It’s Labour Weekend, and Labour Weekend traditionally means two things:

1. D-Family is going camping.
2. It is going to rain.

NZ’s Labour Day holiday is similar to America’s, the only difference being that New Zealanders can spell.

It’s when we take a long weekend to acknowledge the pain a woman goes through in giving birth, by drinking beer at a campground with friends.

One of the couples+kids from our entourage has pulled out though. That’s the one with the one who got hit by a car while walking on the footpath and thrown 10 metres through the air (that’s 300 feet for the Non-metrics), over a fence, and through someone’s front door earlier this month.

The 64 stitches have since been removed from her face, but she then discovered she still has concussion, and she has a sore back.

How fucking weak is that? You get hit by a car and thrown through a plate glass door that nearly severs your nose and eyeballs and now all of a sudden you can’t go camping?

Weak.

I went to the dentist today for the first time in 15 years and got two fillings, but you don’t hear me crying about it, now do you?

In other near-miss pedestrian stories…

My brother (the volunteer firefighter one) was walking through the mainstreet of our hometown the other day, when a car lost control and hit another car, then spun out and headed straight for him on the footpath.

He dived out of the way and the car then ploughed into a concrete building.

The shocked elderly driver didn’t take his foot off the accelerator until my shocked younger brother ripped open his door to check whether he was OK.

My brother then dialled 111 (that’s 911, or 999 or 666 or some other numerical combination for you Non-metrics) and told the operator to send an ambulance and the police.

His Fire Service pager went off while he was still talking to her on the phone. Instead of sending an ambulance and the police, she had scrambled the fire fighters. And she gave the wrong address. And she said the crashed car was sitting inside a Chinese restaurant.

Now my brother knows why people prefer to call the local fire station direct, instead of some national emergency call center hundreds of kilometres away.

A new song.

Click here to listen/download.

I am grateful that I now have a job where I am not required to put a noose around my neck each morning. I wear shorts and jandals. Like a hippy, or something.