Meanwhile...

Well, it’s been a while since I wrote anything, and that has mostly to do with the fact that I haven’t felt very well the last couple of days. Laziness can pretty much cover the excuse department up until that point!

Let’s see, last Sunday I went back to the same church I went to the week before for their “potluck service,” which was fun. Everyone brings food, and they do some singing and reading and such before the meal, and then discuss the readings while eating brunch, and then finish up with communion afterward. I haven’t seen anything like it before, but I liked it! I got to talk a lot with Pete and Shelley, two residents who I’d met the week before, and then was invited to Ann and Murray’s (another super wonderful couple from last week) for lunch. Of course, we were all still pretty full from the potluck, so I think inviting me for lunch was just an excuse to be their friendly selves and have me over to their house. So I spent the afternoon with them and their daughter and her husband (who’s from Canada, and who’s accent put me right at home) and their two kids, all very nice. Ann assured me that if I ever needed a place to crash, or if I wanted to move out of the shearing complex, I could stay in their spare room rent free, which was so generous and out of the blue that I almost couldn’t believe it. She’s the sweetest sort of grandmotherly-type lady, and I think she misses having her daughters at home to fuss over. I told her a bit about how I thought we Americans are sort of naturally suspicious of people’s intentions, and how I’d been caught off guard a bit by the Kiwi’s “I’ll go ten miles out of my way to lend a hand” attitude, and she laughed and said that she thought it had more to do with living in Dannevirke out in the backwoods of the North Island, as it were, and that everyone just knew everyone else, so when a stranger popped in it was pretty exciting. But they dropped me off at the complex that afternoon with a repeat offer of a room if I wanted one, and I said I’d be in touch.

Oh, and another thing about Sunday; the reading was the bit about not worrying about what you’ll eat or wear, and the birds of the air and the grass of the field etcetera, which made me smile because the verse at the end, “do not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will worry about itself” had been running around in my head all week as I worried about where my next job would be. Thanks for the heads up, Big Guy.

So Monday was rainy, which meant no work, as the shearers won’t shear wet sheep because the lanolin in the wool combined with moisture can give you boils, which, I gather, aren’t too much fun. Still, I think I would have taken the boils over the work we did from 6am to 5pm on Tuesday and Wednesday, which was crutching (shearing the wool around the back end of the sheep to clean them up before the REAL shear) about 4000 lambs, seventy-five percent of which had flystryke, which means they were covered in maggots. My stomach’s turning now just thinking about the smell. Sufficed to say, it was not pleasant, and combined with my once-monthly superhuman sense of smell, I thought I’d really have to call it quits by noon on the second day. I made it through, though, and that night I dreamt about maggots and didn’t get a whole lot of sleep.

Thursday, or rather, yesterday, dawned rainy again, so no work, which was just as well as I was laid up in bed most of the day with a stomach ache. I figured it was the aftereffects of the day before, but it kept getting worse and worse until by 9pm I couldn’t stand for more than a few minutes without feeling like I was gonna keel over. This meant I missed out on the only opportunity to go with the guys to the Golden Shears competition, which is the grand nationals of shearing competitions, and I was pretty bummed out. I felt a bit more lucky, though, when the van that had left came back at 10:30pm with Lewis having driven pretty darn drunk the whole way back, so I’m nudged into believing my stomach ache had a bit of purpose to it.

I woke up this morning still not feeling top notch, but my stomach’s a lot better now, and I even went for a short walk this afternoon and had two small bowls of oatmeal. No work today, tomorrow or Sunday, it seems, while the Golden Shears is going on, so Wednesday turned out to be my last day of work without my even knowing it! Good thing I got a couple of pictures, which I’ll try to put up soon.

Tomorrow is the last day of the Golden Shears, and I’d really like to go, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to swing a ride there, and a ride back with someone who isn’t “pissed” as the expression is here, is even less likely, and so I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll be able to see it at all. I really want to, but I guess this may be something that I’ll have to miss and hope that I’ll have another opportunity someday.

And now for future plans: On Sunday Ann and Murray are picking me up for church, along with all my stuff, and I’m moving out of the complex into their place in town for a few days now that my stint at PMS is over. I’m meeting with the owners of that dairy farm I mentioned on Monday to talk things over, so we’ll see where that goes, and if it doesn’t go anywhere I’ve already had two offers from people at church with possible positions, so there’ll be that to check into as well.

Part of me is itching to get on the road again (I know, I know, wasn’t I just saying I was tired of living out of bags?) and head down to the South Island, but hey, I have all the time I want for that, so I may as well just cool my wanderlust for a bit. In the meantime, I have to recuperate from this stomach virus, so I’m glad to have a nice place like Dannevirke to rest up.