God Bless Rainy Days!

Greetings friends

Today is very rainy... which is great! Brian and I just got jobs working at a huge vineyard--Montana (I think you can get their wine in grocery stores in the US). It was recently bought out by someone else and is now the biggest wine company in NZ-- I think. Or at least its one of the biggest. Top 2 or 3. Anyway, that means there is paper work and lots of procedures and stuff that big companies have. But the pay is pretty low-- min. wage per hour for the first week or so and by "contract" it is 50 cents (NZ) per vine. That means you have to do about 200 vines a day to make even minimum wage. That is a bit easier in my job-- wrapping (word) but harder for pruning, which is Brian's job. It was supposed to rain allllll week. But it only managed to rain on our first day (we left at 11:30--- 4 hours of work) and today. Wednesday and Thursday had weather quite lovely for working. Cloudy but warm with a little sun here and there. Today's reprieve is much needed as my right hand is KILLING me. The weekend will be so appreciated. I am going to read as much of Catch 22 as I can today and tomorrow before HARRY POTTER arrives at the Warehouse where I have preordered my copy. Yay.

The Montana vineyard is not far from the yurt but we have to get up and be gone just after 7 when it is only just barely getting lighter. I am a big fan of the cups of ramen for my lunch. We have morning tea and lunch for 30 minutes each and have 2 kettles of boiling water. There aren't pans to cook with like at the yurt so the cups are nice and only need boiling water and 5 minutes--yesterday it even came with a collapsible fork! There have only been 2 other people wrapping with me this week and Thursday I was the only one all day! It was a bit lonely but I don't really talk to anyone except during breaks because we are usually far apart. I am averaging 1 vine in 2 minutes (if it is a difficult one). Today I went a bit slower because my hand hurt and took a while to warm up and move properly. The trunks of these vines are huge... much bigger than the vines we see at the yurt vineyard. They also have ideally 4 canes (pruners leave 5 so wrappers have some options for the best way to do it or if one or almost all break off!) instead of 2, and we don't have to do anything with the buds.

We will probably work at Montana a few more weeks (til the work for us is done there) and then do some traveling via W.W.O.O.F. (Willing workers on organic farms-- you stay with a family or whatever for a week or so and have free room and board in exchange for your work on their farm or wherever it is).

We got NZ bank accounts on Monday, our EFTPOS (ATM) cards came in the mail yesterday and we are ready to spend our Kiwi bucks!

This week was also my birthday! Being so far from home I decided to celebrate in both time zones. Really it just meant that people were telling me happy birthday via email and facebook after the date in NZ was already July 19. But any way to extend my use of "but it's my birthday!" to make Brian do the dishes and whatever else I didn't want to do was appreciated. We went to the HP movie after work and then went grocery shopping. It was a lovely birthday.

That is about all for now, time to curl up in a sleeping bag and read all day!
Cheers!