Life as a Hobbit

  Rubbish - noun meaning garbage or trash.  Try substituting this word  in your every-day language, it is quite satisfying to say. Bin - verb.  "This is such a waste of time, I should bin the whole thing."  I don't think you can use it in entirely the same way as the verb 'trash'.  For example, you wouldn't be able to bin a hotel room, but I haven't really pinned down exactly why the meaning is different.   Munted - ruined, cracked, broken, busted.  As in "I dropped my phone and now the screen is munted." Honk - a bad smell.  So if the room stinks I believe you can ask "what honks in here?" Bog, dunnies - the toilets. Shout - to treat, such as “ I’ll shout us breakfast.” Silly season - the general chaos of the December holidays.

      Voting from overseas underlined my safe remove. I got to experience the whole damn year (+++++) of presidential campaigning from my southern hemisphere bunker, which means I didn't suffer through the 24/7 campaign onslaught. If a TV is on in New Zealand chances are you will be exposed to high levels of rugby or the afternoon quiz show The Chase.         Signing up to vote wasn't terrible but I did have to jump through some additional hoops and track down and fill out some forms to be seen as an overseas voter. A few weeks after I submitted those papers I got an email with a link to print my ballot.  The worst part was the confusing directions involving multiple envelopes (for my PRIVACY the instructions assured me, with capitalization that made things feel less trustworthy, like an 1800s religious propaganda pamphlet).  Why does multiple envelopes feel like the paper gown you wear during a pelvic exam, we can pretend but it is real...

Farewell Spit.  Photo courtesy of Robin Capper, Flickr. Farewell Spit, which the Maori called Onetahua, meaning "heaped up sand" or "sand formation."  The spit was considered the birthplace of whales - and a place they returned to in their death, which explained why there has always been a high incidence of whales beaching themselves on the landward edge of this sickle of sand that protects Mohua, Golden Bay.  It isn't well understood why these beachings occur, perhaps the structure of the spit and the currents within it messes with whale sonar?  Case in point, on my tour out into the dunes we passed the carcass of a whale.  It was the body of a male sperm whale that had washed ashore at the end of October.  Our guide thought it would probably take 6 months before it became fully skeletonized.  Fewer creatures live on the ocean side of the spit which faces the rough Tasman Sea than the more protected bayside, so if it had washed up on the other si...

     I looked back at my bingo card in September and thought I would give an update.  And then I had a blistering gallop of visiting friends, family, and general touristing for the next two months and suddenly it is November.  Oops.  So now I am finally going to reassess my goals, though I am in the last stretch of 2024 at this point. ☑ Hobbiton Botanical drawing ☑ Ref roller derby ☑  Aurora Australis ☑ Knit NZ wool hat ☑ Host a dinner ☑ Have a friend visit me in NZ (hi Rose!!!) ☑ Learn some te reo Maori Feed an eel ☑ Get to New Zealand ☑ Climb on a glacier ☑ ID 10 Kiwi birds + 10 Kiwi plants ☑ Birthday! ☑ Dip in both S. Pacific Ocean + Tasman Sea Swim 100 K (62 miles) Blog weekly ☑ Befriend a Kiwi ☑ Take the train ☑ Solo hike ☑ North Island Monthly tarot ☑ Have a NZ pet friend 12 creative projects ☑ Get a bike ☑ Co-living (hi Windrose!)      I have...

  My most-seen photograph on Google Maps was taken less than 48 hours after I arrived in New Zealand, a picture I took of this wildflower garden in Hagley Park  A botanical bounty, a myriad of queen anne's lace, bachelor's buttons, viper's bugloss, and a sole red poppy. And here are the same grounds in late winter on a foggy day misting with rain: Everything started turning leaf-gold about 8 weeks ago, and the greening pace caught me off guard.  As I saw an increase in pictures of carved pumpkins and bare treelimbs shared by friends in the Northern Hemisphere I saw new flowers budding.      Winter here wasn't ever really winter.  Wet, sure, a bit chilly, on the rare occasion even frosty, but there were pink blossoms in the trees in what should have been the Southern hemisphere equivalent of January so I never felt the tug of seasonal depression that I associate with winter.  What, no need to hibernate? Putangitangi shelduckling A few weeks later t...

The relative rarity of truly entitled patients and families is such a delight.  My ward doesn't have an ice machine, and we also don't carry straws.  These would be mortal sins at any other hospital job I have ever had, and yet here nobody has ever made a big deal out of it. In New Zealand I have never had a patient scold or scream at me for pouring them "hot" (aka room temp) water.  Sure, people like their tea in a particular way, but they've been so sweet about correcting me if I get it wrong. Work-life balance has been a buzzy phrase since even before I was a nursing student (more than 15 years ago, how did that happen so fast?)  The emphasis is always on the individual, though, fix your own burnout, make sure that you balance your work and life.  I have hope that when the irreverent Gen Z nurses are in charge, their attitude towards work being for the paycheck can ripple through the culture. It’s so healthy.  Calling-schmalling. Sure, I'm drawn to hel...

    I am sometimes very caught off guard by the broad influence of American culture in New Zealand.  Case #523: I was walking along the Otakaro riverbank when I stumbled upon what I thought at first was a  hideous piece of industrial modern art.          This is my least favorite kind of modern sculpture, something that looks like it could almost be a fun piece of playground equipment but is clearly covered in enough knobbly bits and rusty nails that it isn't meant to be clambered on.  Unless you buy into a BigPharma tetanus booster conspiracy. The surface has no bright paint, no interesting materials, no evocative shapes, just an industrial abstraction of a corkscrew.      Luckily, I am a compulsive plaque reader, so I went over to study up on this bit of rusty steel getting in the way of the native plants and giving the pigeons another place perch. The first plaque reads:  A TRIBUTE TO FIREFIGHTERS  This sculpt...