Plans to make plans

08Oct08

The last week has been somewhat unproductive. Ella has been off on one of her random free-spirited adventures since Sunday and I’ve been dossing around the house helping with some of the housework and formatting Tom’s computer back to its former glory. I say glory – it’s actually a five year-old Dell. Enough said.

Last Thursday we went to Mint Bar in central Wanaka to see a reggae/dub/beatboxing act called Olmecha Supreme. Not a lot of the actual gig was witnessed as we had to make a flying visit to Albert Town halfway through the evening to rescue two of Ella’s friends who were stranded by Clutha River; their car battery had died while they were pulled up right by the river so we had to push the car up the bank before jump-starting it. The bits of the gig we did see were very good. The only bad part about the evening was how expensive drinks are around here, and the amount of cigarettes I smoked. I’ve only had three today, and two yesterday, so I’m doing quite well at cutting back.

My plans to travel the country have finally started moving along. I’ve signed up with an organisation called WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) which allows me to browse through a catalogue of host families who will feed and accommodate me in exchange for labour on their land. You can basically pick whichever farm suits you (there are hundreds all over the country) then give them a ring and ask if you can stay with them for a bit. In addition to this I’m going to purchase a prepay bus pass which will allow me to go anywhere in the country as long as I keep within the amount of hours’ worth of travel time I pay for. This will allow me to call a host family from where I am now, arrange to visit, bus to their area and work with them for a few weeks. When my time with them is nearly up, all I need to do is find another host family and bus over to them! My plan is to work my way up both the North and South Islands until I make it to Auckland – by which time Andrew will hopefully have made it over here.

In short: everything is falling into place! All I need to do is wait for my welcome pack to arrive and that should be here any day now. I’m so excited I could burst!

Tomorrow I’m going to hike up Mt. Iron with my aunt and then do some shopping. I’m also going to cook dinner which makes me a bit nervous because I’ve never really cooked for anyone but my mum and sister before. I’m sure it’ll be fine, though. I’m going to make my usual no-skill chicken, spinach and pasta bake I think, unless I have an epiphany before then and think of something incredible as an alternative. Chicken and pasta bake it is, then.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time making pointless things out of polymer clay this week. Ella and I spent two hours making a miniature feast consisting of a beef roast, a plate of sushi, an ice cream sundae, a glass of orange juice and various other delicacies. Unfortunately our guestimate conversion from Celcius to Farenheit resulted in the oven being twice as hot as it needed to be. The gory scene that followed ten minutes later involved a lot of melted clay, a ruined oven tin and a faceful of fumes. Needless to say, we were rather upset. I had another go at recreating some of the things I made on Monday and this time managed not to incinerate everything.

A tiny hotdog, at the request of Chrissy & Mike

Lollipop

There are other, prettier things, but I’m not going to post them here because one of them is a present for a certain Andrew I know. 🙂

Filed under: Day to day   |  3 Comments
Tags: activities, creativity, photos, planning, polymer clay, wwoof