notes from the road

I can’t believe I complained about losing my memory card. The next day my whole laptop broke. I mean, really, what the flipping heck? And as I was riding the bus from Dunedin to Timaru, where I am now, I was mentally constructing my next blog, sans the ability to type it out, while listening to my i-pod and wouldn’t you know it my i-pod froze. No worries though, because I have the code to unfreeze the son of a gun in my laptop…. err, wait. Well at least after the battery dies, it will usually work when I recharge it… on my laptop… huh…

Add on to this that the past few weeks I have had pretty much no opportunities to call home. Meaning it seems that God was maybe kind of trying to isolate me all alone on the other side of the world :/ (Don’t forget about me guys!!!)

OK, so obviously you are reading this article right now which means that 1. I bit the bullet and bought a new memory card, and 2. my laptop is fixed. The guy at the computer store said I might need a new mother board. HA. Try some tape. Yep, I have indeed taped my laptop together and presto, good as new… kinda.

So now the good stuff, because believe me, the past few days have been WICKED cool. I’m living in a sheep shearing shed! This is sooooooooooooooooo stinking amazing. It’s pretty much a big metal shed with a kitchen, living room, 2 bedrooms, a bathroom, and a room for shearing sheep. The doors and “windows” (cut out squares in the shed that you close at night with wooden shutters) are huge and open up to amazing views of the farm. I wake up as sunshine pours into my room through the window. I also pee in a makeshift toilet that you have to use a small hose to “flush”. You cannot get more rustic than this. I cooked meat in a pan over a wood burning chimney that keeps the shed warm on chilly nights.

The “WOFing” that I did at hostels before is honestly a lame excuse for WOFing (albeit a fabulous way to save money). To refresh your memory – WOF stands for working on farms. The practice is worldwide (yep, even in the states ladies and gentleman) and you work on a farm for 2-3 hours a day in exchange for food and accommodation. Carolina and I are staying on a small farm with some cows, sheep, and a farmer named David. David manages to work for a grueling 2 hours a day (sarcasm), so the 3 of us together tend to put in a solid 20 minutes of work each day. Work means that we feed the cows hay from the back of a tractor. And drive around the farm on a 4×4, which I’m told we’ll get to herd sheep from in a few days. This is AMESOME. I get giddy in bed when I wake up because this is just so cool. If farmer David was just a little hotter and little younger – I might just trade in my US residency for a low key life on the farm because this feels a bit like heaven.