One Angry Monkey

Gisborne to Rotorua

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Thanks to the better night’s sleep I was marginally less reluctant to get out of bed. Marginally. It seems the Matriarch doesn’t provide coffee to the needy, only supermarket raffle tickets. We set out as soon as we were packed. I suspect she had spent the morning before I awoke planning ways to get me out before having that dreaded second cup of coffee. Not to worry. I still had 2 more bottles of V. God bless four-packs.

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Opotiki to Gisbourne.

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I awoke, disgruntled, to the smell of no coffee while the Matriarch enjoyed her cup of liquid wakefulness out on the balcony as she enjoyed her eighth smoke of the day. Although we were in what she refers to as Rastafarian country she was smoking ordinary cigarettes. Disappointed at missing what should have been a good chance to participate in keeping New Zealand green I rolled out of bed, landed heavily on the floor and began crawling towards the lounge area to make my first (of hopefully many) coffee for the day. That activity was made more difficult by the arm deadened by the weight of my body as I slept upon it awkwardly but by that stage nothing was keeping me from my caffeine.

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Thames to Te Kaha and back to Opotiki.

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For the first time ever I managed to delay the departure until a reasonable hour. 11am Friday the Matriarch and I finally left her delightful home a short way out of Thames. We were “On the Road Again”, as she so likes to sing whenever going anywhere, bound for a trip around the East Cape of New Zealand’s North Island. Despite having grown up in New Zealand I had never been on that particular journey. The Matriarch sought to fix that, thereby introducing me to what she feels is a spectacular length of coastline. I was happy with that idea, being a scenery junkie, and sat in the front passenger seat eagerly awaiting my first glimpse of New Zealand coastline for several years.

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Day two on The Farm and I’m apparently no longer on holiday. The Matriarch gave me some chores she wanted done by the time she returns home from work. Dutiful daughter that I am, I set right to it.

Job one was reattaching a few decorative things to her front deck. During a not-so-recent storm her dangle and her tinkles were damaged. That’s what she called them. I suggested a urologist might be better equipped to help her but she insisted and you do not argue with that woman. So I reluctantly accepted despite knowing that I am not exactly an accomplished repairer of wind chimes.

I acquitted myself fairly well, however, getting her wind diva re-hung with relative ease. It was the chime that would prove to be my downfall. What initially seemed an easy task, use some fine fishing line to tie the chimes to the ring from which they had once hung, proved to be a little more complicated than I had first thought. They had to be threaded using one long line per chime through a horizontal ring which kept them equidistant before being looped over a vertical ring and then fastened somehow. After a morning peppered with words I’m glad the Matriarch wasn’t here to disapprove of I finally managed to strip a twisty-tie of its plastic, wrap the wire around the improvised fishing line and use pliers to pin it as tight as I could.

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