The Book of Ashes

Dan is leaving for Auckland. 5:32AM

The sun shines, heat pounds down upon sweaty bodies. The conditions are ideal for doing nothing. Nothing is done. Yet we all flail around in the darkness trying to find our way...

Why does no one know where they're going? I think people finally get old and fed up and just give up and settle down to life where they are (the settled down stage of life), then they become happy :)

Its been too long since I last wrote and I don't quite remember what I've done in that time. It will have to be snippets of my life then...

Lunch with Bryth, lunch with Tom. Went to the gym a couple of times, got a few business decisions sorted and a little bit of work done. I finally got my indexer program up and working. For those that don't know this is a program that put simply allows you to associate keywords to images. When I upload images from my camera to my computer they go into a folder named after the event I was photographing and they are called dscf001.jpg, dscf002.jpg, etc. It becomes very hard to find photos of Tom out of my 100 odd folders so if I can add keywords against images then use queries to return all images from this date to that containing keywords ""TOM"" & ""SPASTIC-FACE"" then it will cut down my retrieval rates greatly (and in this case return about 20-30 odd photos). It still needs a little tidying up but is mostly functional.

Dan is moving to Auckland. He has a job at Navman and leaves in 2 weeks time. I will be looking for a new flatmate next Wednesday. Should be fun. Katrina is moving up with Dan a month later. To celebrate his new job we went out for a meal at Masala on Friday. I popped into TT for Moira's birthday drinks first and ended up getting quite written. Didn't get much sleep and was very tired the next day.

Saturday I was up relatively early to catch the train up to Param to visit my Grandparents with Bryth. I was pretty buggered for most of the day but had a good time. It was great walking on the beach up there (its so big) and dipping my feet in the relatively warm water (compared to Wellingtons sea temeratures).

After coming home Bryth & I grabbed some fish & chips and I went home for a quick rest. Later I headed out to Bonnie's place for her flatwarming. It was pretty cool but I was fairly tired so home before I turned into a pumpkin at midnight and saw Char at home who had just been out for her hens night. She had a few dramas but a good night. Then I slept...

Today Bryth came round and we went out to investigate sea kyaking. It was a little cool and windy so we decided to wait for the perfect conditions and go rock climbing instead. Rock climbing was awesome. My arms don't hurt as much as they used to so I lasted a lot longer than I would have. I can climb 3/4 of the way up the hanging rope just using my arms. Also can do most of the walls. By the end of it we were buggered tho and neither of us could write properly with a pen as Tom filled out a 10 sesh app form. Will definietly have to do more rock climbing this year.

On our way back we found the pavement covered in chalk. Someone had organised a chalk the walk day and there were buckets of chalk everywhere. Tom & I picked some up and started drawing. I drew a sun with Ashes under it and Tom drew Tom with a smiley face in the middle. I amended it to read Tom Loves Coke. I then put FREE BEER -> signs leading along the walk and then into the sea. We then decided to draw a NZ flag which turned out really cool. Some chicks walked past (16yrs) and one said ""hey its like dimensional"" cause it had a wave in it, her friend said to her ""you shouldn't try using big words like that!"" FUNNY. Our flag was way cooler than the other 10yr olds drawings tho. We rocked! It was heaps of fun