After Helen and I finished doing smoochy face on facetime on St Valenitne's day last week she started in griping about the cold and all the snowing going on in Chelan this winter.  To me the pictures look like a winter wonderland.  "Honey,"  I said  "Let go of  those bad vibes and open your (Shoot, that sun burned spot on my back is still soar. How could ALL those beach volley ball girls miss the same spot with the sun block?  Stupid English / Swedish translater app.) heart to the wonderous beauty of nature."

She also tells me the people around town have been giving her the stink eye and throwing some hate on her because I haven't been doing my blog.  Well. to all you loyal complainers .....know this.....Helen is not the boss of me.  She did, however,  text me this morning saying no more phone se... "romance" until I get going on my blog so here at my computer I sit on a sunny summer Saturday (say that five times fast) in Greymouth.

Our little clinic depends on an endless phalanx of temporary docs from throughout the English Commonwealth: The U.K., Australia, Canada, South Africa, India,  to man the battlements against disease and pestilence but we got our first doc from Ireland last month:  Fergal O'Driscoll.  Everyone else at the clinic is here with a spouse but Fergal's main squeeze decided to stay home for his 6 months here so we inevitably fell in together and are now two wild and crazy guys around town.  In fact I'm pretty sure most people think we are an "item."   Now I'm not a homophobe or anything but in this case I AM a homodenier - Fergal and I are just drinking and carousing buddies but sometimes the  categorically false and totally wrong and unfounded perception of our "relationship" works to our advantage.  In the pubs all the young ladys think we are a cute couple and so let their guard down.  Now you understand that Fergal is Irish and has the gift of gab to the max and so, to any random stranger, within 3 minutes Fergal becomes the best friend they never knew they had.  It's kind of sad actually.  With their shields down and between  Fergals' verbal magic and my boyish good looks we hardly ever have to roofie drinks anymore

I ran a 1/2 marathon last weekend in a town about 60 miles up the coast.  I was shooting  for a time of 100 minutes  but came in at 110 minutes.  I am pretty sure I could have run 13 miles in 100  min but everything is metric down here so the race was listed  as 22 kilometers which is supposed to be the same  but just sounds longer.  Damn metric system.  Anyway, on the way back we; Fergal and I, picked up two kids hitchhiking around NZ one of whom was Liedy; a 20 somthing young lady from France.  Well, I'd been preparing for this moment for donky years and after they were safely in the car and  with my best ever inspector Clouseau impression  I said:  "En moi confiance je suis un medecin" which I thought ment: "Trust me I'm a doctor."  but judging from Liedy's reaction it's apparently  closer to:  " Would you like some candy and pictures in my widowless black  van little girl?"  Fergal immediatly used his powers to make everything righteous and we talked all the way back to Greymouth about Brexit, the yellow vest thing happening in France and argued about weather  French or Italian wine is better.

I have been in country now for six months and I was thinking the other day what do I miss most about home...other than the obvious...MY WOMEN....and the kids and my FJ-40 (Toyota Land Cruiser) and the dog and my Chelan buds and my FJ-40 and the turtles and my house and my FJ-40 and my tractor....but other than that I would have to say the magic kitchen and the magic laundry room are what I long for the most.  Gourmet meals would magically appear and the dirty dishes would just vanish overnight.  My dirty cloths - and I am talking some pretty groatty undies - would just disappear and then reappear clean and nicely folded in my closet and drawers. Yes,  I definitly miss that a  lot.  It just does't work the same down here.  It must have something to do with being south of the equater.

FYI  two more quirky things about New Zealand;  No lie but it is a federal law that every employer here must provide to every emplyee all the wherewithal (tea, milk, sugar) for tea time in the afternoon and this is the only non-third world country with no capital gains tax and since I am a tea drinker and don't like  paying taxes this place is looking pretty good.  So the question then is; for how much or, more accuratly, how little can I be bought and enticed to stay here forever by the siren's song of low taxes and a free cup of tea every 4 PM on the dot?  Well it all comes down to physics....and just regular physics not quantum physics so don't have a cow.  As you know Rachel is due to deliver our first grandchild ( a boy... little Charles Jay I'll call him ...no matter what his birth certificate says) sometime around the Ides of March.   My expectation is that once born, like a super massive black hole out in space,  little C.J.'s grand father event horizen will extend out light years beyond all reckoning and once crossed neither I nor even light itself can slip the unresistible pull of his drooly, poopy gravitational field. Which is to say between little C.J., MY WOMEN and my FJ-40 I will be back in the states sometine in September.  I also feel it is my sacred duty as a grand father to teach little C.J. all the bad habits that took me a life time to aquire and perfect.........but then again if they throw in free scones with afternoon tea??hmmm?? Recalculating...Recalculating.

Now for some housekeeping info.  I live in shoe box of a house about 100 yards from the Tasman Sea.  I can hear the waves thundering on the beach all night which is kind of a relaxing lullaby (See Helen, at least My ears are open to natures wonders) and I generally sleep like a rock.  Laura and her hunk of burning love Matt are coming to visit in a few weeks.  I plan on testing their mettle on a three day hike on the Abel Tasman Coast track; a pretty flat walk along the north coast of the south island and so, as far as metals are concerned , aluminum will sufice. That of course assumes we  avoid the quicksand and the crocodiles.   Sarah and her sig. other Andy will be coming in April .  To them I will show no mercy and we will be going on a gruelling 3 day mountain adventure along the Routeburn track down in the southern alps of New Zealand. All I am going to say about that is that "Routeburn" is Maori for "Donner." I'll let you know.

So that's it for this installment of my blog

I think I'll give Helen a call.