shop shoes while my shoes are fixed, donate them back to the shop before I leave. Why not.

I also booked a tattoo appointment in Invercargill. I have some time and money to kill, why not? It’s even cheaper than the shop in Methven. Not that that’s always a good thing, but I think in this case it’s cuz Invercargill is in middle of nowhere and fairly economically depressed, like Greymouth. I checked out their art and I like it better for the mask anyway, it’s garish. Majora’s Mask game had an art style of lurid colours that enhance the surrealism, the brightness symbolic of the fact the townsfolk are trying to pretend everything is fine as the sky is literally falling.

For dinner we had what the guests were having, or rather, I ate alone while Simo served the guests the same thing. Grilled chicken in a sauce, grilled zucchini, and some eggplant cut thin and baked in a crust of parmesan.

The power went out Friday morning. I got up and went to turn the light on… and it didn’t turn on. For a moment I was confused and thought I had somehow turned the light on wrong, and then it clicked that there wasn’t anything on the microwave either. Checked my phone… wasn’t fully charged. The power went out around 2AM.

I had another dumb moment of panic as I wondered how I would stay warm, then I remembered that I use fire to stay warm, not electric heat. There was still some glowing coals, so I coaxed the fire back to life and by then the microwave had beeped to indicate the power was back.

Simo was in a good mood Friday and shrugged off the power being out. All the guests had had dinner – both the woman in the Stablehand, and the two Finnish guys in the Granary – and had hit it off. They all wanted gin and tonics, and then the Finnish guys had noticed the bottle of Grappa and insisted on buying a glass for the woman to try. Simo called it “plying her with alcohol”, in a wholesome, non-sexual way of course.

I noticed that I’ve been getting better at rolling my R’s. It feels weird.

The Finnish men had checked out, so I went in to turn over the cabin. Partway through, I noted an odd smell and looked up; a fantail had gotten into the cabin and was fluttering around the ceiling, panicking.

What is it with me and birds lately? If it were my place, I’d just open the windows and doors and wait for the bird to leave, but of course Simo didn’t want that cuz it would poop everywhere in the meantime. So I closed the door to the room we were in and tried to “encourage” it to leave with a broom.

The main problem is that the roof is a gable, so the bird kept trying to flee to the highest part of the room instead of dropping down and going to the door. More than once, exhausted, it would drop down and land on the top of the open door, but fail to realize escape was right there.

I feel like the bird is a metaphor for my life. The obvious option is right there, but I can’t see it for some reason.

Eventually it left, and I wiped down the poop on the walls with Vim and went about my day.

There was lots of controlled burns today. It made me nervous. I suppose we just had some cool, wet weather and there was more to come, but burning farm waste is so… wasteful. Plow it back in to the field! Let the field fallow for a year. You have other options!

It’s so odd… Brisbane is getting hammered by a cyclone (hurricane) right now. But if you look at the weather map, the cyclone was heading right for us until it suddenly did a 180 and headed towards Australia. That’s why New Zealand is such a paradise.

I remember Brisbane flooded in 2011. Yahtzee opened his Minecraft video with “The waters around Brisbane got sick of waiting for everyone to come hit the beach and decided to bring the party to us.”

Since it was sunny to the defiance of the weather forecast, I let the chickens out.

In the mid-afternoon, I heard the frantic clucking of a chicken in distress. I decided I should go see what it was about – I’d already observed one chicken make the foolish decision to try and pluck some of Earl’s hair. I stuck my head out of the door just in time to watch Simo turf the one black chicken out the door, scattering black feathers everywhere, and laughing so hard she could barely catch her breath. Turns out the chicken had wandered inside, noticed the cats winding up to pounce, and tried to flee but discovered the hardwood floor was slick as ice. Cue the chicken running in place and shedding feathers in a panic like an episode of Looney Tunes!

I called the Ministry of Transport and told them I’d sold the bike. The call was actually really quick and straightforward; I spent no time on hold. They just needed my name, address, and the bike plate, and his name and address.

And that’s it. I bought a motorcycle, drove it around for six months, and sold it. I’ve officially completed the bike rider starter kit. Lynda joked that I should buy a 750 when I come back so we can do at least 110, but I’m not sure I’ll bother buying a bike when I come back. I might just restrict myself to renting a bike to do a loop of the north island. It was a lot of hassle

I spent most of the afternoon on voicechat with Jeremy. Ever since me and Rich blew up, I was wondering who would end up filling that gap. It seems to be Jeremy; I’ve talked to him on voicechat more than anyone else. Our relationship is very different, though. I’d almost refer to Jeremy as being like my little brother. Not just because he’s younger than me, but also because he has less life experience (which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a fact) and yet we have a lot of similar experiences. We watched the next episode of Severance together, had a long talk about the themes.

We also discussed our haphazard plan to spend the summer working on the game. We seem to have come to the same conclusion independently of each other; for working on a game, it makes the most sense if we are in the same room. And since at best I’ll be renting a room again and he has a “proper” apartment with a living room, it probably makes the most sense for me to just set up my PC in his living room and come over to work on it there. He even has a proper kitchen that he doesn’t share, so I’ll probably end up doing most of the cooking for maximum expediency; it doesn’t really make sense to go home and cook when it’s just as easy to double a recipe and cook enough for both of us. The only real concern is if I want to stream, but I bet we can work that out, or worst comes to worst, treat it like a day job and bring my rig home for the weekend. I’m not like Winter; my rig is pretty easy to tear down. Depending on how I’m feeling, I could even have a second cheap keyboard, mouse, etc and just unplug the tower and move that and leave everything else as-is.

I also sent an email to my “mentee Angel”. Quick plug here; when the article about Vincent first went live, I was approached personally by a member of an organization called Imerman Angels. They’re a non-profit that connect cancer survivors, or “mentor Angels”, to people who have just received a cancer diagnosis. You don’t get paid for it, but all you’re really doing it providing a listening ear to someone who just had their whole world turned upsidedown and wants to talk to someone who knows what they’ve been through.

I was really excited to join the program, because it lets me turn something negative into something positive. I’m multi-faceted; I can talk to people who have sarcomas, bowel cancer or other cancers of the digestive tract, cancer-related pregnancy loss, FAP or even stuff like Crohns’. I’ve had my current mentee for about 2 years, although I’m not thrilled with her cuz I don’t feel like I’m doing a whole lot. She doesn’t want to chat very often, although when I suggested we go our separate ways she said she was still enjoying it, so I don’t know. I suppose if it’s helping her that’s all that matters, but I can’t help feeling like someone else might need me more.

It’s wild how quickly my vitals came down. In the space of two days my resting heart rate went from 69 to 63. I know stress effects you blah blah, but it’s weird to see it in such a visceral way.

I noticed an article about “the man with the golden arm” who donates blood to make RH factor. I was surprised reading this article. For those who don’t know, if a woman is a negative blood type and she gets pregnant with a baby who is a positive blood type, her immune system will attack and possibly kill the baby. I am RH negative, so when I was pregnant I had to get the shots. I assumed it was synthesized; I didn’t realize the RH shots are reliant on one guy with special blood donating blood every single week! Good golly.

I’ve been in some kind of Ozzy Osborne mood. I feel really powerful now that I have a chance of actually getting my debt all paid of this year like I planned. Being broke and travelling is one thing, trying to pay interest while you don’t have a job is another. This is a real chance at a clean slate, starting again; new name, new town, new job, no debt. The next 10 or 20 years of my life can really, finally, truly be mine, to be as far out there as I see fit!

I don’t know what I’m doing,

All I know is…

I don’t wanna stop!