(written on the 22nd from notes)
I’m having such a hard time writing in my journal. I’ve got this block. I just… don’t want to. I just my butt and get caught up, and then I’m good for a day or two, but I have no journaling routine. My routine at night of vege. I don’t want to think.
😕
And time is going by so quickly. I’ll be back in the states in less than a month, and I… don’t want to be.
At the same time, I feel like I’ve wasted my time in New Zealand. I’ve done exactly what I was afraid I would probably do– let myself be distracted by all the amazing things in New Zealand instead of digging in and getting myself right.
And if it’s not the beautiful things in New Zealand, then it’s just… something else.
Regular news, sports news, educational videos, TV, movies…
I’m a disappointment to myself.
Today was no different. After wasting my life away in front of my phone screen until something like 5:00 in the morning, I woke up to the repeated closing of the doors of the vehicle next to me somewhere around 10:00 a.m. (I hadn’t put my headphones in to prevent such a scenario).
I guess they were retrieving all sorts of stuff from their car in preparation for breakfast (a very nice breakfast [open-faced, omelet sandwich] by the looks of it).
Feeling quite unsocial, and remembering that I had to jumpstart the car to be able to leave, I just stayed inside my van–waiting.
And waiting…
And waiting…
I think from the time I woke up from their breakfast preparations until the time they left after cleaning up, maybe an hour and a half had passed.
And… I was grumpy about it. 😅
I am grateful to have that extra battery and the jumper cables, though, and grateful to have gotten a good one at such a cheap price from the people at the junkyard who treated me so well. 🙏
After getting the van jumped, I drove into town to fill up my water bottles at a nearby park, only to find that, though maybe only 1/50th of the park was closed, it happened to be the 1/50th that had the water fountain. 😶
😒
So I headed back over to the grocery store I had gone to yesterday and bought some more diet soda.
So much for my fledgling self discipline. 😕
Next stop was gas, just a few blocks away, and I think today was finally the day where I am now satisfied that my credit card will work absolutely anywhere in New Zealand, as this gas station was one of those that is only pumps with self-pay stations and no building whatsoever (New Zealand has lots of gas stations that are nothing but pumps).
I wasn’t quite sure where to go next. With so little time left in New Zealand, it’s time to think more strategically. Plane ticket prices from Christchurch to Auckland or crazy cheap, cheaper than the ferry from the South Island to the North Island, but having checked, resale prices for my van are dirt cheap in the South Island. Prices seem to be almost double in the North Island?
And I’m sort of at the point now in this last month where I’ve done all the loops that I really feel interested in doing, so for the last month, I’m just sort of hanging out where I want to hang out.
So where do I want to hang out? 🙃
And what do I want to do while I’m hanging out in whatever places I choose to hang out?
The goals would be to be productive, to finally dig in and ground myself, find some sort of foundation I trust to stand on.
Tall order to accomplish in only a month with a brain that is so used to running away because I just feel like I’m going to fail at everything I try, and that what I hope for most will never come.
I decided to head up to Lake Brunner, as that’s sort of a neutral spot (super easy to head east toward Christchurch if I want to fight with the cell phone people, and super easy to just head north toward Golden Bay and the ferry…). And it seemed like a safe bet to stay for the night without having to worry about crowding.
Not sure what I’m going to do next. I’ve got a bunch of journal entry catch-up work to do. 😕
On the way to Kumara, I saw a sign for Derry Rock. I think I’d seen a sign for it previously, but wasn’t really interested in stopping by. This time, I figured I might as well, so I headed on over.
It was just a short drive down a dirt road to a dead end and an information sign with a trail going off into the bush.
I has realized when checking my mileage that it was time for me to change my oil again, and this little dead end place seemed like the perfect spot, as there was this little grassed-over dirt pile that was just the perfect size for me to drive up on one side to tilt my oil pan toward the drain bolt hole.
So I drove one wheel up onto the little mound, and then I spent probably the next 10-15 minutes getting my oil out from the storage compartments and looking for my oil filter.
Unable to find my oil filter, I wondered if maybe I had only bought one and was misremembering, so I dug out my receipt and found that I had actually only bought one. 😕
Darn.
Still, it was a nice out-of-the-way place to clean up and organize my van and maybe put it back together, so I started that little project.
Of course, every time I think about putting everything back together, I’m faced with the challenges that brought me to disassemble everything and leave it disassembled in the first place.
My heater doesn’t work properly on the driver’s side.
Normally, I would say that there’s a blend door actuator issue, but it seems more like a gradient problem with it getting progressively cooler, the heat on the passenger side being decently hot and then going toward the driver side getting progressively cooler (as opposed to hot on one side and cold on the other).
If a gradient issue, then it’s more likely to be a clogged heater core part of the heater core is getting hot and staying hot, and part of it is staying cool because the hot coolant can’t flow into the clogged sections.
Man, I wish I had a garden hose and spigot to test. 😕
Oh! Maybe I can find an outdoor faucet! 🤞
I’d need some hardware from the store…
Anyway, remembering the heater issues, I decided to do a bunch of testing to try to rule out blend door actuators as the issue.
I’ve tested them before, but maybe one of them isn’t working correctly?
I went through all three, and they all seemed to be working like they should. AI tells me there are only three, and I can only find three, so… I guess that’s what I go off of?
With all three functioning as best I could tell, I thought maybe the temperature door wasn’t fully closing off the cold air because of some problem with the actuator. So I thought that maybe I’d pull out the actuator and disassemble it to see if there were damaged or dirty contacts on the inside.
Somewhere around the time that I was cleaning everything out and testing things, a group of older cyclists, probably in their ’60s, came to the end of the dirt road, and I started chatting with some of them for a little bit.
Surprisingly, one of the gentlemen was well-informed enough as to know that Kristi Noem was from South Dakota. 😶
Most people don’t even know where South Dakota is, let alone know which political leaders have come from there.
In addition to cleaning up and organizing and working on my heater issues, I laid out my damp clothing to dry in the wind and sun. Eventually, though, I moved the van over to the shade to avoid the Sun. 🙃
After all the cyclists left, I wandered over to take a look at the big rock myself, which involved just a short walk through the bush.
It’s a point of interest because it’s a single rock about the size of a small house way out to where it seemingly doesn’t belong, a leftover relic of a previous ice age.
The rock was too massive to take any reasonable pictures, though I think I snapped one?
Yeah…
I spent pretty much the rest of the day messing with heater stuff, testing radiator hoses and heater hoses and removing and disassembling the temperature door actuator.
Unthinking me didn’t pay attention to the position of the actuator and the relative position to a connected HVAC door (the temperature door actuator runs a bypass door as well). Which meant that I had no idea at which position to reattach the metal rod.
Every single time I tried, using logical strategy or even straight up guessing, it never functioned as it appeared it was supposed to.
Ugh.
I probably spent an hour or two just fighting with that, trying to figure out where on earth the little arm needed to be at the connection and at what position of the circular cycle it needed to be in that position.
Massive variables. 😕
I worked and worked and struggled and fought and tried and tried and never figured it out.
I continued well after dark, fighting off mosquitoes and sand flies before finally giving up and leaving the rod disconnected all together. 😕
And then finding that the dew point was such that everything that I had set out to dry and that had dried was now quite damp.
😠
Frustrating day.
I more or less just threw everything back into the van and drove away, frustrated at another wasted day.
No successful journal entry catch up. Pretty much zero success with the vehicle. Very little progress in the areas that are of greatest importance for me to focus on.
And not enough hope or motivation to stay away from life-wasting activities I choose to engage in day after day.
I just drove to Lake Brunner, veged out for a bit, and then crashed, tired from the lack of sleep.
Oh, there was a bright spot in the day, absolutely beautiful songs of a New Zealand bellbird. 😊
The vocal range was one of the widest that I’ve ever heard from any species of bird.
Not that I’m much of a birder, but still. Pretty cool. Love animals. 💚
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 