Off to broken river for the weekend. Richard had put a link up on snowpool and so got a lift up with him. A Frenchman – Gerome – had also come across the website and he came up with us too.

At broken river, like many of the club fields, you have to walk up to the ski field. At Broken River there’s a goods lift – so you dump all your stuff in the lift and then just walk yourself up.

The field didn’t actually open until Saturday morning, so we arrived into a pre-opening party. Good times.

Ok.. so while this is probably kinda scary.. I think it’s great!

Google has in the last while (no idea when) updated their maps of Christchurch. That pic above is of my house, the yellow bookmark pretty much where I am currently sitting. Wow! There’s a bookmark here if you want to look yourself (you will need to download google earth first of course).

Stayed the night with Darren & Heather (friends of Euans – Darren helped in setting up snowpool.. which seems to be working well!) in Methven. Up early and on up to Mt. Hutt.

What a difference to Mt. Dobson – SO MANY PEOPLE. It was good to go here once, but I will not be going back again I think. Had a few good runs (though I was pretty knackered from yesterday).. but there were just too many people there. The rescue helicopter was flying all day!

At Dobson I never had to queue once. Here, with about 2000 odd people it was fast enough I guess (10 mins ish) but still – a completely different feel. Can’t wait for the rest of the club fields to open (next week hopefully)

Finally a quick pie (I got the last one.. and didn’t share it either they’re SO good) at the pub in Hororata. Totally worth getting pies there on the way back from skiing.. I’d been looking forward to my next pie there since the last time I was there (about 2 years ago!)

All in all a really excellent weekend. I can’t convey just how amazing it is to snowboard on deep (for us anyway) fresh powder. It’s just something you have to experience! (oh, and I did my first little jump too.. excitin’ stuff eh ;)

The South Island received a huge amount of snow in the last week. Mt. Dobson, still the only Chill Pass (smallish club) field to be open, we decided to head down there for Saturday. The pic below is an aerial photo of the South Island on the 12th June.

It was a lovely group of friends heading down : Warick & Aroha, Dave, Nick & Heidi, Michelle, Euan, Bob and me. It was great to have people to play with all day! There was *so* much more snow this time. See, the fields hadn’t opened since the dump of snow.. so it was about 2ft of fresh powder (1.5m base) to ski on. Heaven.. the last best day I had like this was Ohau almost 2 years ago. It’s an incredible feeling to be carving along, at reasonable speed, knowing if you fall you’re probably going to be ok. That said, I still might get a helmet as I did have a few tumbles!

There are a couple of videos too.. one of Shelly Boarding.. and the other of Warick paragliding (pic below)

Then down for a quick pint (and setting napkins alight by mistake) before Michelle, Bob, Euan and I headed to Methven (small alpine town by Mt. Hutt skifield) for the night.

Now.. I must say.. this is terribly illegal probably.. but I thought this book of bunny suicides was utterly hilarious (yes, in a sick way). I put up a slidehow here.. and here’s one pic from the slideshow..

Up at 7am on Monday morning (not too early) to catch a flight up to Auckland. However, it had snowed all night and the entire airport was closed!

So on Tuesday morning we caught the 05:45 flight up (which is a whole lot earlier). The reason Andrew and I went up was for the annual TUANZ Contact Centre conference. It was pretty interesting, there were some excellent presentations (esp. on the growth of the Asian market.. there are some interesting times ahead).

One of the talks was on how to get your workforce physically active again (something I think that really needs to be done). And there was this excellent company called azion. Actually their website is a bit lacking on detail – but the jist of it was that you split your workforce into a number of teams (4 per team). Each person is given a pedometer and each week the total number of steps taken by the team is entered into the website. Once they hit the goal for that week they are shown a flash movie of what they would have seen if they had actually been walking. So you get a virtual tour of NZ.

It’s really a very cute idea. If it’s not being done in Ireland & Europe then I reckon it’s an idea which could *really* take off (and easy to do too). With the way our sedentary lifestyles are going you might even be able to get serious government funding to get set up!

Anyways.. dressed up in Tux’s again for the awards, good times (but no pics). Then a day in Wellington on work, and then spent the weekend up in Palmerston North with family. Met a very nice English couple – Jim & Abby – on the way up (thanks to a text asking me whether I was sitting next to anyone interesting.. as otherwise I would have happily kept on listening to my mp3 player!). Totally interesting pair – backpacking around doing WOOFING and making houses out of renewables (straw) etc.

It was great to catch up with the cousins. A much needed break. Now, the reason for the A change in attitude title. Well, it came to dawn on me (and I’ve been avoiding this for the longest time) that I really do need to get back into real career / job mode. I have had the best time over the last couple of years, and I have really enjoyed and have no regrets whatsoever! about taking it easy and just cruising for a while. But I have felt over the last 6 months to a year that my concentration and skills have been turning to mush.. and so I came to the uncomfortable realisation that I need to start pushing myself and upskilling myself again. So less long holidays I suspect, more hours in the office, but hopefully get some good stuff done – and make myself employable again.

Well, that’s the idea.. we’ll see what happens eh ;)

Excellent plane ride back down. Everyone got both a window and an aisle seat ;)