Life in General

So I think there are going to have to be a few text based posts :( Paul has given me an assignment that would be easy for me to relate by text or speech but I am having a bit of trouble capturing it with an image. So Paul, I'm working on it.

We've been getting a bit of riding in, had two rides with Briony on Mt Fromme, we found a fun little trail called Espresso that makes me think I can actually ride a bike, and I've been rapidly getting better at steep rocky switchbacks; 'cause its safer to ride them than walk them. I'm really not exaggerating...much. Weather permitting we are off to Whistler this weekend.
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/532728227
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/531396231   (As you can see by the heart rate, I. am. not. fit.)

Got a new boardgame, Terra Mystica, so much wood. It's a fun euro game that plays reasonably quickly with a nice amount of asymmetry and beautiful components. Not found anyone to play with yet, but we aren't being very social at the moment while we get set up.

Went paragliding the other day, had four flights, logged a little over two hours of flight time. Caught a few thermals, caught quite a bit of turbulence, went on an under-prepared cross country flight.

The XC was arranged while shuttling to the top with one of the tandem pilots, "Get high enough to fly over that little peak and you will be fine to make it on glide, aim for the roundest hill and follow Kevin into landing." Turns out the landing was here.

The landing

I thought it was somewhere here,

not the landing

The problem is that top down it is clear which hill is round and which is a ridge, in profile from launch the closer round hill appears quite conical and has a lot of vertical features while the ridge behind it appears to be a lovely round dome, so I was aiming at the wrong place.
And I came down here

my landing

I was a bit low and knew I wasn't going to make the ridge line and had to pick a landing, I would have preferred to land here

My flight path preferred landing

but from the air it looked like freshly sprouted crop field and I really didn't want to deal with landing in that and the resultant damage/farmer grief, so I scraped over some powerlines (I would guess I had 15-20m vertical clearance but I was still closer than I wanted to be) and landed crosswind, which I ran off for my best landing of the day. So a lack of updating my flight plan with my current situation and then sticking to it left me in a situation where I was forced to land now rather than choosing to land. So I would have made the landing if I'd headed in the right direction I was trying to get get to that southern ridgeline to get some lift. I flew too far north of the river bank and missed all the thermals/lift generated by the mudflats, I was flying in the water affected air. The thing to do is follow the river bank (right above it) and then make a line for this hill

the "roundest" hill

which apparently produces some real lift then land in the field in lovely laminar wind.