Spotify has changed the way I live my life, every new day has a new soundtrack that matches my highs and lows. I fall asleep each night with a new song trickling in to my ears (and wake up soon after with the head phones wrapped around my throat.) So damn peaceful.
Hillman aka Chicken was over for a visit. Got some decent snowboarding done on the first day with him, sun shining, soft mushy snow. Beautiful weather for park riding. The next day was a little more dreary, but still decent snow up Remarks. The third day we made the mistake of going to coronet, which was simply terrible. I got so bored with riding the concrete tracks they call snow that I went off hiking to find a jump. That was about when James and I fell about fifty feet down a sheer icy slope that felt more like glass with some water and oil sprinkled over it. Poor old James went flying off down past the barrier which had massive warning signs on it saying, DANGER - NO SKI PATROL AREA. Somehow we managed to clamber back up by jumping up to grass patches and grabbing a hold of them until we got back to the path. Once there we went and ate lunch in silence, brooding over our shared life experience.
Also recently in the life of Ashton was a pub crawl. Butt loads of fun, and loads of fun butt. First drink was at 2:30pm down the old courthouse, 1876. We took a photo in each pub to follow, with the pictures steadily containing more red eyes and drooping stances. After a few too many beersies, my usual drunken smile was frozen permanently on my stupid drunken face. When 5:30am rolled around it was time to leave the pubs, and where better to go next then with some random stranger up on to the rooftops to run around like crazy adolescents? Leaping around from roof to roof like intoxicated ninjas looking like ducks with no feathers trying to fly. Our misadventures finally leading us in to a backpacker through the top balcony, where we practised a guitar we found and then ran off into the rising sun to get some shut eye.
After my spontaneous inebriated parkour it was a pleasant change of pace to work down at Milford Sound for a couple of days. With the boss flashing his credit card around paying for food, beverage and accommodation we headed off at 5:45am Wednesday morning, which saw us miles away from anywhere by the time the sun started to rise. The clouds hung in droves just above the jagged mountain peaks, creating a giant scar in the heavens through which the golden sun blared, spilling out like molten blood. As the fiery orb rose its light reached out and touched the clouds, turning them insane pinks and purples. Milford was a great little escape, but work took up most of the time and soon enough I was back in Queenstown. Back to my monotony. Back to routine. Man I need a tropical holiday...
