Another rainy day in Murupara

I am still sick.  I haven’t stopped coughing for a week and if I had internet coverage right now I’d look up the Guinness Book of records to see who holds the current record for lung abuse.  I reckon I’d be in with a Guernsey at the very least.  But today, due to my husband’s holding of his nose, I thought I’d best bathe while he was at Church.

Now, having a bath in Murupara is a bi-weekly experience.  We don’t have an inside shower – the outside shower, as I am reliably informed, is called ‘rain’.  I digress:  the bath here is the original bath from when the house was built in the 1940s.  In those days, Maori must have been, on average, a size S-M, so it is a challenge to fit my XL tero into the bath-tub and then wash my hair.   I had to use Papa’s loofah to scrub off 5 days of Vicks layers as well.  The off-bath days are APC days, as my nanna used to say (armpits and crutch), or desert washes, where we just soap up and sluice off in the laundry, in an effort to have enough hot water to use the bath as above.  For those of you who are already planning to comment on this being ‘too much information’, well, read on....

I was watching TV today – I don’t as a rule put it on, but I was curious to see what NZ does on Sundays.  So lucky I did! They have a young farmer’s TV show, and they were just about to announce the winner of ‘Who’s poo’s whose’. (Some 11 yo boy)  They had 7 different types of animal poo – each sample on a blue & white paper dinner plate on a table – and contestants had to identify the animal responsible.  (I am not sure how they convinced the said animals to poop on a paper plate, but more digression).  Apparently, the samples included chicken and buffalo, dog and deer.  Look- this in an absolute true story.  The 2 young adult presenters took the whole thing very seriously.  My husband refuses to believe me, but it’s TRUE!!!!

He has a trained sparrow.  Apparently it is very rare.  He goes to the kitchen window and as soon as he does, a little sparrow from the burnt-out house two doors over comes swooping over and waits for a feed.  I tried to give it my  left-over  experimental banana cream pie – it was left-over because not even Maori kids would eat it – get the picture- and the birds flew down, did the equivalent of a avian sniff and took off.  Now they will only come to Papa. 

I am hoping I am going to be better overnight-the President came and gave me a blessing – so here’s hoping.  I am now officially 2 weeks behind in my work due to this dang-it-all flu, and there is a tangi tomorrow and Papa wants to go, but I won’t be allowed if I am still koffin Kerrie.