last week when i went to trim the kiwifruit vine the old bugger said he’d put the finishing touches on those salmon and wanted me to take a look. then he asked if i’d go down to twizel with him and help install the salmon on their mounts. so i said i would. there was a storm blowing through that wednesday so we figured later in the week. i waited around thursday and friday mornings for him to call but he never did, which was fine. i mowed the lawns on thursday since the weather was, well, not warm but also not cold. and freshly cut grass smells like summer so that probably made it feel warmer. anyway. he finally called on saturday morning but i had to babysit that night and it was going to be too much, too close to an infusion so i said i couldn’t go. i felt a little guilty about that but then he made an excuse to postpone the trip, he said the manager wouldn’t be at the salmon farm on a saturday so there’d be no point going. so… but? yeah, okay. he called again on sunday asking if i’d mow his lawns for him, i still haven’t mowed the lawns and i’m fairly sure he just wanted an excuse for me to visit to set up this trip to twizel.
when i remembered that he kept putting off going down to pick these salmon up, and was now putting off taking them back i figured he must’ve been worried about doing a roughly 6 hour round trip in the van by himself. and fair enough. i was thinking on saturday that if he still hadn’t been to twizel after my infusion that i’d offer to take them down by myself. but we went on monday.
at the top of burke’s pass there’s a little stopping zone on the side of the road for tourists to take pictures of the alps, as we drove past a group of tourists he’s pointing and telling me that’s a selfie stick, it’s for taking pictures of yourself with your phone. what the fuck? i was about to tell him the same thing. a few weeks back when i visited he was so proud of himself. he had printed some pictures of a fontinalis trout. a few weeks before that i’d googled some pictures of this trout on his phone so he could paint the one he’d made and google had blown his mind. when he later showed me these pictures he’d printed he told me he called google on his phone and then they sent him through some pictures from america and then he got his digital camera, took pictures of the pictures on his phone then printed them on his printer. i still have no idea if he actually called google and got put through to a help desk of some sort and they’ve been kind enough to email some old dude a few pictures of a trout or whether he’s somehow activated the voice assistant on his phone and spoken to it as if it were a phone call to an actual living person and asked the voice assistant to please send him some trout pictures, thank you. either way, he was so stoked with himself and i’m still confused.
anyway. there’d been another storm on sunday so we were expecting a bunch of snow and ice on the road in the high country but it was clear. i still couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel, i said my goodbyes several times on that trip. he drove us there, i drove us home. if he’s not talking and swerving from left to right all over the road then he has a bad habit of waving to other campervans or cargo trucks as they pass, except as he takes one hand off the wheel he loses control and swerves right to the middle of the road and it’s fucking nerve-racking. i can only imagine what it’s like for the passing vehicles to have this mad lunatic simultaneously waving at you and swerving towards you. so i was exhausted even before i got to drive. the closest he came to admitting he needed my help for the drive was saying how nice the van is to drive, how comfortable it is and that it doesn’t make him tired to drive it all day. then ten minutes later saying when he took a road trip through the north island last year he couldn’t drive more that two hours a day without needing to rest. so i’m glad i went, and i see why he kept postponing until i could go and help. it was a long day. he was exhausted even before we set the salmon up. my arse was numb when i got home and my legs felt weird for two hours. it’s not a comfortable van.
but we installed the salmon. one goes on the top of a car and the other two are mounted on poles for tourists to stand behind and hold and take pictures as if they’ve just caught this giant fish.
i babysat on saturday night and ate an obscene amount of pizza since they don’t deliver to rangitata. then bryce and i watched jumanji, jake played on his playstation all night and after i sent bryce to bed i fell asleep on the couch waiting for their parents to get home.
jimmy’s twins were born on monday. i found out yesterday when i got home from hospital. i’d just missed him. despite having two new born twins he’d driven all the way out here, freshly shaved all except the stache. but i was in hospital. his wife’s either going to be furious or happy to have him out of her hair but i’m not going to be surprised if he’s here again today, waving a joint around.
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