Apologies – this blog has taken a complete hammering while I’ve been working away mostly on Snowpool. My bad… will try to do more exciting thing and be a little more regular keeping updated.

Up to Palmy for the weekend. It was Maaike and my present to Mary for Christmas (we’d head up, take her out etc.) Unfortunately I didn’t take many pictures… but we had some nice snow to look at on the way up..

We had a lovely weekend, and took a quick trip to . It’s a nice little studenty town on a river.. (has claimed a fair few lives that river!)

That’s the Waimarie there. They resurrected it from the bottom of the river. Seems they did a good job :)

Also saw glass blowing in action. That was fun. If we’d have time we’d have given it a go (unfortunately it books up, and you need the weekend)

Finally.. also had my Thirty Third and a Third birthday party. Lots of fun. People came as Dirty Trees, and turds…

A really good night.

So the other weekend it was my old flatmate’s birthday, and he elected to go for a tramp (before some fine beers were drunk later on that evening).

Little mount peel was the venue of choice.. it’s here.

This is what it looks like on the way up.

And this is the view from the top

There’s a little shelter at the top where we had lunch – nice wee spot.

And a small waterfall on the way back.

It was excellent to get out and stretch the legs..

Also – here’s a link to Eimear Brogan’s blog. She’s working as a physio in Haiti…

Well there has been quite the lack of posting on this blog… will have to make amends. Mostly I’ve been working away on Snowpool – with much help from two friends Paddy & Becks..

Firstly – climbing. Headed climbing outside (in Christchurch) with Julia for my first time since the earthquakes. Most of the crags have been closed because of rockfall hazard, but they’ve made a couple of them safe – so off we went. You can still see the rocks across the summit road where they fell in February?

Still, it was a great days climbing… lovely to be outside again.

Next, my first ever foray into the world of rhubarb and apple crumble (an unmitigated success)

Finally.. I’ve spent the last month or so (again, with lots of help from Paddy and Becks) working up to getting the word out about Snowpool. The first attempt at which was going to the CSA Ski Sale and handing out flyers.

Beck helped out with the graphic design and so we had flyers (and hoodies) to give out / show off. I’d ordered 1000 stickers from the US () which is a great site. I uploaded the image, they had a proof ready within an hour and printed within 2 days. Then it went to USPS to (priority) ship to New Zealand 7-10 days… and it arrived 24 days later one day after the ski sale. More than slightly irritating. Anyway, stickermule kindly gave me a discount off the next purchase, and life goes on with slightly more stickers than I was expecting to have left!

I’ve made video’s to show ski fields how to take info from Snowpool and put it into their websites and twitter, facebook etc. It’s quite ridiculous how hard it is to get the ski fields to do this. I mean.. here’s a service that will

• Save people money
• Be more environmentally friendly
• Get more people up the hills to their fields if they help promote
• Less wear and tear on their roads

And probably a lot of other reasons… you think they’d be proactive about it. But no. It’s completely ridiculous.

Anyway, rant over… hopefully it’ll be a great ski season… I’m intruiged to see whether all this marketing will give a real boost to the numbers. We’ll see.

So.. one of the nice things to come out of these measely earthquakes is Gapfiller. Basically they setup installations (could be anything from an old fridge on a random corner with books in it) to….

The Dance-o-mat