vedana.net

going snowboarding

Before leaving Dunedin Wednesday morning, I met up with Dr. Nigel Chang of the University of Otago's Anthropology Department, who heads over to north-east Thailand for 2-3 months each year doing digs for the department's "Origins of Angkor" project. Angkor being the totally wicked ruins over in western Cambodia, which I fully intend to visit sometime. There's the remote possibility of me contributing my computing skills to the Origins project on-site in Thailand some day. Um yeah, that would seriously rule.

Then Wednesday evening I crashed in on a meeting of the Apple User Group of Canterbury, here in Christchurch, and met up with some cool folks using Macs here in town. The crowd was largely an older one; I'm used to younger, geekier meetings back home. The focus was definitely on more simple stuff, like Appleworks basics, but the people were all wonderful, and they served tea and biscuits! ("biscuits" in New Zealand, and I suspect elsewhere in the Commonwealth, are what we call "cookies" back home)

Tomorrow morning I'm headed to Methven to learn how to snowboard at Mt. Hutt over the next few days. A Kiwi girl (a U. of Otago Law student, no less) I met down in Dunedin offered to teach me how; the students are on break at the moment, and it's definitely the middle of winter down here, so... why not? Hopefully I won't break anything. If all goes well, maybe I'll get her to snap some pictures of me cutting some sweet powder down the slopes, or more likely falling flat on my ass. I have a feeling it'll be a lot like the trip Cloud and I took to Michigan for spring break last year, when I learned how to ski. I recall a helluva lot of falling, and a helluva lot of sheer determination.