I'm not dead yet!!

...cried the chicken. Got up to the first big old lady hen house today and found a chicken laying strangely on the side of the house. Her head was buried in the mud and she still had a heartbeat. I picked her up and she moved, barely. Showing her to Claudia, I asked her what to do with a half-dead chicken. "Smash its head." "Um... you do it." Claudia laid her head on a beam and crunched her head twice. That was it - then the chicken went on our trailer and headed off to the woods to decompose. I like it better when they're all the way dead when we find them.

We had a massive storm last night that carried on until about noon today. Hail, sleet, torrential rains, winds. Apparently this is not unusual for NZ. My much anticipated trip out to Castle Hill for climbing was canceled - they got snow! Heading out to the Port Hills, just south of Christchurch, tomorrow for a little day trip. By the way, my usual outfit of clothes here is (when warm) pants, a t-shirt and a long-sleeve shirt and (when cold) wool long underwear, pants, two pairs of wool socks, top underlayers, two wool shirts, maybe a fleece, hat, and/or jacket... sometimes in the house. Hope summer's coming soon!

And my last bit of exciting news is that I think I'm in love with milk and honey. So far my favorite foods on this trip are butter and honey on toast, tasty cheddar cheese and honey on bread, and yogurt with honey and muesli. hmmm... pattern. We've been making yogurt here from the fresh raw cow's milk. So delicious. I've decided I have to start doing this when I get home. Claudia has an EasyYo yogurt maker (basically and insulated container with a piece of tupperware for the yogurt). I heat up the milk on the stove to simmer and then let it cool off to about 40ºC (warm-hot) and then put it in the container with a bit of left over yogurt. Then pour 40ºC water around the container in the thermos and let it sit for 12hrs. I have to chance the water once to keep it going. The 40-45ºC temp allows the yogurt bacteria to grow and multiply... thus making yogurt. So if it gets too hot or cold, the culture dies and you have plain ol' milk. You get the same volume of yogurt as the milk you put in... so doing the math, yep, way cheaper to make yogurt myself and just buy milk if I've got the time! On the honey side of things, there's a special NZ "honey" called Manuka. It's actually from a flower and more of a dew/syrup (think honeysuckle) so the bees aren't so central. It's delicious, definitely tastes a bit flowery, and regular honey seems bland next to it. Mmmm. Maybe I can bring some back!