What's happening? For my whole life I was OK living in squalor.  Not your 81 cats, TV hoarders type squalor but you basic 6 out 10, comfortable, gentleman bachelor type squalor.  You know.  The kind that you can still see most of the floor. Some where between Animal House and auntie Em's house after the tornado..But recently I've been getting a warm and fuzzy internal satisfaction from keeping a tidy home, having a closet full of neatly hung and clean cloths and dresser draws full of clean socks and undies.  I know.  It's like: "Who are you and what have you done with Jay? " Right? The fact that Helen is arriving in a few days has absolutely nothing to do with my new embrace  of civilization and recent adherence to the local health code.

I've now gotten to know some of my patients well enough to talk politics.  This area of New Zealand is pretty conservative, a bunch of farmer types,  who are not too crazy about Jacinda Arden their lefty lady prime minister and the "greenees" running the show up in Wellington.   But it seems that a lot and maybe most of the people down here have a pretty favorable opinion of Trump.  They just wish, as do we all, that he would stay off twitter and keep his big fat mouth shut.

The medical system here is a little wack. There is a huge shortage of Family Doctors especially in rural areas and so there is a heavy reliance on temporary docs coming in from all parts of New Zealand and from every English speaking country around the world some of whom only stay a few weeks  or months at the most .  There is absolutely no continuity of care and it takes months to get an appointment to see a specialist for any non emergent medical problem and it takes forever (6 month to years) to get any kind of non emergency surgery like a total hip or knee or hernia or gall bladder. Meanwhile people are hobbling around in pain.  It kind of gets me upset to see this but it is their system and I don't hear many people complain about it. If this kind of thing happened in the US there is no doubt in my mind that the people would rise up, grab their torches, pitch forks and other sharp, pointy but portable farm and gardening implements and march on Washington or Olympia or were ever needs marching demanding immediate gratification for all their health care wants.

Last weekend I drove about 100 miles south to a little town called Franz Joseph, named after some old king dude from Prussia and famous for a glacier coming down the valley above the town.  The town is like a little Leavenworth and everything is glacier this and glacier that but the glacier IS pretty cool.  The sign said the glacier is retreating up the valley - about a kilometer the past 100 years but also said that it has retreated about 18 kilometers the past several thousand years so fossil fuel CO2 is not the whole story.

I am kind of getting into rugby mostly because everybody down here goes nuts over it and  there are no other sports.  I've been to a few games and pretty much know most of the rules.  I even sometimes watch the "All Blacks" (like in the movie "Invictus") on TV but now the season is over and it's on to cricket.

Well, we are supposed to have a rare beautiful sunny day tomorrow so I am off to climb a mountain but just a wee small one this time and so certain death is unlikely.

Peace out