Being self employed definitely has it's bonuses

Had a good day in the hills today.

Around 6pm last night, I got a txt from David Hamilton (local GP) asking if I wanted to climb Barrier Knob with him today.

I nearly said no, as I haven't actually got much work done this week, but with Nicky's help made the decision to go anyway.
The forcast was good (the only day this week), David had the day off, the avalanche forcasting was good (ie low risk), pluto was aligned with goofy, and I had nothing that had to be done today.

I enabled a new way of including media files (images, video, sound) and other files (pdf's etc) into your blog posts.

It's called "Scald" - don't ask me why; the bloke who wrote it is French so perhaps it's a French anacronym.

Now, whenever you're on a page you can edit (or even comment on) you will see a bar at the right of your browser that looks like:

Douglas and Gethin were both racing today.

Gethin was racing in the Otago Championships Kart race, and Douglas was racing in the Southland Schools Orienteering Championships.

The Otago Champs is a trophy that Gethin has pretty much made his own - he's won it in every class he's competed in. This year he's in a different class - Rotax Max.

We had an interesting morning.

firstly the snow. This is carrying on.

Then I was making breakfast and heard a thump on the patio window. Looked up and saw feathers on the window and a New Zealand Falcon flying away. There was a rather concussed thrush on the patio.

Nicky reckoned the falcon would return, and sure enough, a few minutes later, there it was on the lawn. I expected it to quickly swoop onto the thrush, but the building must have hindered it, so instead it stalked it: