Off to Kaikoura to see Val & Dom. Val just back from another stint in the Arctic (guiding) and soon off again to Antarctica… Dom, soon to get his thousand hours in the helicopter and then presumably they’ll be off somewhere else (which will be a shame as we’ll miss them!).

Games were played, “Kinect” – that clever little add on for the X-Box which tracks your movements. While it may not look like it, this is me on my way to crushing Maaike in the 100m sprints.

On that note, I got my report card back from Outward Bound … and I quote:

They encouraged him to be more competitive so that he continues to gain as much as he can out of life

You read it here first folks, I’ve a green light to be *more* competitive. Hah.

Anyway, Kaikoura..

Lovely spot. Need to get a set of these wooden kiwi’s …

Then it was off to see Mike and Heather – and how their house is progressing. The last time we were there, there wasn’t a house. Now there is.

And a turkey (Romeo)

And a septic tank water cleaning tank system thingy..

It’s all very impressive. Heather’s Mum is over from the US and helping out for a while, and she is keeping an excellent blog on how the building is progressing.

Off to Akaroa after OB for a debrief ;) It’s always a lovely place to get away to. The slightly annoying thing was that, pretty much for the rugby world cup, legislation was passed so that you can’t just rock up anywhere in your camper van *unless* it has an installed toilet. Now, my little van doesn’t have one. I’m not sure how much it’s being enforced, and I *can* understand the reasoning… but still… I hate staying in parks like this one… (pretty ‘n all as it is)

I suspect if you’re out in the wilds then you’re very unlikely to be snared.. but I dunno.. it’s just the *fear* of being caught I suppose. Still, the fine is only $200 or something, so if you can get away with a ratio of 5:1 then you’re on the up ;)

Mostly the weekend was about the chatting eating and drinking.. Maaike trying to get accustomed to my attempt at a beard (here to stay for a while I think)

There was swinging too

We also went to see The Tree of Life. It recently won the Cannes Film Festival.. and I must say.. it was total pants. I’m sure it was entirely “clever”, “arty”, “thoughtful”, “deep”, “meaningful” etc. etc. ad nauseam. I’m quite possibly too dense to really “get it”, but I thought that while it was a pretty film with some nice images, the actual plot, storyline, charachters, y’know, something you might enjoy in a 2 hour long film might actually be there. Total rubbish in my opinion…. I’ll leave you with a couple of quips from imdb:

The Tree of Life wilts under the scrutiny of any audience not sitting in a museum or on hallucinogenics.

Basically it had no plot, a vague meaning, and seemed to be consciously attempting to be artsy. I suspect that Cannes critics praised it out of fear that they were the only ones who didn’t understand it, somewhat of a ‘king’s new clothes’ scenario.

Please email for the password if I haven’t already given it to you. The reason it’s protected is simply so that information about Outward Bound isn’t too easily accessible as it’d spoil the fun if people who were going to go on the course could get info on it toooo easily!

So.. I was listening to a podcast (This American Life – excellent).. and it was on gossip. During the podcast they played a snippet of music which I loved.

So.. downloaded Songza – which is an app which can discover what music you are listening to.. found out that it was “I heard, by the mills brothers”.

Put that into youtube.. and here’s the result.

It is quite ridiculous what you can do with computers these days. Really quite incredible. I remember ZX Spectrums and very slow modems (128bps?). Crazy. Really crazy