12 November              Quarantine day # 7

The walls are starting to close in a bit  but they're not bleeding (yet) so I guess I'm still OK.  NZ TV is OK but no Law and Order reruns,  Jepardey is on only occasionally and only one old Big Bang rerun a day.  My HBO doesn't work so all I have is Netflix and the voices.  Not The Voice but the voices.  You know.  Everybody knows.  Everybody hears.  Everybody sees!  Everybody!  Everything! All the time!  Right now I'd happily trade my favorite child for some tin foil and a colander.

 Of more concern is that my self imposed  socially acceptable time for my first drink of Scotch of the day has gradually drifted  from after 5 PM to after sunrise. Fortunatly I have an adequet supply so no worries there. But drinking a lot is a good thing because a full bladder is one of the few  things that gets my fat lazy ass of the couch.

 They let me outside for 50 minutes twice a day.  There is a small place to walk (21 laps / mile - 556 .5 laps / marathon)  Meals are delivered in a brown paper bag left at the door to my room three times a day.  The food is OK but I swear hand to God I will never ever take for granted Helen's miraculous  cooking skills again.  I miss my women.

 7 November 2020  - Quarantine day # 2

Good news.  My first covid test came back negative so I got the coveted blue bracelet of life rather than the red bracelet of death they give to the cov-pos losers.  Now that I am in the elite blue bracelet crowd I get to go outside in the "yard" for an hour or two a day but always under the watchfull eyes of the NZ army folks.  Check out any good prison movie for an idea of what life is like for me.  

After just one day in quarantine I can tell already that maintaining any socially acceptable level of personal hygiene will become increasingly optional.

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 6 November 2021 - Day 1 of Quarantine

........... "Hello"..."Hello"...."Can anyone hear me?"........."Check..check"...."1,2,3,4"... "1,2,3,4".........."When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to disolve"......."Is this thing working?"....."we hold these truths to be self-evident"....."Is there anybody out there?"....... "damn computer!"......"1,2,3"....."Double, double, toil and trouble.  Fire burn and cauldren bubble."..... "Does anyone hear me?..... "Eye of newt, toe of frog; wool of bat, tongue of dog."....... "Anybody?" ....."Anybody?"......... "Nobody?".........

"I think therefore I am."......"I blog therefore you are."..... I hope.

Since you are reading this you either must already know that I am back in New Zealand or you are so far down the internet rabbit hole that you stumbled on it accidently in which case: get off you fat ass and go outside.

Yes I am back in New Zealand; The Land of The Long White Cloud.  I'm contracted to do the usual doctor stuff  from 22 November to 22 March back in the Greymouth Clinic; the same place  I worked last time.  Greymouth is an OK town but it is always hurting for doctors and so,  being the great humanitarian that I am, I agreed to help out.  Greymouth is a very blue collar working man's place but, despite what its' name suggests, it is in a beautiful area.  On the NZ west coast and sittng at the mouth of the Grey River as it flows into the Tasman sea there are  hundreds of miles of wild beach north and south with alternating long streaches of open sand and gravel and  cliffs of fantastically eroded rock formations stumbeling  into the sea. all bearing various amounts of gold for those clever and patient enough to find it. Greymouth backs up against the Southern Alps which is what Kiwis call the pretty significant mountain range that runs north and south down the west side of the south island cutting Greymouth and the west coast off from the rest of NZ and the world.  Between the coast and the mountains is a nearly impassable temporate rainforest with giant big fern trees, huge and always hungry man eating carniverous plants, vines that reach out and grab you as you try to get by and moss covering everything, all dripping from the rain which either just stoped or is still falling which are really the only two weather options.  And I'm talking a real Tarzan / Jurasic Park type of forest not your weenie Disney Land faux forest.  Anyway,  the atrocious weather (google " average anual rainfall in Greymouth or Hokatika, NZ") and the physical isolation from the mountains has kept the population of the west coast from Westport in the north to Haast in the sound (200 miles) at around 30,000 hearty soles (about 1/2 of whom live in Greymouth) and the west coasters perfer to keep it that way.

Actually right now I am sitting in an airport  hotel room in Christchurch on day 1 of the 14 day covid quarantine isolation which is  required of everyone entering New Zealand.  While I'm not looking foreward to the next two weeks, with the help of  the two botles of top notch  single malt Scotch that I bought in the duty free shop on the way down I think I'll make it.  You might want to check back later to follow up on the status of my liver and to see if the deep psychological scars caused by two weeks of sensory depravation are permenent or will fade with time and counceling.  New Zealand is pretty strict about all this covid stuff.  They've almost totally cut themselves off from the rest of the world which is easy to do if you are in the middle of the ocean and far way from everythng.  Good for fighting covid but  really bad for their tourist centered economy. But like I said NZ has very little if any covid and to keep it that way EVERYONE who comes into the country has to be vacinatrd for covid, have a negative covid test upon departure, have a visa indicating they are coming to NZ to meet a critical need and spend two weeks in Quarantine upon arrival and so here I am.  

The 14 hour flight from LA was tolerable but upon arrival in Auckland there was the covid screening, then customs and then the biohazard screening then another flight to Christchurch and then a militay escort by a bunch of NZ army dudes to the quarantine hotel and then here's your room and shut the door and don't come out for two weeks.   It was an ordeal and I think I would have been entirely justified if I chose to  bite somebody's head off but Kiwis are all so damn nice and friendly and helpful that, try as you might, you just can't  get mad at them.  It's like a whole country of Mr Rodgerses and, democrat or republican, Q-anon proud boy or antifa anarchist,  stones or beatles, extra crispy or original recipe;  I think we can all agree that  it's an against the law felony hate crime to hassel or  in any way diss Mr Rogers.

The words to the Greymouth / West Coast official anthem:

It rained and rained and rained
The average fall was well maintained
And when the tracks were simple bogs
It started raining cats and dogs

After  a drought of half an hour
We had a most refressing shower
and then most curious of all
A gentile rain began to fall

Next day for one was fairly dry
Save for one deluge from the sky
Which wetted the party to the skin
And then at last the Rain set in.

Lately there has been a lot of trash talk going on in the comments section casually dismissing  my complaints about the weather down here. Implying that I am some kind of a mama's cry baby weenie boy which anybody who has ever met me knows to be mostly totally untrue.  And you know who you are.  Yes it's you Bob and I am calling you out on this. Why just a few weeks ago there was such a monster storm here that the driftwood was pushed up to within 50 yards of my house which is two whole blocks from the beach.  So as a now  hardened "West Coaster"  did I hunker down whimpering pitifully  in my soon to be swept away shoe box house?  No indeed.  I waited for high tide then drove 30 miles up the serpentine coast road  through the raging deluge to Pancake Rock Park where the land  juts way out into the Tasman Sea just to watch huge waves explode on the lime stone cliffs then travel through a network of underground sea caves to series of blow holes causing towers of sea water geysers to erupt 100 yards or more inland.  Of course I froze my ass off but a man's got to do what a man's got to do.   This is the same thinking - or lack there of - that convinced me it was a good idea to quick run to the all picture widow  glassed in 7th floor sky bridge at St Lukes Hospital to try to catch a glimpse of the killer tornado tearing up Cedar Rapids, Iowa 35 years ago.  Also last week I googled the wettest place in New Zealand and it's not Milford Sound which everybody says is so rainy but a place called Cobb River about 20 miles south of Greymouth were 2 years ago they had  an officially measured 18 meters of rain.  18 METERS....That's more than 50 feet of rain in one year.  I rest my case

OK  I'll admit that the weather has been a little better the last few weeks so I was able to do a little fly fishing.  If I say so myself I got pretty good at it.  I had tons of practice  perfecting my casting technique without the periodic annoying interruptions of haveing to take fish off the line.  Next time I think I'll work on the catching part.

Also last weekend I drove way down south to spend two days on a boat cruising through Doubtfull Sound which the locals say is much better but also less accessable than the more popular Milford Sound.  The weather was unusually clear without a cloud in the sky the whole trip.  The sound is more accurately a fjord and we wound our way through it's narrow passages for 2 days amoung snow capped peaks out to the Tasman Sea and back.  Very cool and very beautiful. I even went in for a 1 and 1/2 second jump in swim (peer pressure sucks) We saw seals and peguins and my favorite - Kea parrots along the way. On the way back to Greymouth while drving past Franz Joseph Glacier the weather was still unheard of clear so I got a helicoper ride up over the glaiciers and around Mt Cook.  The sun was almost painfuly bright on the new fallen snow.  It was stunningly beautiful.  We landed on the glacier for 1/2 hour or so.  The snow was too hard to make snow angels but I did start a snow ball fight.  Then on the road again back to Grymouth and gathering dark clouds and rain as I entered town.

This will likely be my last official entry from New Zealand.  Tomorrow I am leaving Greymouth to drive to Christchurch to ship my priceless dirty clothes and other very important stuff  home, transfer all my hard earned money back to the states (the 63 cents US per NZ dollar is killing me) and sell my trusty car,  The next day I'll be jeting over the Tasmin Sea to Australia for a few days on a boat out of Carins scaba diving on the The Great Barrier Reef then, God willing and the creeks don't rise, down to Sydney to do some sailing and catch a performance at the Syndney opera house Then on that long miserable 18  hour minus one day flight to the US and, with any luck at all, back to the welcoming bosom of my loving wife who hopefully has yet to realize that her life is so much better with me on the other side of the world

But stay tuned for one more blog from Australia and then after I get home on the 25th  or so I'll down load all my cell phone and camera pictures for all your oooing and ahhhing pleasure.

Go Goats!

Dr Jay

HELLLOOO ! Is anybody listening?  Every couple of weeks I sober up so my hands are steady enough to type my heart out updating my blog but I've not gotten any comments back in months.  The accolades better start pouring in pronto or all you readers (if  any) I say are literary free loaders casually enabling my moral, psychological and hepatic decay.  I know (hope) none of you could live with yourselves if that happened and there'd be  all mannor of gnashing of teeth with boat-loads of people jumping off cliffs and stepping  in front of speeding trains and dogs and cats sleeping  together and general mass pandemonium and we wouldn't want that now would we?  So look down.  You see all those buttons down there with letters on them.  You push them to make words.  Good.   That's right.  Now try a vowel.  Very good.  Try:  "The quick lazy red fox jumped over the huge brown cows."  Excellent!  Now; " Compared to Dr. Jay's blog, Shakespeare bites.'"   By George I think you've got it.  Now you know what to do.

That reminds me: After a recent night of immodest farewell revelry for Steve; my last best mate in New Zealand and all round partner in crime, I woke up wondering which is better;  Having a night to remember or having a night you can't remember?  So now both Steve and Fergal are back in the UK and there is no one left to lead me astray and I like being astray but it's a place that is hard to find alone.  My life here is not totally lacking in social contact,  I am the token American on a local pub quiz team.  The team name is; "Let's Get Quizzical" and we are doing pretty well.  Most of the questions are about the obscure minutia of New Zeland geography, pop culture or sports (which All Black player broke his leg in the 1983 1/4 finals match between NZ and South Africa or what did the captain of the 2011 women's Christchurch net ball team get on her 3rd grade spelling test) but about 1 in 10 questions has something to do with the US (name the  13 original colonies, How many Apollo missions landed on the moon (6)  State capitals, which NFL team has lost the most superbowls (Buffalo Bills) and to which  NBA team was Kevin Durant recently traided (the Nets - "Go Joe-3") ) and stuff that any red blooded American should know.  Our team has 5 Kiwis and me but a mix of men and women young and old (me) so we have most of the bases covered and we won the last two fortnightly quizes and @ $180.00 / victory divided by 6 x 2 =  $60.00 to me. Not exactly bank but not bad for just knowing a lot of worthless stuff.

The weather down here has been atrocious. It's rained every day for 6 weeks! And between the constant gloom, everybody's  British-like Kiwi accent and the coal that lots of peaple still burn down here to heat their houses I feel like a grimy character in a Dicken's novel.  The abysmal weather has also put the kibosh on all my out door activities so while yes I now have more time to write I have  less to write about.

Down the road a bit come September I will be spending a few days in Austrailia looking around but  mostly just to say I've been there and put another pin in the map.  Then from Ausie on to the US if the Trumpmeister will let me back in.  The very first thing I'm gonna do when I get back is order my Tesla extended range, dual motor, charcoal grey, tasteful chrome wheels, all decked out for full autonomous driving model 3 and then spend some VERY quality time with my women ........hmmmm....... on the other hand I can drive any old time but astray is a hard place to find so maybe the Tesla will not be  absolutely the  first thing I do when I get back.

God Bless Us Every One