Happy happy joy joy! Yours truly has got a job! I start Monday week, working for a small company in Whangarei – I can’t believe it – thought I’d be out of work for ages!

First up? Treating myself – new hair colour, new clothes (all this derby has made my work trousers too big!) and new shoes!

Then? Saving, saving, saving for clear our debts and for our trip to the UK next year.

So HAPPY!

In March my best friend L and I made a pact: whenever we visited one another we would fit in a walk or a tramp or a hike (along with the shopping/drinking/catching up on all the goss!).

So it was Mt Manaia in March when we stayed the weekend at Ocean Beach and on Sunday when we were down in Auckland L and I took a two hour walk along the coast from Milford to the end of Takapuna Beach and back again.

It was a sullen, grey, flat kind of day, and there was little point of any colour in the photos I took, so there was nothing for it but to go black and white…

This morning, in some sort of random bucket-list type of moment I decided that I would hike to the top of the mountain at the end of our road.

Yes, we have a mountain at the end of our road. It is a small one, granted, but it is a mountain.

The voices of doom and gloom were soon hanging over me from respective members of my family at the sheer idea of it: “Oooh, you’ll be away for hours” – “It’s a bloody long way, you sure?” “Take lots of water. Have you got some snacks? What about your mobile phone?”

Dutifully dropped at the top of the road by my skeptical father and his new quad bike it took me forty (hot, sweaty, hilly) minutes to get to the top of the mountain (like I said, small mountain) and the view, my friends, was fan-tas-tic.

Mind you, I did have to prove it to one and all that I did make it….as these photos plainly do.

And let’s just say the ol’ muscles are certainly reminding me as I type that I did in fact climb a mountain this morning