Six weeks ago my wife Janice and I received a phone call from our landlord informing us that they had a worker that wanted to move into the house that we had been living in for the past two years. To me this was a blessing in disguise, I had been wanting to move up to the block for a while now and my Janice and I had already had plans to build a house up their. So for the last week we have been putting a lot of our possessions into storage as the hut is only two rooms plus bathroom. Our power consists of a truck battery with a
solar panel and we have a gas oven for cooking on and a gas califont to heat our water and a shower and hand basing in the back room. There is also an in ground bath up above the hut that will be getting a lot more use over the coming months.
We are lucky enough to have Janice’s parents living 25 km away in Geraldine so we can get our washing and any thing else we need done there.
The move itself took three days and went smoothly. This morning I arrived home at 5.30 am after a night driving a milk tanker for Fonterra, as I came around the last corner I could see Jeff barking at a tree so I instantly knew that he must have had a possum bailed up. As I entered the hut Janice was awake as she would not have been able to sleep with a dog barking that close to her. She informed me that at about midnight she was woken by a possum outside the hut so she went and let Jeff off to catch it. The only problem was that when Jeff arrived on the scene the possum was setting on the roof of the hut
and Janice did not want to use the 22 to shoot it. So here was me five hours later with the possum in a tree just beside the hut. For Janice it was a night with very little sleep for me it meant another few $ worth of possum fur and a snack for the dogs as once I had plucked it I cut it into five pieces and feed it to the dogs. I can see that Janice needs to get some more practice and confidence with the 22 so next time she can sort things out by herself and get a good nights sleep.