In Which I Do Some Silly Things

First Silly Thing: We went and watched the Geminids on Friday night.

First, there was a gathering of hoardlings at Gengys All-You-Can-Eat Mongolian BBQ, which was a good chance to catch up with people we hadn't seen for nearly a week. Then we retired to Casito, hung around talking, playing games or reading comics, until 12:30. A quick sky-check said that, once again, the Friday night was clearing. So eventually we piled in to 2 cars and headed up to Muriwai.

It was glorious up there, Auckland only a sullen orange glow on the southern horizon, the Milky Way stretching out north to south, thicker than one sees it usually. As usual, Orion was standing on his shoulder - one day I'll catch him the right way up! The sky was clear of clouds, but the wind was a bit nippy - the first time I'd felt cold for about 2 weeks. There was the crash of surf on the beach below, but we didn't go down, because then we wouldn't have seen as much of the sky. So we sat in the carpark, leaning against the cars for a while, until our necks started hurting, then doc_spatial got a tarpaulin out of his car, and I found the blanket from ours, so the 6 of us lay on the ground and periodically went 'oooh' and 'aaah' as lights streaked across the sky.

The meteors were infrequent, though zcatcurious reckons they came at about one a mintue. The strange thing was that they were happening all over the sky. We had been debating whether we went up the East Coast or the West, because they were supposed to be coming out of Gemini, rising in the North-east. We ended up going to Muriwai because you can get out of the city glare quicker up the West coast. And we saw meteors to the north, the south, east and west, going in opposite directions, at right angles, all over.

We finally got cold, and headed home, tumbling into bed sometime after 4:00am.

Silly Thing the Second: I sign up for exercise.

See, when we took in the money for Oxfam on Tuesday, the girl in the office said, "Thanks, and have you considered the Oxfam Trailwalker fund raiser? We need more people." I had looked at the ads, thought that sounded fun, one day, when I'm fit... But they needed more people to join, so I said we'd see if any of our friends would be interested.

I sent an email, got one response, and then at the meteor-watching, reassured the Wolverines that we still had time to join. Having gotten an enthusiastic response, I went and signed up our team yesterday morning. I'm hoping we'll have about 8 people training for it, and just before April, we'll decide which 4 of us will walk 100km in 36 hours, and the others will be the support crew. This may be one of the silliest things I have done for a long while, but if we complete the course, it will be a great achievement.

I'm hoping we can get the team together soon, maybe this next weekend, to try a 4 hour tramp, and see how we handle it. We have 28 days to pay the $600 participation fee, which gives us some time to discuss if we can actually do it, or if we should start training now for next year. If we decide to go ahead, then we will have to start training in earnest, and raise at least $2000 in sponsorship.

ST 3
So with all this happening, having paid $25 to reserve a place in the Trailwalker, I then went and tripped on the steps on the way back from paying rent yesterday, twisting my foot (but thankfully not my ankle) and breaking my big-toe nail in half. I spent the rest of the day with my foot up, throbbing, watching NCIS (thanks to <lj user=starfirenz), and reading Terry Pratchett, instead of the Christmas shopping I had meant to be doing. Hopefully I can walk more comfortably today, and this won't seriously affect the attempt to train for a 100km tramp... Feeling silly, but happy.