15.08.2019 short interim report, first day off

Hello dear ones :-)

today was our first day off together! Mike already had a day off last week but Jenny had her first day off after 9 days of work. It's funny, you can feel muscles again that you didn't even know existed.. (like in the fingers, wrists for example)

According to the plan, we should always have Thursdays off together, but according to the plan, Jenny does not have a day off on the last Thursday of this month, so we don't know if she will have to work 13 days without a day off or if she will get another day off.

The work is exhausting but also great! Jenny is now feeding more and more calves every day (in English it's called Calf Rearing, for those who want to look it up)

This week, Mike managed to insert an infusion on a cow twice, which was pretty cool.

We called the Inland Revenue again about our IRD number, apparently there was an error and now we had to apply for it again, but we should receive it in 1-2 days.

In New Zealand, if you start a job and don't have a tax number yet, the employer has to provide it a few weeks after the start of work, but then has to declare a pretty high tax rate.. and why pay more taxes than necessary? We are paid every two weeks here and the next time would be after this weekend, so we will receive our first salary after this weekend :-).

We roughly calculated it. Although you earn much more here for less work, you must not forget that there are no statutory deductions for insurance here, all insurance must be taken out privately. And if we calculate how much more we would have from our salary in Germany without these deductions, it would be more.. but then also without insurance.

On our day off today we slept in nicely! Actually, we are total late sleepers but today we were already wide awake at 7:30 am. After having breakfast in front of the fireplace, we created a small to-do list.

We told you that we want to convert our van. Since we only have our free Thursdays for that, we don't have a lot of time. Our big box spring mattress has to be removed first. But before we tackle that, today we looked around in Ashburton (about 40 minutes from us) for an alternative. On Facebook, we learned from some backpacker groups that some have bought foam mattresses for their van, then cut them or cut them apart and sewed them together with the cover. It might sound a bit confusing but in the end it looks like cushions you find in motorhomes. An easy alternative to quickly convert your bed into bench seats.

We found exactly such a mattress at the 'Warehouse'. Now we have to get rid of our old mattress and then take a closer look at the frame that is installed in the van to plan how we can convert it best.

Mike will ask John, the farmer, if he might need the mattress because there are also such mattresses in every room of the house where we live. Maybe something will work out here.

We also drained our water canisters in the car, as we don't need them right now while we are living here.

Oh yeah, the farmer for whom Jenny works is super nice. He offered us to fill up our van once a week, since we have to drive so much. Of course, we were thrilled to receive this message. The van can go about 400 km with a full tank, but it only has a 40 L tank. During the week, Jenny drives about 350 km for work and filling up each time costs us 70-80 dollars. If we can save that, it's simply perfect!

In the attached pictures, you can see some impressions of the work (we might be able to take more pictures in the coming months, but right now there's simply no time and we're still new here :-D) but there are also pictures of the beautiful surroundings here :-)

See you soon!