Don't vote!

I’ve voted. I don’t know if it will be counted, I just overnighted it from New Zealand, and if you’ve ever overnighted something from New Zealand, you know there is no such thing, there is five daying it, but not overnighting it. Since it is the 28th in the U.S. (29th here, thank you international date line) it is possible my vote may count. It did cost me NZ $25 to vote this year, and this brings me to my point. I was very serious about voting. Serious enough that I spent NZ$25 to vote, and I’m not entirely sure my vote will even arrive in time to count.

Every year, there is a “get out the vote” campaign encouraging people to vote. This is a terrible idea. Why should we ever have to encourage people to vote? Who are these people who we are encouraging to vote? If they really cared, and really payed attention to the issues, wouldn’t they already be voting? Maybe even be willing to pay NZ$25 to vote? I’d have payed NZ$50 if that was what they were charging, and some guy in the States is voting for free who really isn’t that sure what he is voting for? I bet he wouldn’t be voting if he had to pay NZ$3 to vote.

Which gets me to the heart of my rant. Shouldn’t we be encouraging informed people to vote? No, wait, there is no need since they already will. So, perhaps what should be done is it should be made more difficult to vote. We can hardly charge people to vote, I do think that is a terrible idea (almost as bad as encouraging people to vote). Nor should there be a standard, it didn’t work out all that well when white land owning males were the only people allowed to vote. Education level is really no standard either… The willingness to put up with four years of higher education might be grounds for eliminating people from voting.

But some things should be put in place to make sure people who are voting are serious about it. Perhaps doing away with mail in ballots and have all voting booths on the 13th floor of a building with out an elevator. That’d scare away the faint of heart… What about people bound to wheel chairs? We could have a ramp as well (insensitive, me? Voting is serious!).

Maybe we could have some sort of test, nothing to rigorous, something like P.J. O’Rourke’s idea to require people to hop on one foot and spell ‘rhinoceros’. It would add an intelligence aspect to the test, and I’m not crazy about that, so perhaps we’ll put in a caveat that they don’t need to spell it correctly, they just have to make the attempt (I did just have to use spell check to make sure I’d spelled it correctly). Again, people would have to really want to vote to go through the humiliation.

While these ideas are tongue in cheek, I am serious about uninformed people not voting. If you don’t read the newspaper, maybe you shouldn’t vote. If you can’t name at least three of the members of the presidents cabinet, maybe you shouldn’t vote. If you don’t know who is in charge of the Senate, maybe you shouldn’t vote. If you only care about a single issue… Please don’t vote. I’d prefer our nation not be subject to a candidate you voted for because they agree with your views on abortion, an issue that isn’t likely to change any time soon at the federal level.

Voting is a right, and I respect that, but it is also a responsibility. If a blizzard on November 2nd would be enough to keep you home, maybe you should just stay home, you probably aren’t informed enough to have the countries direction at the tip of your fingers.

Water water

So, when I started this blog, it was with the intent to give a little knowledge about New Zealand, and try to do so in such a way that it was entertaining and fun… I’m afraid I am not keeping up with my intentions, and life is keeping me too busy to continue the blog in this manner, so, I’ve decided to change the blog’s original intent. The new intent will to be to tell about my life and experiences in New Zealand. It will still be with the intent of giving a view of New Zealand and its quirks, but I will not strive so hard to write about “New Zealand” and instead write about day to day life in New Zealand.

The kinds of situations I will write about are things like our water situation. Most of the population of urban New Zealand has water pumped to their houses much like most of the U.S. but the population in more rural areas of New Zealand have to get their water in more creative manners. Many rural New Zealand houses have water tanks sitting in their back yards, with pipes collecting the rain water that falls of their roofs. Often in the dry months of summer, people have to pay to have someone bring them water in a tanker truck.

This has been the situation Samantha has been in most of the time I’ve known her. But when we moved to the Thames house, we found ourselves in a new situation, in some ways improved, in some ways, a bit more of a chore. Here, we still get our drinking water from the roof, but the rest of the water, the water for the shower, laundry, outside taps and horse troughs all are pulled out of a creek on the property. The up side is we never have to pay for water, we always have abundance, the down side is we have a half a mile of hose going from the creek to the house and if something goes wrong; fixing it is a lot of work.

So far this year, a lot has gone wrong… I have learned some valuable lessons. If you see water bubbling out of a hole in the ground, it is probably a bad idea to stick your hand in the hole, grab the pipe at the bottom and pull up… This will lead to hours of digging in the mud, pulling up pipe, and having to wriggle piping until you can get the two pieces that you’ve split back together… Funny enough, the situation I describe is the second time it has happened, the first time was much worse.

Normally, how we discover there is a problem with our water is we go to turn on the outside faucet, and find no water running. The solution is usually pretty easy, a half mile hike up to the filter, a quick cleaning of the filter, a quick bleeding of the hose and we’ve got water again. But on this occasion, I went through all the steps and still, no water. This meant there was some problem between the filter and the house, which meant following the hose across the paddocks until I find a place where the hose has come undone and water pouring onto the ground.

I started at the house and started following the hose up the hill. Most of the hose is above ground, but there are many stretches that are buried under grass and other stretches that are under dirt. As I followed the hose up, I found a joint, and while delicately inspecting the joint to see if maybe it was leaking, I gave it a gentle yank, and the joint came apart. It is a bit of a mystery how this happened because, when I tried to reconnect it, which should have been easy since there was no water flowing, but the two ends wouldn’t reach each other.

I placed the two pieces together hoping I wouldn’t need to tighten the joint and continued to follow the hose until I did find the joint that had caused the problem. It was an easy fix, but now I’d done far more damage where I’d pulled the hose apart below. I got the water running again at the filter, but as I came down the hill to the spot I’d pulled the hose apart, I found water spilling on the ground. Pull as hard as I like, I could not get any more slack out of the hose.

I followed the hose until I found some more slack, then proceeded to start pulling up the hose out of the grass in some spots and out of the ground in others. It was about one hundred meters from where I’d found the slack to where I’d pulled apart the joint. I made my way down the hose, pulling and digging cutting grass and digging and pulling some more. After a couple of hours of work, it was starting to get dark so I packed up and decided to call it a day.

The following day, Samantha had the day off so she came up the hill with me and together we dug out the rest of the hose. It took another couple of hours and finally we pulled the slack to the break. We fixed the split, and had water again. Not the end of the story… The link is still a weak link and we’ve been back up the hill several times to reconnect the joint… It is much easier now that we don’t have to drag a hundred meters of hose out of the dirt, but it is still more work than we’d like to be dealing with.

And then there is the problem with the filter itself. The filter is a piece of PVC pipe, about two feet long with several small slits cut in it to let water in. The slits are small, and it doesn’t take much debris to clog the filter and once again, stop our flow of water… This didn’t happen for the first three months we lived in the house, but then the rain came. Since the rain came it has been several times a week we’ve had to hike up the hill to clean the filter to get our water running again. We’ve become experts at cleaning it, now if we could become experts at keeping it clean, we’d be golden.

While in the States, I did pick up a filter for a swamp cooler, with any luck, this will do the trick, I’ve wrapped the PVC with the swamp filter cooler and so far it has worked brilliantly, I’ve walked back down to the house (a second time, had to go reconnect the hose that won’t stay together), turned on the water, and voila, we have water… It didn’t last a full hour… I may have made it worse.

In the morning I’ll be walking back up the hill to see if I can’t figure out why our water is not flowing and to see if the filter is the problem… I’m sure one day, it will work brilliantly…

Jack

If you hang out with my family enough, sooner or later they will tell you stories of me as an adolescent, riding my bike around town pretending it was a horse, and then to show my parents I was responsible enough to have a real horse, going and mucking out his imaginary stall. The story has grown in grandeur over the years; by now I’m sure the story tells of how most of my childhood was spent mucking out imaginary stalls, when I know I was not so patient as a child, I’m guessing it lasted for about five minutes one afternoon.

Those five minutes never really paid off, my parents never bought me a horse… They were hesitant to let me have a cat; a horse was pretty out of the question. But on my first trip to New Zealand, I met Samantha, a girl who has brought me back to New Zealand five times now, and as luck would have it, not only is she a horse lover, but at that time was the owner of three horses, one of which she events with.

Jack on his first day with us

While Samantha sometimes wonders if I keep coming back for her or for her horses, I did finally have easy access to horses, but I still didn’t have a horse. That was until a few weeks ago. Samantha’s herd had increased to four horses when she picked up Scooter to event or possibly sell on after training him to event. She was also had her eyes open for a new standard bred she could use to give lessons. Her horses really are not ideal for giving lessons, Luna is a bit temperamental, Cullen a bit too sure he knows how to do it better than anyone else, and Seth, well, if he weren’t a little crazy, he is getting a bit on in years…

And in her search, this is how we came upon Jack. While surfing Trademe.co.nz, New Zealand’s eBay.com, she stumbled upon a six year old thoroughbred bred for racing, but never raced, and hardly even ridden. His asking price was NZ$500, around US$375. He is a large beautiful bay (a brown horse with black legs, tail, mane and nose), well… Samantha says he is quite ordinary, but what does she know about beauty? She is dating me…

Jack after a bath

Samantha did think he was quite the find despite his being ordinary looking, had she bought him he would have been the most expensive horse she’s ever bought, her current high is NZ$400. But she didn’t, I did and thus, I have my first pony, and by pony, I mean thoroughbred horse.

Since having bought him, I have been breaking him in (with a little help from Samantha). He is a pretty sweet good natured guy. Of our five horses, he is now the second largest after Luna, but does fall last in the pecking order being both the youngest and newest. There does seem to be some confusion about his order because Cullen, a horse who has never backed down to another horse, has for some reason decided to let Jack tell him what to do… It should sort itself out, and it may be bad for Jack that Cullen doesn’t just exert his authority, but it will work itself out.

While he is my horse, I will be back in the states for a while this year, and his home will be here in New Zealand, so really he is as much Samantha’s as he is mine. Really I’d be at a complete loss of what I need to be doing with him were it not for Samantha, so he has to be our horse, but I do finally have my horse.