Ice, White & Blue

Redhead Amok in Antarctica

Fantails and Tomtits and Wekas Oh My!

I have a date to be at the Queen Charlotte Wilderness Lodge again this year, this weekend sometime in fact. But until then I am out of Pav's and wandering the West Coast and Golden Bay with Ruby Deux (her full official name, since Pav's Subaru was called Ruby, too), taking 3-4 hour hikes here and there into the bush and up the coast, often followed by the trio of birds most human-friendly in NZ: Tomtits, Fantails and Wekas. Spotted a family of wekas with two tiny fluffy cautious babies at Kohaihai Beach at the start of the Heaphy Track. Squatted to pee with the gazes of two tomtits and a fantail on me as I disturbed the insects they want from my passage near Scott Beach on that track.

I'm in Motueka now, pondering my next step. I may visit the other end of the Heaphy and wish I had the time to walk the entire 4-6 day hike. I'm also within spitting distance (in a high wind) of the Abel Tasman. Lovely area, but not my beloved West Coast. Very agricultural.

I'll post more when I hit Queen Charlotte.

posted by: coldwish at 12:33 | link | comments (4) |
nz 2007

Startled Weka

During our dagging in the crush we attracted the attention of a few wekas, those curious bold flightless birds found all over the West Coast. For the most part they stayed outside the crush, where I wrestled with sheep, attracted by the kicked up mud and the possibility of worms and insects therein. But on our last ewe, the black-faced single-horned girl we dagged practically in the dark at the end of a very long day, two of the wekas came in. Wekas are very territorial, needing a metre or more of space between each other, some being more aggressivce than others.

Deeply involved in dagging this last ewe--carefully clipping perilously close to skin in the falling dark, the ewe's head in my lap, me on my ass in the shit and mud, Erin (Pav's partner) crouched and dagging closely--I am suddenly being climbed by a weka come charging from around the blind corner of the crush. The weka stops one foot on my knee, one on the sheep's belly, less than 10 inches from my face between me and Erin. Erin's head pops up, I'm eyeball to eyeball with this weka with the shocked look on its face, frozen for several seconds. The sheep lifts it head to look at this new sensation, shocked. Erin & eyes also look shocked. For a few seconds shock & startlement radiate between we four, three species among us.

The weka focusses on my face, realizes her predicament and turns back to run into the face of the chasing weka, who'd stopped short much further away. Erin and I burst into insane laughter at the quartet of expressions. We laughed hard enough to have tears in my eyes and pain in my gut. The poor sheep. She struggled in fear of the laughter.

That night I lay down in the back of Ruby, exhausted and satisfied, only to close my eyes to the image of that startled weka. I fell asleep laughing.

posted by: coldwish at 17:45 | link | comments |
nz 2007

Grass Maggots

Pav has Arapawa sheep. They are not your rotund fluffy white sheep, the pale maggots who infest NZ's green landscape. Arapawa are thought to be the descendents of the sheep that were released, or escaped, from the ships of Captain Cook in the late 1700s, one of the first Europeans to "discover" NZ, onto Arapawa Island in the Marlborough Sounds on the northern tip of the South Island in the Cook Straits between North and South Islands.

Arapawa sheep have many great traits, not least of which is a near complete immunity to fly strike, a killer of many sheep. Flies lay eggs in the dags of sheep, the maggots burrow into their skin and eat the sheep alive from the inside.

Arapawa also shed their own wool, thus not needing the once or twice yearly nonsense of shearing. They are very independent and need little care, and he keeps them on his land to keep the area clear, and to keep them from being sold for meat.

Their appearance differs from the stereotypical grass maggots you think of when you think sheep. They are often dark or pinto-spotted with white faces or spots, the ends of their tails (he does not dock them, docking is done for fly strike prevention) tipped in blond. Some are golden coloured, others dark brown. Close up, upturned, their wool is gloriously multi-hued, varying from sheep to sheep. There is rich dark chocolate brown, pale Marilyn Monroe platinum, brick red, Arizona desert hues, golden sunny wheat and rich amber ambrosia. I imagine a life garbed in these natural wool colours, knit into  luscious garments soft and warm. These are not colours found in the dyers art of imposing colours on bleached wool from factory sheep, these are colours profound and unique to each sheep. If I were a knitter I'd be stalking through the brambles with knitting needles in my back pocket.

posted by: coldwish at 17:35 | link | comments (4) |
nz 2007

Dag It All!

I am bruised in spectacular colours, aching in places purple, pink & blue. I cannot lie on my left side for the intense bone deep bruise there. My arms, elbows, chin, calves, shins, elbows, wrists, ribs and ass are speckled with bruises large and small.

I gloat at the evidence of hard work on my body. The bruises do not wash away with scrubbing and hot water, as does the stink of wool musk and sheep shit.

I've been dagging sheep. Waist deep in wet, filthy mud and shit and brambles, ewes pressing panicked and wild-eyed away from me in the wooden-sided narrow sheep crush. I wade into these animals, into their fear, and I pluck a likely culprit from their midst, leaning over the lowered head thrust between two other ewes to grab her around the neck. I grab both hands full of wet dark wool and haul her 40kg/100lb body out of the sheep ruck. I have to separate her, get her down the narrow corridor and flip her on her back so we can dag her. she's being sold and needs a trim.

Flipping a sheep. Sounds fun, doesn't it? Possibly even easy? They are dumb beasts, ruled by fear, not terribly effective at defending themselves.

Yeah, right. You try it.

The best way to get a ewe tits up is by grabbing her neck from behind, lifting her head back until she is raised, forelegs off the ground. Grab one or both of her forelegs, thin and bony, from there and lift her all the way upright, facing away from you but held tight against your body and legs. She will be protesting her plight mightily, kicking her hind legs into the mud, trying not to lose the ground beneath her feet. Once she is full upright, forelegs immobilized and snug against you, then if you are lucky, you can knee her lower back hard enough (slowly) as you pull her into you that her hindlegs will splay out and lose their muddy purchase. Then you have her. Carefully, holding her head and forelegs firmly against you, lay her slowly down on her back.

She is tits up, ready for your partner to approach, scissors in hand, to dag her.

Sounds pretty nasty, doesn't it? It is, but not so much for the sheep as for the humans. To dag a sheep means to cut the dreadlocked, matted, balls of wool and shit from off the backs of their legs, their tails, their udders, their balls (for rams), their asses, and their bellies. Yup, we are cutting off their dingleberries, or dags as they are called in NZ. Some sheep are more daggy than others and their behinds from the tops of their tails to their hind hooves are a sold mass of caked, matted, dreaded, hard balls of shit, inextricably combined with their wool, all this oft coated by a fresh dump of slimey green shit.

We clip, we pull, we cut, we twist, we snip these dags off these sheep when they are belly up, or "cast". Sheep, on their backs, are relatively helpless, they can still struggle, and they do; they will still kick, witness the bruises under my chin where I was caught by a flailing shit-covered hoof or two; they will protest the state of upsidedownness. But they can't actually get up. Sheep can die in this position, when they are cast, as they will starve to death, incapable of getting their feet back under them.

In order to hold them in place, and restrained safely for the person wielding the scissors and working on the shitty end of the sheep, the holder can try several positions. Kneeling with the sheep's head gripped firmly between your thighs allows a good lean forward to help out dagging, but can be hard on the knees for an extensive session. Ultimately it works best, and is easiest on the knees, if you sit on your arse with the prone sheep gripped and nestled between your things, head in your lap (lips within kissing distance), one of your legs thrown over her bony protruding chest, at least one of her hind legs held in hand and pulling her ass up (curling her back) toward you. If she's a kicker, you hold both hind legs up until she's almost bent in half and immobilized.

It's a rather intimate position to be in with a sheep. The younger ewes, barely out of lambhood, are smaller and easier to deal with, often small enough that hands can be freed and both of us can dag away. These smaller ewes are often heartbreakingly cute as they gaze up from my lap, peering up with their terror-filled eyes from beneath blond dreadlocks like moptop towheads.

Many sheep are so adrenalized by the panic and fear of being handled by me that when they are settled in place between my legs, their heartbeats are so loud they thunder like distant drums around you. Some sheep collapse in my arms, legs going limp. Some shiver and vibrate endlessly for the entire procedure. Others are so tense that it is a real effort to pull their stiffened legs in from their en pointe position. All of the sheep have incredible borborygmous. It upsets their stomachs to be upside down and the rumblings are racing bubbles and squeaks through their bellies. Occasionally I echo their belly sounds and end up farting on their heads. Can't be helped. It is not a dignified position to be in for human or sheep. 

Except for the struggle to upturn these animals, an oft fiercely engaged battle, dagging the sheep does not hurt it. Okay, so we clipped a few wigglers and nicked them here and there, but nothing serious.

We did 33 sheep in two days. Day one was dry and overcast and our worst annoyance, besides the stroppy sheep, was the cloud of sandflies around both our faces the entire time. We got dirty, we got stinky, we got bit by sandflies constantly. But we two petite females got down in there and dagged over & over & over & over again until 13 ewes had clean butts and tails and no longer clacked as they ran, dried dags banging together like mad castanets.

The next day was not dry at all, it dawned wet, and solid sheets of rain swept across us regularly. The sheep were wet. The dags were slimey. The crush was muddy and shitty and stirred up into a slippery mess. It rained off and on. I looked and smelled and felt like I'd just crapped and pissed in my own pants by the time we'd done just a few of these stupid beasts. I was filthy. But we couldn't stop because of the rain, heavy or no. We had to finish the rest of the sheep.

Sheep do not like to be isolated from their ovine coven, they huddle in frightened groups, they spook in wooly masses, they tear off, dags aclacking, in unidirectional charges. In order to not freak the sheep out and cause heart attacks, we move slowly, faces averted, in order to guide them from the larger pastures to the smaller crush where we can handle them with less likelihood of escape. That part's relatively mild.

But when you have a group divided into dagged and not yet dagged, eventually you get down to a small number on the not dagged side, only two or three left in the crush, those few remaining sheep can get nervous about their reduction in numbers. Nervous sheep equals panicked aggressive wild behaviour. There is none of this 6 ewes in a corner heads under the ewes in front of them or on either side, butts clenched in immobilizing fear as they burrow in further. It's easy to remove one one from that mass.

Reduce it to three and there is not enough cuddle in their huddle to reassure them. At this point they turn and look at you wild-eyed and hunting for an escape past you. So they bolt, one first, then the two others. To the other end of the crush. You follow. They are in a dead end again and past you again their only perceived opening. Back and forth they scramble, you on their tails.

Sometimes there will even be a ewe who does not simply crouch and scurry past your knees. No, she eyes you up and down and takes a great leaping charge at you, head butting you at about chest height with a great flying leap. After the first such bony jolts to the chest by such a ewe one recognizes that pre-charge glint in her eyes, that tensing to rush you and you meet her headlong tilt with a raised, hard-soled, booted foot lifted in defense. She knocks into it hard, back to the mud under foot and scrambles underneath you as you suspend yourself over her, hands on either side of the top boards of the narrow run. She repeats it again and again. Guilt and worry blossom in your mind with the force with which she is near knocking herself out on your boots. Finally you drop on her during one such pass and press her kicking and grunting into the mud with your weight and muscles straining. Soon, she is flipped and dagged.

Then there is the black-faced, black-hearted devil ewe with rare horns 4-5 inches out on either side of her head. Smaller and darker than the others she simply will not be caught. Her struggles are mightier and she is slipperier in her escapes. One of her charges, lower and unexpected, lands on a hipbone with such a resoundingly painful thud that you are knocked sideways into the boards, pain radiating from hipbone outboard like a gunshot wound. That one requires stepping out of the crush, leaning head down into the boards, tears springing forth. Some heavy breathing, some wry jokes, some detailed revenge fantasies, a glug of fresh water, and while the pain has not gone away, the trembling that accompanied its spread has. Legs once more steady, and the day's light quickly fading, you must get back in there and subdue her solo self. We left the best for last.

There is some vivid satisfaction in discovering upon your re-entry that she hit your hipbone so hard she lost one of her horns, and is left with a bloody stub on one side. A smile, wicked and vengeful, curves upward on your face. Eventually she makes a wrong move and you have her down and dagged in the thickening grey-skied dusk.

All I can say is thank goodness we weren't dagging rams. I'd be disemboweled by now. They have horns, real ones, wide and curly and black and pointed.

But I wear my scrapes and bruises with a perverse pride. The pain passes with most bruises immediately after impact, until later when I press my hands along my body, poking for evidence of tender spots and forthcoming rainbow-hued patches. I grin with each one I find, but I sleep only on one side for now.

posted by: coldwish at 17:23 | link | comments |
nz 2007

Hipbone's Connected to the...

This story to be told later, when I am less off-grid. I am over at Pav's in Ahaura, with whom I WWOOFed last year at this time.

But, man oh man, I'm sporting some lovely evidence on my body of the latest adventures I've been engaged in.

Needless to say, I've been rather more intimate with sheep than I bet most of you have. Stop with the jokes already.

But there's a few new yoga poses available in this business, along the lines of Downward Dog and the like: Dagging Sheep and Startled Weka.

Later, folks, I am alive, Ruby is a stout companion, and we thrive in the wet. 

posted by: coldwish at 16:30 | link | comments (5) |
nz 2007

Edibility

The sandflies of NZ don't bother me. Nor do the mosquitoes. Certainly their everpresent buzzing and flying about is irritating, but they don't really bother me. I rarely feel them bite, I rarely react when they do.

I realize how lucky I am. I spent 48 hours with Zondra and James. I really get how lucky I am.

Mosquitoes brave hurricane force winds to get to her. Sandflies are undeterred by DEET or mutliple layers of clothes. She gets bitten through FLEECE.

Zondra must be the filet mignon of humans to the insects who prey on us. I can stand right beside her and I am dismissed like canned spinach. They circle her, devouring every millimetre of flesh available.

Her poor flesh. It swells, it reddens, she feels each and every bite, then they itch. She is miserable in sandfly country.

Meanwhile, I am blithely unaware of the miseries of being on the West Coast. It is my favourite place in NZ.

posted by: coldwish at 13:16 | link | comments (2) |
nz 2007

The Skinny On The Girl

I do not eat much. I am no longer ravenous every few hours, woken in the middle of the night by hunger pangs.

It is warm here in NZ, innocent with it. My food requirements are almost nil, and unlike other Ice folk who spend their season craving Thai, Indian, sushi, pizza or fish and chips, I did not charge into Chch ravening.

The post-Ice culture shock, the readjustment to city and humidity and all that shook me last year, is vague and distant. Mostly what I have felt is the almost complete deletion of 5 months of spectacular, challenging experiences and hard work. Chch is, as always, Chch: familiar, easy and rife with Ice faces. It is not that I have lost my season on Ice, so much as had to put it away, store the frabjous joy deep inside me, in order to move back into society. It is there, and memories come surging forward to grab me by the throat, and I cannot believe them here. Who would?

We live a fractured life, a life full of fault lines leading straight through our thoughts like unbidden tremors. There is some numbing going on, a callousing of our impulses, so we can once more fit off-Ice. We hide our experiences, we prevaricate when the inevitable inquiry comes, "What do you do?" Home becomes a trial and error process, as we figure out how and when and if to reveal.

We change behaviour, we alter vocabulary, we slide away from habits deeply engrained from long repetition. We embrace the new, many of us. Certainly though there are multitudes of post-Ice people stunned and unmoving yet in hostels around Chch, decisions unmade, choices unbearable. It takes time to adjust, to learn how to choose, how to decide again. They hand over their credit cards for food and housing, waiting for something.

We have been mollycoddled too long. Until I learn to take back charge of my life, I, too, sit stunned in the spaces allowed me as I travel.

I nibble, I snack, I feed when I am hungry, but my hunger is tiny and insignificant and often goes unrecognized and easily dismissed out of mind, until it approaches ludicrous. I have to learn to feed myself again before I am stumbling cross-eyed and atilt with need. I must learn to recognize my hunger, my thirst, earlier on. I grew so used to functioning highly on very little fuel and water, stretching my energy stores thinner and thinner, such that now, without the expenditure of energy and calories of the Ice, I am unfamiliar with the warning signals. I lived daily disregarding the check engine light on my body, and didn't stop until the tank was bone dry and my brakes were burning rubber.

I must learn to eat again. I am too skinny by far. But sometimes the effort, the cost, the decision-making involved in feeding myself defeats me.

posted by: coldwish at 13:10 | link | comments (3) |
nz 2007

Redheaded Grebe

Seated on a precipace eating norimaki bought in Christchurch, surrounded by the giant rounded stones on the well-cropped grassy hillside. I am quietly munching, gazing upon the tiny pair of humans below me, packing their climbing gear into the far stones. The man belches and I give myself away with my blurted guffaw at how it is magnified magnificently among the stones. A simple belch becomes a sound somewhat between Whitman's "barbaric yawlp" and diCaprio's Titanic bellow. They wave up at me.

I follow paths around the hillside, climb stones, shed my shoes, dirty my feet. I slide down grassy slopes and climb up others, dwarfed by the folds and puffs of enormous elephantine stones side by side with prehistoric popovers. Two hours I wander, two hours I wonder.

Then I move on.

I have finally left the confines of Canterbury, headed west in my newly minted pinto Ruby. I have grown tired of the city, the east coast, the expense, the stares.

Perhaps there are not enough redheads in NZ, for the men stare so; cars slow and heads swivel in my direction. I admit that my hair in its curly uncombed uncontrollable halo about my head is loud. It blares with copper and gold, as if lit from the inside when the sun hits it. Each time I let it grow, as I have this last year, I learn again just how startling is my hair colour. I rarely see it from the inside, until someone takes a photo of me in the sunshine. Then, I. too, stare.

But the common male response is far beyond startled, second-glance gazes. It veers well over into obsession and fetish. It never goes unmentioned, and the phrase "I've always had a thing for redheads." can deflate the best of moods.

Eventually I will tire of the the care and feeding of this blatant monster on my head and I will once more shave it down to a 1/2 inch buzzcut. Until then, I accept the attention it garners me with as much good grace as possible.

I sit in Ruby, feet up on the door, gazing out over Lake Pearson, high in the mountains between the coasts, east of Arthur's Pass. I have just swum with a Southern Crested Grebe, the bird as curious about me as I about it. Perhaps it too has never seen a redhead before. I swam head above water, treading water carefully in its direction, red and blue dragonflies perched on my head as I approached. He swam vaguely near me, head cocked. Twenty feet between us and he decided to move on. The water was slightly chilly, but as always the uppermost 2-3 feet were warmer. I floated in this lake, toes up, body palely glowing through the clear water.

I was not the only one wth the idea to swim here. When I pulled up and parked by the lakeshore, I came upon a man's clothes on the edge, and a naked man in the water. One can tell, because bottoms are remarkably pale on white folks, and his shone through the lake water brightly. Undeterred, I rolled up my jeans and strode into the water knee deep, carefully angling myself away from him so as to allow him privacy, should he be embarrassed.

Minutes later, he emerged, dressed, and apologized when I turned in his direction.

"I couldn't resist," he said, "a lake this fine on a day like today."

"No worries," I smiled, "I am tempted myself. I hope I didn't chase you out."

He insisted I hadn't. But he blushed as we spoke of skinny-dipping. I told him I am not startled or offended. He does seem to complete my mental checklist of skinny-dippers I've come across in my travels around NZ: East Coast, West Coast, North and South Islands, all I had left was a lake between two coasts, really.

The lake, despite its proximity to the road, and the traffic noises emanating therefrom, is peaceful.

I decide to spend the night. I swim in glassy calm water the next morning, walking straight out of my sleeping bag in the car to the lake waters.

posted by: coldwish at 12:51 | link | comments |
nz 2007

A Slight Case of Delay

Oyvey.

So, tell me, why is it that all the people I see and meet traveling in NZ are couples? Don't women travel on their own anymore?

The sands at Le Bons Bay. I camped there in my car for two nights and was startled and stunned by the sands on that beach. So many colours, and each sand grain had a different shape and texture based on its source, so it separates on the beach by weight, creating tri-colour sand pictures like Mandalas: an olive green base with a blond seashell sand design on top, interspersed by light wine red volcanic sand. There were slow fades and stark stripes like a child's version of a sea gull in the sky.  Geometric patterns redesigned with each incoming slow withdrawing wave of sea water. As the sea rearranged the designs you could see the weights of the sand having an effect on how it settled out for a momentary burst of artistic glory in the sun.

Among all this sand was evidence of various bivalves going on about their business beneath the surface. Once clam would create a small crater the size of a quarter with a pencil sized hole in the center, and an inch away there'd be a pile of extruded dogshit shaped sand. Another creature created a hole in the sand with a tiny stovepipe of sand sometimes inches tall sticking up. Created of some kind of saliva or mucus and sand particles they stuck up through the shallow surf like snorkels. I pulled one up and it maintained its shape in my hand, cemented delicately into a tube. I did not dig for the clam, I know how fast they can disappear.

I chose roads with no exit and warnings to the weaker vehicle and headed out on them. Ruby is 4WD and I was curious from two years standing about these dirt tracks up the sides of cliffs. I went up so sharply I couldn't see the road over my bonnet (hood), I descended so steeply I thought there was no road before me and I inched along. I came across flocks of sheep who moved away, a herd of beef cattle, red-bodied with white faces who trotted off down the road and stopped and turned in a line facing me like the battle-ready Scots of yore. Luckily the road was wide enough at that point for me to do a 13 point turn to reverse direction. There were some roads so narrow I ended up back down thema  kilometer or more before I could turn around.

I gazed down from hi=eightsd over the green folds of land along the peninsula, watching a man on a dirt bike with two dogs, guiding sheep in to a pen with loud shouts. The dogs, one white, one black, dodging uncannily about, pulling in stragglers, gathering the flock together, chivvying it along. Small enough to look like grains of fat sushi rice against the green field, all straight lines and aimed in one direction moving along.

I stood in the center of the volcano that created Banks Peninsula, barefoot hiking to the historic pa (Maori site), surrounded by water, agape at the powers that wroth this land in once liquid stripes of purple wine and orange rock. What is it that makes us humans think we will last any longer than the dinosaurs, and why is it we hasten our own demise with stupidity?

Barefoot driving, walking, hiking. Getting some tough back on the soles of my tender too long booted feet. Dirty heels and plucking grass and flowers between my toes as I walk. I still go carefully, but I build up tolerance. Returned to Christchurch and had a hard time returning to shoes. Luckily people don't really look down that often.

Driving down roads steep and curved like slaloms along the edges of cliffs. Unbelievable heights I climbed, ears popping up and down. Each road I climbed seemingly straight up a cliff was accompanied by the What Goes Up Must Come Down corollary, way too fast even in 1st. Ruby straining against her own weight, but no way in hell was I relying on my brakes. Nor was I going to speed up for the bloody impatient locals tailgating me as I crept down hill. There were way too many reminders of the risks and perils of these twisty windy steep hillside roads: I came across one car with its driver side front corner bent in, abandoned. As I turned slowly I wondered what it had hit? A boulder? A fencepost? As I rounded the corner there was the thing it hit, another car, stove in completely on the front and side. Glass and metal strewn across the narrow road. Old crash, no one about. They were both towed away by the next day. I prefered the reminder of the danger.

Driving on the left side of the road is a bit of an adjustment, early on one does tend to drift over to the right a bit, specially around corners, and certainly I've turned my wipers on more often that I need to whilst indicating a left or a right turn.

The harder habits to break are the habits of looking around oneself before changing lanes or turning. I still look the wrong way first.

Which is why I'm back in Christchurch having my bumper, right headlight, turn signal and right front guard replaced at a cost of $1300 NZ. It'd be another $800 to have it all painted to match, so Ruby's just going with the pinto look for now. As long as it works, she don't need to be pretty.

I hit someone in the city. I was looking for a street name, I had had only 3 hours (if that) sleep the night before due to a snoring roomie (we are talking freight train loud here, my bunk rattled to his exhales), and was not paying good attention. I don't think I had it in me to pay good attention I was that exhausted. I should not have been driving. I turned right into a bloke. Broadside smack into his driver's side door.

He was kind and understanding, and walked me through the whole exchange of details, even offered help on where to get it fixed and what it might cost. It wasn't until later I learned his 8 year old son had been belted into the passenger side seat.

I cried at that point. Then the shock hit. I'm very lucky i didn't do worse, that I didn't hurt him. I could never live with the guilt if I had injured a child. I am very very lucky.

It has taken days to get a place to get the parts to fix it, so I've been hiding out in Taylor's Mistake (a small surfing cove past Sumner) and out to the Banks Peninsula. Ruby doesn't look too bad, but I've been licking my wounds while deeply adrift in self-recriminations and humiliation avoiding other Ice folks like mad. More than anything I feel stupider than mud.

Once Ruby is road worthy again, I'll be over to the West Coast to visit friends and former WWOOF hosts.

A bit of a delay, some expense, more self-doubts, a touch of depression, and I'm back up and at it.

Why don't women travel alone?

It may suck sometimes when shit like this happens, but dammit, I deal with it. I don't need someone to hold my hand and take charge. That's my job, eh.

I'd be a right wuss if I wimped on this after defueling planes with their propellors still turning at the South Pole at -44F.

Onward, Ruby.

posted by: coldwish at 12:09 | link | comments (7) |
nz 2007