Well, grand aulde week.. Nuffink too special, the new site is going fine.  Which is a relief.. but that’s all good.  New house working out, except for having made a video when it wasn’t clean ;)  hehe, ahh well, au naturel c’est moi.  Squash on Monday was good, and brother Matts bday on Tuesday.. good to talk.  Esp when I get to talk about boarding ;)  ehem.  So yeah, had caving practice on the Wednesday.. see this weekend was going to be heading off on a fairly serious caving trip, but the weather is going to be too bad.  It would have involved camping underground.. which is kinda exciting and scary.  So I’m quite relieved that it gets postponed and I get to wuss out :)

 

Then on Friday it was Simon, Emma, Fiona and Peters last day in work.. so out for a couple of drinks.. lazy weekend ahead – can’t wait!

Here’s a short video of some of the inside of the house (4.5 Meg)

Crazy busy week, Monday squash, Tuesday pub with the Irish posse, Wed Yvonne back from Oz for a few days so headed out for dinner with her and friends from work, Thursday – Barry, Ben and Ronan were back for their last night, so headed out with them. Friday was a Mid-Winter Christmas party with work.

Then it was Saturday. And what a day. Blue skies.. and off for SNOW BOARDING Woo hoo. Damn it’s a fun sport.

Drove there with two friends from work – Simon and Fiona, both temps who will unfortunately be leaving at the end of the week… But a great day out. Mad road up to the slopes. Apparently a couple of cars fall off the edges each year, and some have even been blown off..

So it was to Mt Hutt that we went. Great day. Got a lesson – well two ish, 2 hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. It was a big group lesson, next time I’ll get a lesson on my own I think, but it was good. Learned how to turn on your toes, and on your heels. This is the basics of snow-boarding, once you can do those correctly then you can do S bend turns all the way down a slope..

In theory.

But sure it was such a good time. Really makes me want to get back up there again ASAP. Will have to organise a day off work next week (before I head to Sydney) and go up midweek when there are less people around.. Yup, this is a sport I want to do *all* the time now. It’s just so much fun.

There are Kia up at Mt. Hutt

So you do have to be careful. They’re a very intelligent parrot. The only thing is that the adolescents have a tendency to go on sugar highs and then attack things for fun – like it you leave a car window in they’ll happily get inside and rip your seats to shreds. For real.

But a great day. I did manage to get a couple of complete S bends (so heel & toe routine) without falling over by the end of the day.. was pretty happy about it.

Today Sunday – up and off doing some trad climbing up at Castle Rock – which is on the Port Hills overlooking ChCh. Really lovely views.. will get some mountain biking up there sometime, but will need a proper bike to do it with.

Must say though, it’s an insane bunch of people I live with, and I love it. Well, active perhaps more than insane.

Here’s a vintage Morris being loaded up with 3 kayaks (midwinter!) – the girl beside the car is Araha – Waricks girlfriend, who is back down to Dunedin to finish her 2nd year of her 2nd degree.. Good excuse to visit though hopefully :) So yeah – Warick was heading off Kayaking.. Steve & Yvonne (different Yvonne!) Michelle, Florian and I went climbing and Luke headed off to do some backcountry snowboarding (you hike with your snowboard and then head off down some slope…) Which is what Florian was up to on Saturday – except he was ‘Ski Touring’.

That was just for the morning, then in the afternoon another trip to the Supershed, got some stuff to kit out our living rooms (we’ve changed the organisation of the flat a little bit..) But I’ll make a little video of the place tomorrow hopefully and put it up.

Then it was back to move into the new place. Had a really lovely evening on Sunday evening.. Florian cooked a meal, and also Michelle (as we didn’t have enough stuff) and 5 of us ate in the main room just sitting around, no tables, just eating on our knees, but it was perfect. I love the place. I’m going to make a little video and put it up sometime too..

Oh yes, a couple more pics, this time of the Yurt we stayed in up in Nelson (sorry it’s all disjointed)

That’s the outside.. the inside (a little foggy as it was warm) was like this. Yum breakfast too

Finally, last night – Conor, Grattan, Ronan, Ben, Barry, Keith & Aisling slept on the floor in our living room (yes it’s bare).. it’s so great to have a place that I can invite people back to.. really great.

So time for a few images.. in no particular order, this was the group of people on the trip.

Front row, with his certificate – Keith, behind him – Grattan, then L->R on the middle row is Ronan, Barry, Conor and Aisling. Behind again – Me and Ben.

Next, well seeing as this pic was taken at the sky-dive centre..

So that was before we went up, then there was the nice paraglide on the way back down again..

So after arriving in Queenstown (which is where I left off writing) we did quite a lot of drinking.. and Barry, Keith and Grattan did a couple of bungee jumps. They did the ‘Nevis’ which is the 2nd longest in the world, at 237m or something.

I didn’t bungee, far too afraid of all the stories about people hurting their eyes. But did have a great chat with the ‘dude’ of a busdriver. Every bus that went the other way he’d make a sort of rap-sign at. Way cool. ehem. However, he does mostly power his house of solar and I think that’s the way to go. I really would like to go that way.. whenever I’m rich enough to have a house.

And there’s grattan jumping out of the thing.

Finally, what I thought was a pretty nice pic of Aisling and I. She and Keith are now off to travel for 3 weeks in Asia (or is it 4) before heading back to Ireland.. wow… must be odd coming to the end of the holiday.