Here is a pic of me from when I was about eleven with my trusty companion Toby and the farm (which had been recently converted to farm deer, hence the high fences).
A shot of my brother and feeding one of our many orphan lambs. There is a theme in all of my old photos… I always have animals with me! I love it that we’re typical kiwi kids running around barefooted, though I should point out it was probably August when this was taken which means it would have been still winter!
Okay, so more than once someone has found my blog with the search “girl biceps”. Why?
At the ripe old age of 31 I have been sitting back and thinking about the few quirky features of my childhood and at the cost of making NZ look like more of a backwater than it really is I thought I’d share a few stories.
I grew up outside of a small town around an hour south of Auckland (NZ’s largest city) so we weren’t exactly in the back blocks of beyond (or the “whop whops” as we’d say here). Until I was six years old we were on a party line for our telephone. This mean that anyone else in your group or party could listen in on your calls and you’d have to listen out for your specific ring to know the call was for you – our number was “266S” I think so the morse code for S would indicate a phone call for us. Not surprisingly I was probably at least seven before I learnt how to use the phone (oh so different from today where pre-schoolers probably have cell phones).
I can still remember the first time I went to McDonalds as it only opened when I was eight. My parents thought they were having a bad day at the restaurant as the food was terrible and decided never to go back. Little did they know that every day is a bad day for McDonalds food! We were banned from eating it (oh the wisdom of my parents, I love them for this) and I literally didn’t know how to order when I was a teenager and taken there on school trips!
We lived next to a vineyard and on a 340 acre sheep farm that we were free to roam around. There was a pond with eels that my friend and I used to go and catch and bash their heads to kill (and take home for dad to smoke, but they’d always taste distinctly like mud), a waterfall, hills to roll down and swamps to wade in. The vineyards provided many years of fun and a cover for a fair bit of naughtiness as a teenager, I dare say. Though I never stole wine like my brother did. Nor did I set fire to a shed of fertiliser either and have the fire brigade and half of the surrounding area turn up to put it out, he’s never quite lived that one down!
I used to get picked for school everyday on this old bus from the 1940s (well it looked like it was…) with an old bus driver who used to smoke a pipe the whole way to school – mmm passive smoking!
My parents grew and made almost everything! Dad was a fantastic gardener and we always had surplus that we bartered with our neighbours informally… it wasn’t uncommon to come home and find a large box of meat (mmm lamb) in our garage freezer for example. Mum made biscuits (cookies to you Americans) and cakes everyday and yummy cheese scones on Saturday mornings and homemade tomato sauce, chutneys, relishes to use up the seasonal produce. We used to complain that we didn’t get bought chocolate biscuits! And I’d also spend my weekends baking as girl too (yep, I really was cool but I think it significantly ups my marketability as a wife).
In late summer we’d go blackberry picking for wild blackberries after dinner and then mum would make amazingly yummy blackberry and apple pie with what us kids hadn’t eaten.
Dad would mow a cricket pitch into the paddock in front of our house (does this sentence need a translation? Paddock=field, cricket=weird and slightly boring game played with bat and ball) and we’d all play out there until it got so dark you couldn’t see the ball every night. I’d always have to field down the hill in the long grass when dad was batting as he’d hit it so far. Then there’d be the hunt in the long grass when you lost the ball, which always provided great challenge. Aren’t dads fun?
Every spring we’d get to ‘adopt’ an orphan lamb (one who got seperated from it’s mother, or the mother died giving birth) and raise it up by feeding it milk from bottles and giving it shelter. But the really, really bizarre thing is that we’d train them to walk on a lead like a dog and stuff and take them to school in October and have a competition to see who had trained their lamb the best. I kid you not! Sheep are incredibly stupid animals too so I still to this day have no idea how I got “Snowy” to do what I told it. And before you ask… yes they did sometimes get eaten. Especially the boy ones as their whats-its would get chopped off.
And we had fantastic ‘neighbours’ (closest one about 5 mins fast peddling on your bike away) that would always be there if you needed them to provide a cup of sugar, babysitting and general support.
As I get older I am starting to really appreciate the great, healthy, wholesome start in life I had and it’s dimming the memories of being totally bored as a teenager. I think I need to tell my parents how grateful I am for my early childhood!
I’m not sure where all my money has gone so soon after payday… but it has indeed gone. This has been an epensive month or so.
It’s cold and wet and miserable here! I ventured out to do the supermarket shopping tonight and drove home in the second hail storm of the day, nice when your shopping bag breaks as you’re trying to get groceries into the house! There was lightening strike this afternoon and we lost power for a while, so I had to burrow under two blankets for my afternoon nana nap on the couch until the heaer came back on! Brrr…. It’s the first real cold southerly blast of the winter and even though it’s cold here I still have memories of living further south where you get hit much worse by things so I can’t really complain. It’s not snowing at least!
In the absence of brain cells that actually work I thought I’d tell you these things about me…
What was I doing 10 years ago:
1. Doing my final year of my Social Science degree
2. Trying to get over a boy…. that took way too long by the way
3. Obsessively exercising – oh to be that size again…
4. Working part time jobs to try to pay the bills as a student and getting pretty stressed in the process
5. Living with two boys in a shared student house (or flat as we call it in NZ)
Five things on my to-do list:
1. Get better!
2. Lose weight and get fit again
3. Get more involved in ministry at church
4. Be more aware of those people in my world with needs
5. Get some goals for the next ten years!
Five snacks I enjoy (Can you tell I try not to eat gluten and dairy – my snacks are boring these days):
1. Sushi
2. Rice Crackers
3. Nuts
4. The tasty healthy bars in the States that I ate and can’t remember the name of…
5. Mangoes! I wish we could get decent ones here… maybe global warming will make it warm enough to grow them?
Five things I would do if I were a billionaire
1. Give lots of money to orphans in Africa
2. Make sure my parents were taken care of
3. Travel the world
4. Give more away
5. Help my church pay off all their current debt
Five of my bad habits (gosh I’m a great catch, you can just hear the men lining up to live with me…):
1. Procrastination
2. Not cleaning enough
3. Talking too much
4. Never putting glasses in the dishwasher and leaving them around the house
5. Leaving washing in a pile instead of folding it
Five places I have lived
1. London, UK
2. Sydney, Australia
3. Wellington, NZ
4. Auckland, NZ
5. Hamilton, NZ
Five jobs I’ve had (All before my “real” career started):
1. Melon picker
2. Door to door surveyor
3. Retail Assistant
4. Chocolate packer (I ate way too much and didn’t last too long in this job, thankfully)
5. Call Centre Rep
So that’s a bit about me…
I wish I had something interesting to say, but I just don’t. The brain fog rolls in at about 11am everyday and then I need to go home for a sleep. I feel like the connections in my brain are not quite working and focussing takes a lot of work. I lost the letter box key the other day and it was way too much for me to even try to think about where I left. Luckily it turned up without me having to pull the house apart! I don’t like what the injury doing to my personality and I feel helpless to change it. And I can’t book my holiday to the States until I’ve seen the Neurologist as I don’t want to have something go wrong and end up bankrupt as travel insurance won’t cover this.
Still at least I made it to work today.
Tonight I thought I was going crazy for a bit (or that the concussion was messing up my eyes or something) but we had this weird thing where all of the power in the house went to about half it’s normal strength. I was trying to cook dinner and the extractor fan wouldn’t go and the rice cooker took over an hour to cook my rice! Our neighbours had the same thing. I’ve never, ever heard of this before (and I used to work for a power company in my first job out of Uni).
Luckily it didn’t stop my friend Matt from doing a great job of colouring my hair (despite that he could hardly see what he was doing in the dim lighting) and I now no longer have a big stripe of dark roots in the middle of my head. I hate trying to grow hair – I’m sure by the time I grow it long enough to do something with it I’ll end up just hacking it off again! Getting a hairdresser friend to do your hair at home is great, but it did involve me climbing into the bathtub in a bikini to rinse the colour out, which is not a fun thing in the middle of winter! Still, it cost about a third of what I used to pay so it’s worth it.
I don’t have much to say at the moment and I know I should be resting my brain anyway. And quite frankly I’m scared of the randomness factor way too much. I have said things that have just made J laugh at me and not in a “you’re so witty and amusing way” but more like “oh dear, she’s mad and I’m not really sure I want to be involved with her” way.
I’m having to make a rule not to make any life changing decisions while this head injury thing is causing me grief and certainly not break up with anyone or anything like that. Or let paranoid thoughts take over. 
On a high note (sort of) I get to come home and sleep every day instead of working a full day at work though I have about a billion emails to clear, but my brain turns to mush by about midday everyday. It’s sort of nice to come home, but I’m trying not to think of the economic impact. I really need to sort out with ACC (our public accident compensation organisation – the organisation that stops us from sueing for compesation) if I can get money or whatever if I need more time off as I must be eligible. It’s only 80% of a maximum income that is less than what I earn though. Fingers crossed it will all clear up soon.
By the way, I’m the second person in my family to get a head injury as my dad has quite a severe one. I think I’m meant to go through this just to know what he experiences all the time. Fatigue is a hard thing to understand unless you experience it – it feels a bit long a fog of fuzziness rolling in your brain. I feel real guilty for my lack of sympathy in the past with dad, going to have to apologise big time!
And you might be wondering what the picture of my hand has to do with anything – well it doesn’t I just wanted to show off the manicure I had today. It’s the nicest thing I’ve had happen in a while!
Well I hit the big 3-1 yesterday and it was probably one of the worst days for a long time and definitely my worst birthday ever. I was woken at 6am after not much sleep by a text from an aunt wishing me a great day (yeah, not-so-much after you woke me up, thanks for that) and it just went down hill from there.
I was fighting nausea the whole day and a bad headache and I generally felt miserable and I had to resist the urge to hurl my phone out the window as person after person texted me to wish me a great day (hmm is there a lesson in that? If you call you can hear tone of voice and find out that it might not be such a good day at all).
Funny, but tragic. And I do feel like a 12 year old, but I got ‘birthday money’ so I think I can go buy a mountain bike with it, if my medical bills don’t swallow it up, so much for the accident compensation system here. I’ve spent over $300 I think in the last 3 weeks on my health alone, and an extra $300 on my car as well. I have to wait a month to get into the concussion clinic as well to be checked out, I’m not sure why it’s such a long wait but I know it’s rugby season so I can only assume it’s peak time for concussions.
I’m trying not to write much at the moment as I’m meant to be resting and not internet surfing. And I think I’m being a bit random as well so I’m scared of scaring or offending people. Has anyone else had concussion and how long did the effects last for?
I think I’ll stop writing now, but hoping the rest of my year goes better than the start.
