Yay – picked up my brother (Matthew) and wife (Helene) at the airport this morning. Spent the day showing them around the botanics, museum and sorting out snowboarding gear for our upcoming trip. They arrived fully laden down with chocolate and gin, but unfortunately minus a fresh salmon which had been stopped at customs.

Really looking forward to travelling about and hitting the slopes with them. Fun times ahead.

So took off on Saturday and headed up to broken river skifield for the day. Headed up with Dave, Aroha, Neil and Fran. I found the conditions pretty tough actually.. the snow was pretty heavy and there were a few rocks poking through. In fact I found a chip taken out of my board so that’s off getting fixed at the moment.

It was great to get up though and try a few jumps.. I’m so woefully out of practice it’s terrible. Still, I’m really looking forward to getting out on the slopes with my brother Matt and wife Helene when they arrive.. that’s going to be excellent!!

Had a pretty annoying start to the day today (Wednesady) when I went down to our gateway to find that the letterbox had been vandalised. Second time in a year. What is it with these people? I just don’t get it – I mean it’s not like it’s a challenge to kick over a letterbox. Gah. I just hope that after spending my evening fixing it that it doesn’t just get vandalised straight away again. Quite irritating as there are other things I would rather spend my evenings doing (like tidying the place before Matt & Helene get here).

Sigh.

So this is a highly addictive game. My best time so far is 35.188 seconds.

Also, went out to see a comedian on Monday night – Danny Bhoy. Quite enjoyed it – though I thought the comedian who was on before him (who’s name I forget) was equally if not more funny.

Really getting quite excited that my brother & wife arrive in a little over a week. Just a shame they’re not moving out here permanently!

As I am still in recovery mode I’m only working 4 days a week at the moment. While this might sound like a brilliant idea, the flipside is that I’m pretty much broke all the time! Still, it’s all good really. My friend Steve had some work to do down in Dunedin and invited me to come along for the ride. Dunedin is a place I had only ever driven through so I was happy to get the chance to have a look around.

My impression of Dunedin was of a very vibrant student town. I really liked the compact layout and the fact that everyone walks everywhere. It’s a very Scottish town – being a country where Scottish Presbyterians settled in to build their ideal town. In fact I went to the Otago settlers museum there and there was a bit on the Irish in Otago. We Irish were really discriminated against in the beginning as they didn’t want the mainly Catholic religion to be practiced in their new colony.

It was interesting seeing what the settlers had to go through to get out here. They were allowed to bring one kist with them (3’*2’*2′). Really not the biggest baggage allowance you could imagine.

I also checked out the cadbury factory and did their tour. I was pretty surprised to hear that sometimes NZ supplies product to Europe.

Also checked out some really incredible landscape photography (Andris Apse. Luckily it’s still going to be in Dunedin when I’m down there in a couple of weeks time with my brother and his wife.. so will definitely be recommending we get there.

That evening (Friday) Steve and I headed into the Silverpeaks reserve. We got there at about 5pm with a good hours light to get to our hut for the evening. Just as we were getting close Steve goes ‘Actually, I have a sneaking suspicion that the hut might have been taken out’. I thought many evil things at that point, and even more when we arrived at the site and there was an empty grassy space where the hut used to be.

So we decided to walk on and try the next hut (possum hut). It was a slippery and dark experience and we weren’t even sure if the hut would be there when we got there. It was.. but was in pretty awful condition. Someone had pitched a tent in the cut (complete with dirty newspapers and whisky bottles). We decided to let the tent down and sleep on top of it where it was marginally cleaner.

As I was letting down the tent I came across a dead possum in the corner of the hut. Ick. I really didn’t sleep too well that night.

The next day we walked on to Jubilee hut. The hut was in excellent shape only having been installed in Feb. I was looking forward to a nice quiet relaxing evening – when a group arrived (7 people) and then the Otago University Tramping Club (13 people) so there were 22 of us in a 10 bunk hut. We were snug!

Still, a great weekend tramp. I’m ridiculously unfit at the moment – really need to get out more at the weekends. Would you believe – a button on my work trousers popped the other day! really is the beginning of the end :)

So the Reith lectures are run each year by the BBC. They get in an international speaker to talk on a subject of interest and importance. This year it was given by Jeff Sachs and is on climate change. There’s a link to a blog which has all the audio available for download as mp3.

Apparently it’s a fairly optimistic take on the whole thing which could be good for a change. Just finished reading a book called we are the weather makers which was a pretty chilling introduction to the possible future of the planet. Perhaps the wet summer (and floods) that the UK & Ireland have been experiencing is just a taste of what’s to come.

I must say, I do think that my generation is going to have a very very interesting time of things. I could of course just be a doomsayer, but it seems to me that climate change is real and has the likely potential to be a real disaster unless we can change our ways. Course we in the West will be able to buy our way out of the worst of it.. but the impact of millions of refugees from the likes of Bangladesh etc. could be … interesting.

Anyways, while I’ve not listened to them yet I suspect the Reith Lectures will be well worth listening to.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQl8MahN9fk]

Morph goes green..