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

So yesterday  Helen face times me in a hot toot to sign some on line tax papers,  "Down load and print and sign them and i-phone picture them back to me ASAP so we don't go to jail," she says. Well, cheap ass that I am, I never bought a home  printer and call me psycho-paranoid but I'll be damned if I'm going to download all my financial info onto an unsecure clinic computer just to use the clinic printer. What to do? What we have here is your basic garden variety dilema: on the one hand risking finacial ruin at the hands of some pasty white, cheetos crumbed, stinky, bearded fat hacker dude living in the his mother's nasty dank basement in Moldova or back to jail again to share a 10 x 20 foot cell with, who would immediately become my new main man,  Leroy "Big Willie" Brown (dibs on the top bunk Willie)   But hold on..... I'm not your average idiot.  In fact, if my last blog is to believed, I am a shoe in for a Nobel Prize for MacGyver stuff.  So  I bring up the signature page on my lap top and with a felt tip pen sign on the computer screen over the signature box on the e-form.  Snap....Snap with my i-phone camera and  bada-bing bada-boom send the pics off to Helen.  Seriously folks sometimes I even amaze myself.  Now for a quick wipe of the screen with a damp cloth to remove the.......hmmmm..... Let me see that pen again ....."Alexa...What does indelible mean?" ....Oh.....  Hey, I bet some nail polish remover would work but shoot!~ I forgot, I'm a rough and tumble football watchen beer drinken beef eaten gas passen manly man who would  rather root for the Patriots to win the super bowl while jumping up and down doing the chearleader in close clap wearing butter cup yellow skin tight designer jeans than be caught with nail polish and ergo nail polish remover.  There must be something around here that would take off.....wait for it...wait for it.....does my epiphany light hurt your eyes?  I reach into the pantry and pull out the super special bottle of gin I bought down by Wanaka in a snooty little distillery right next to a 1/2 mile long bra fence (another story for another blog) So glug, glug, glug an ounce or so into a glass and dip dip in the glass with a paper and wipe wipe ....and I smugly sip the rest of the gin as I sit at my spotless computer and book my tickets to Stockholm

Things have sure been lonely since my main man Fergal left 3 weeks ago.  I do have to admit my morning headaches and shakes are better but the voices are starting to come back so what's up with that?  And last week my other main man Steve took off for a week of R&R on some South Pacific tropical paradise.  Finding a bit of gold now and then helps a little but things got so bad that I frequently found myself wandering the empty evening streets of Greymouth, stopping in front of the sports store and gazing longingly at the volley ball in the window. "Willllsonnn;" I'd whisper making sure he could read my lips and then quetly turn my collar to the cold and damp and doing a classic Bogart, disappear into the night fog moving softly in on little cat feet. Ok, I am saying it straight up:  anybody who doesn't think the ending of "Casablanca"  is the best movie ending ever is a damn communist or at the very  least a leftist symapthizer and to all of you I say a pox on Bernie Sanders.

To make matters worse the wheather around here has been abysmal.  It's rained every day for three weeks straight .   And windy and cold? Oy vey!  But lemons into lemonaide - the other day I was cooking so, as usual, I opened the front door and the big glass slider doors to the back deck hoping to get a little cross breeze to keep the smoke alarm from going off. To get the full picture you have to understand that I live in a shoe box with a one parking space sized (and no not an oversized  handicapped spot either )"great" room with combined kitchen, dining and living areas with two tiny bedrooms and a Lou down the hall   Well as I said it's been pretty windy around here so instead of a nice gentle smoke clearing breeze I got an everything less than 20 pound... oops...I mean 9.0909090909..... Kg clearing  typhoon of biblical proportions.  Disaster?  Perhaps to the untrained eye but I noticed that most of what blew out the door were things that Helen would have waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat night mares about... I'm talking about your trophy sized, dust bunnies, your odd bits of incriminating evidence of previous indiscretions, last week's shopping list, your museum quality fossilized left overs sitting on the counter from God knows when and the occasional  pair of unredeemable undies lying on the floor to  name a just few.  Well I  know a good thing when I see one so now whenever  there is a nice brisk northerly wind I do a bit of tidying up........  It's nice when things just seem to work out for the best.

Saving the best for last I was back in the states last month to seee my number one main man Benjamin my absolute favorite grandchild.  He is the bomb.  During the week I was there I could see that he was getting stronger and more alert every day.  While we are  all stuned and relieved that Rachel and Bryan are turning out to be such great parents I am concerned that they are not spoiling the little guy enough.  I guess I am going to have to step up to the plate myself on that.  Also while face timing with me the other day Rachel was whining about how much a nanny will cost when she goes back to work in Sept. So I started thinking.  Why not rig up the phone so Ben is always on face time or better yet a bunch of super high def phones like the "Trumen Show?"  That way Helen and Margaret can take turns or more likely fight over who gets to gaze lovingly at him remotely hour after hour.  And if they see a problem?  Easy peasy quick phone Rachel who,  just a few steps away in her home office, could in a flash put some random multibillion dollar international bank merger deal on hold and quick like a buny run to change a diaper or someting.  And when he goes mobile?  What you never heard of go pro?  So what if both Helen and Margaret are too busy with something to watch the Ben meister?.....Like that would ever happen. .....  Just out source the job to some tech support dude in some third world country........I ask you;  In what universe do I not deserve a Nobel Prize?  I mean really! Elon Musk watch and learn!

                            More Kiwi Slang        U.S. Meaniing         Used in a sentence


Stink One :  An expression of disappointment 

Come Right / Be Right:  It will be OK.  It's not a problem   -   "Bro.  Oh stink one.
                                              Your leg is totally buggered but no worries.  Dr. Jay
                                              will make it come right"


Skint:  Broke, No Money  -  "But dude, I'm totally skint and I can't afford
                                               Dr, Jay's outrageous but totally justified bill."

Skull:  To drink an entire beverage in one gulp without a breath  -  "Bro.  Maybe if
                                               you skull this bottle of Tequila your
                                               buggerd leg will come right."


Squizz: To have a look

Twink:  White Out  -  "Bob.  I had a squizz at your pictures and you need to have
                                    emergency surgery on that leg.  It'll  cost $25,000 US"

                                    "But Doc, I'm totally skint. I can't  afford it."

                                    "Ok.  Hand me that twink and for 50 bucks I'll touch
                                     up your X-rays."


Sprog:  Small Child  -

Torch:  Flashlight  -  "Honey, It's after midnight and the sprogs are lost in the
                                   swamp again.  Where's the torch?"


Tog:  Swimsuit   -  There should be a committee of frat boys to decide who
                               gets to wear thong togs at the beach.


Wobbly:  Temper Tantrum  -  "When I told Mr. Witherbee that it was time
                                                 for another colonoscopy he spit the dummy
                                                and had a major wobbly right here in the office,"