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Published: February 25th 2007
My beach art
In the voice of Rolf Harris "Can you guess what it is yet??"It was a usual week (starting to get in to a routine) - work was fine, went to chiro and physio, went climbing at the Roxx, watched a DVD, spent time at the beach trying to play volleyball with some house mates.
The highlight of the week was walking in to a smoke filled kitchen to see one of my house mates (never found out who, but have my suspicions) had left a pan on the hob. They had left it on so long that when Lisa picked it up to take it off the heat, the bottom fell out of the pan as molten metal and burnt through our work top! Thankfully we went in to the kitchen before going to bed!
Our weekly eat-out treat was at Govinda's - a vegetarian restaurant run by Hare Krshnas - very cheap and very tasty too!
I finally caught the dreaded flu/cold that had been working it's way round the house and took the Friday off. I managed to drag myself out of bed to go bowling though, but I have to point to my illness as the obvious reason Lisa
thrashed me! ;-)
My illness really kicked in and I spent most of the weekend in bed, rising only to take part in Tim's (one of my house mates and climbing/kiting buddy) leaving BBQ.
Monday 4th December 2006 to Sunday 10th December More of the same - work was fine, chiro, physio, climbing, DVD. But this week while mostly feeling ill.
The Dutchies celebrate Christmas a bit differently - they have St. Nicholas Day (before Xmas day) and leave little notes and paintings in their shoes by the fireplace, hoping St.Nick will leave them something. We didn't have a fireplace, so they left a shoe each (and a bowl of water for his deer) by the hallway heater instead. Lisa surprised them by filling the shoes with sweets in the night LOL.
We went back to Govinda's as they do a Yoga and diner special. So I did my first Yoga session (great to stretch out my shoulder/neck) and got a three course vegetarian meal all for $15 (five pounds). Unfortunately due to my illness I brought all three courses back up later that night. :-(
The illness really screwed my week up - I
had to take time off work and our trip to Mt.Cook had to be cancelled.
On the bright side I did see the Wizard of Christchurch (see
video here) and bought some new Keen shoes :-)
I also started sorting my room for the move out at the start of January.
Flying wasn't so great at the start of the week due to the weather and feeling ill. But on Sunday my new wing had arrived (and my helmet and flightsuit) - Icaro Incanto, in 'go faster' red :-) So I took it for a maiden flight off Port Hills flying into Lyttleton. What a flight! I soared along the ridge and start gaining height. I had a vario on which told me my height gain and loss and recorded the whole flight, including max gain and loss and max height. I managed to get up to 2300 feet and was still climbing - I was the highest glider on Port Hills and the view was amazing. The other two guys (Graham and Mike) didn't get so lucky and cruised straight down to the landing site. Even Dave (doing a tandem) had no luck. I could have
Holy melted pan batman!
The result of one of my housemate's attempt on burning the house down... stayed up there all day, but everyone was waiting for me at the landing zone, so I flew out towards the rugby field in Lyttleton. Dave gave me instruction on how to do spirals to loose some height - fantastic feeling! So I landed a very happy chap and was very pleased with the wing.
Later that day we went to Sumner beach to watch and Dave and Graham parmotor (parglide with a motor strapped to your back). It looked pretty impressive and was all going very well until Graham dropped his throttle control through his prop - destroying the control and his prop. He was over the eastery at the time and had to make an emergency landing on the spit. I offered to drive round and collect him - it is a 1 hour round trip to get to the spit, only 200 metres across the water!
We also had a Lisa's friend over for the weekend (Ciaran from Ireland) and it was the Dutchies St Nicholas celebration night - so they had two Dutch girlfriends round for a big piss up.
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