So lets get the good news out of the way first, Tania said yes. Well actually she said “absolutely”, but in legal terms that counts as a yes and we’re getting married at Christmas next year. I had planned it to happen while hiking the Kepler Track but since we’d reached a major mile-stone in our renovations I was in a good mood and decided to pop the question right then. Which was good because she’d already guessed something was going to happen while hiking and I hate to be predictable. Anyway, I buried the ring in a geode in the wall of our recently finished hole and made her dig it out. It looked a little something like this:

So we’ve now got 12 months of planning and then the rest of our lives to reminisce about it. In other news we’re still working on the foundations. The builder is building a wall and the supports, all we have to do is to paint the back of it with a heavy duty waterproof paint, no more digging out tonnes of clay! We bought a nice safe family station wagon, used it to carry one set of bricks across town and then it got hit & run by a drunk driver. Thankfully there were no serious injuries, others stopped to help and through the power of MotoWeb the WhitePages and FaceBook I was able to track him down and hand the details over to our insurance company and the police. I look forward to the day I can stand in court and point my finger at that bastard.

Apart from that I’m busy trying to write iPhone apps, Tania is busy working and we’re both looking forward to a long lazy Christmas break. All the best to all of you, and once again I promise to update more often.

Good weather and no builder on site meant Tania and I spent the weekend in the garden. The task for this weekend was to get the fruit trees that have been sitting on our front steps into the soil. My parents have apple and lemon trees in the their garden but they are so short and squat that mowing under them is a real pain. To avoid that I built three pretty simple boxes that cost just $40 NZD all up.

Materials:
Six 15×62.5cm Radiata planks (for the fronts)
Six 15×57.5cm Radiata planks (for the sides)
Twelve x 30cm Radiata steaks: H3 treated
pack of galvanized nails (at least 72)
big tub of black acrylic paint.

The planks were purposefully cut to have a difference of 5cm between the front and side pieces. They are 2.5cm thick so the over lap at the corners makes them square.

Nail the steaks to the shorter planks, then the longer planks. It is best to nail to the steaks rather than each other so that if one ever comes off it doesn’t take the others with it.

You’ll want to remove the grass from beneath the boxes so it doesn’t grow up and smother what ever you’re planting there. Just place the box where you want it and then dig around the edge to mark the square, remove the box and cut lines across the area a couple of inches deep. Slide the spade under neath and you’ll be able to life the turf right off. Of course you can dig it however you want but we needed to transplant the grass to cover and area where I removed a tree stump.

Be careful when pushing the boxes into the ground, you wouldn’t want one side to get ahead of the others incase it twists the wood. You could knock each corner one by one, but if you’ve got a lovely assistant *waves hands and Tania enters stage left* you could do it like we did and use four feet to push all corners in simultaneously.

The end result
So we now have lemon, lime and mandarin trees in the front garden. We’ve got plans for another four. Perhaps nectarine, apple, pear and plum. A veritable orchard I tell you

There are a few changes going on in my life, chiefly a new (ish) job, moving in with my girlfriend and soon we’ll be house hunting. The beginning of a new year gives me a good reason to sit back and do a bit of planning and thinking about the way I am heading. What do I want from life and how do I go about getting it. With the financial trouble that providing the newspapers with fresh doomsday headlines almost every day it occurred to me that it’s time for a rebalance. The commercialised and consumer centric society has had it’s day while the retailers were wailing about the public not spending “enough” this Christmas I was glad that the holiday season may return to being that, rather than the buying season it has become. So the retailers may go out of business, millions of jobs get lost. How can we cope? How about doing it ourselves? Tania and I are growing a few vegetables now and when we do buy a house we’re going to dedicate a large chunk of garden to feeding ourselves. It’s green and economical. My parents are doing the same after years of having an unproductive compost heap they now grow a full range of veges and my younger brothers are taking up fishing. This doesn’t quite stack up to Ayumi’s ideal of living in a fully self-sustainable community but it’s a good step along the way.

There are obviously people out there who are further down the track. My good friends The Noodleheads are two of those and have recently pledged to buy nothing new for a year, except essentials for hygiene & safety (think toothpaste and brake fluid). I’d like to get to that stage but with the potential for owning my first house this year and not having a lot of kitchen wear I doubt I’d be able to keep to the pledge. I can still do my part. I cycle to work now and only use my girlfriends’ car vary sparingly, thus reduction the amount of pollution I cause. I have only bought two shirts and a few pairs of socks in the last year, it’s not like I’m growing and my trousers haven’t quite worn out yet. I’m reusing shopping bags and those plastic boxes that (my flatmates’) takeaways come in and our recycling bin is filled quicker than the refuse one.

When we do get our house you can expect a few posts on the measures we’ll be installing to lower our impact on the planet and our wallets. Water troughs for the vegetable garden. If only solar panels were cleaner and cheaper to produce. I’d love to drop of the grid.

After releasing Geotagger 2 I’ve taken a break from Mac programming and branched out into making apps for iPhones. I’ve been officially accepted into the programme and I’ve got most of the logic sorted on my first game. What’s missing now is the real spit an polish to make it a seller, something that people will show off to the friends and earn me another sale. Yes I’m now charging for my apps.

There will be more about that in a coming post, about sustainability, about my coding projects and about the cool new geotagging in iPhoto.

I’ve spent this morning setting up my new MacBook’s dev environment to match what I had before. I’m now ready to get back into coding and polishing up the donationware items I released in my former life as a developer. The last two years have seen a lot of my personal time devoted to getting my body and mind into shape for months of isolation and hardcore exercise that comes with crossing countries on foot. Now I’m back on solid ground, thinking about arranging millions of 1s and 0s in a row. It’s an entirely different challenge and one I welcome. I haven’t decided if I can announce where I work just yet. Not that it’s a state secret but I’m not sure on their policies of personal blogs. Rest assured that it’s something I’m really looking forward to in a field I can be pretty happy I’m working in. I’ll try not to bang on about it at parties though

I’ve a week of induction and set up. Then once my brain is back in gear it should flow through to my own projects, if I’m not busy moving house, which I will be.

I got an email last week from “an aspiring traveller” and it’s a question I’ve been asked a few times so I thought I’d share it.

Dear sir,
I am just curios as to how do you continue your travels and have ample budgets for your expeditions. I aspire to do just what you are doing now. I would like to know how do you earn your expenses along your journey.

and my response

Hi James,

If there’s a secret to my travels it’s being careful with my money and being prepared to be very uncomfortable. I take it you’ve seen both my American and Japanese walking sites. For those adventures I had almost no accommodation costs by sleeping in a tent, in temples in the occasional abandoned tunnel. The last 6 weeks of OneManWalking was traveling in a different style. Having a girlfriend along changes things because I wouldn’t want to put her in the position of sleeping in public toilets (a big fancy disabled one with my tent’s ground sheet below). So expenses went up dramatically. When I’m back home I try not to spend too much on things I can do free. I eat in as much as possible and rarely see movies at the cinema. I was really lucky to get cheap rent about 4km from my job so I walked that every day. It was good exercise and it saved me money.

In neither case did I deliberately earn expenses along the way. Once in America I was given a free room for helping spread wood chips at an inn-keeper’s prayer park and in Japan the locals were incredibly generous. Some people stopped and gave me fruit, some bought food from convenience stores and handed it straight to me and some even handed me cash. I never asked for it but they felt like doing a good thing for someone taking the time to see their country in a different way. There’s a similar phenomenon on the PCT called “trail magic”, people leaving chilli-bins (coolers) in the forest full of drinks and snacks, or doing other good deeds just because they like to. You should never get to a point where you rely on these things, be self sufficient, but be open to the idea that things usually work out pretty well.

If you do go traveling and write about it, let me know, I’ll be needing some good travelblogs for next year.

~Craig

I’m settling back in pretty well. On the job/house hunting circuits. I haven’t yet dug back into my code, I haven’t even gotten the latest version of Google Earth. But I will, and I’ll post updates to both projects when I can.

I thought I had made a post about this but there’s nothing here so I guess it slipped my mind. As of April 2008 I’m in Japan walking from the southern tip (Cape Sata) to the northern tip (Cape Soya). Originally I’d hoped for a mountain route and upto 6 months of walking, but I got impatient and missed my girlfriend. Now the plan is to finish on my birthday (and hers as it happens) which will mean a 98 day trek and as far as I know that’s the fastest yet. It’s all documented on OneManWalking.com. While on the move I’m sending home photos and videos which my dad is geotagging and uploading. The videos have been nominated for a prize on Seero.com, so please pop along and vote for me (free registration required) because I need a break from walking 25 miles per day

   I’m back from the trek and adjusting to being indoors again. Somethings are coming naturally but I’m having trouble starting any of the projects I thought up while I was away. Tomorrow is a big test, the return to work. 9 to 5 under fluorescent lights and in a chair at a desk. It’s going to be a bit of a shock I’m sure but as I’ve been telling people all the way along I’m lucky to have a job waiting for me, many other hikers had to quit their jobs and would now be facing interviews. My brain is still in warm-up mode and I’m in no condition to impress a panel of judges.

Soon I’ll be restarting work on my software projects. iPhotoToGoogleEarth will have one more release before I make a new version for iPhoto 7 (part of iLife ‘08). I’ve some improvements for GeoTagger but it should be forwards compatible already. let me know if that isn’t the case.

If you’re wondering what I’ve been up to check out this little video clip, it shows 5 months of hiking on the PCT

Things have genuinely been busy, but I must take some time out to write about them. The new year is here and I only have 3 months left before I fly off to America and start The Pacific Crest Trail. I got two pieces of news today that help me considerably. The first was that my employer will keep my job for me until I return, this is handy because I know I’ll have an income when I return and can afford to spend a little more while on the trail (though I won’t quite be shouting everyone lobster dinners). The second piece was the very generous offer of accommodation by a couple in San Diego so I have somewhere to stay while I create my resupply packages for the first few months on the trail.
In other news I’ve been training hard, gaining weight and doing a little bit of planning. Last week I walked the Northern Circuit with my dad and sister, then did a couple of extra days on the Round The Mountain track. It was really good to get some proper practice in, using my new tent and cooking tools. I’ll write about it properly over on PCT2007.org with a good selection of photos just as soon as I can. For now though you can check out my new hiker trash look.

The weirdest thing I saw today was a can in the Thai mini-market in Northcote. It was called Birds’s nest and had the strange subtext of “Flavoured Artificial White Fungus” which made up 4% of the ingredients. There’s also some text that says “boisson au parfum du nid d’oiseau” and you hardly need a translater to work out what that means. I bought it and drank it. It wasn’t foul as such, but I wouldn’t buy another one.