Toby's journal

Skiing was fun.
Five of us drove up to Mansfield on Friday night, and stayed in this bungalow on a farm, full of beds, about half an hour drive from Mt Buller.

Each morning, we piled into my Subaru at 8am, which I was rather surprised could actually manage to fit five adults plus all their skis, boots, clothes, etc into it, and I drove us to the mountain. In the evening I drove us back while everyone else napped..

Buller itself claimed to have 75cm average snow depth, but this seemed to be a blatant lie.. The bottom parts of the mountain had about 0 to 5 cm of cover, which surely means the top half would need 150cm to average out at 75cm.. However it was more like 20-30cm cover around there at best. *shrug* oh well, it was definitely skiable - you just often had to load onto the lifts halfway down, instead of all the way.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I don't seem to have forgotten how to ski, despite not having been on a mountain for about eight years. Also a pleasant surprise was discovering that the best snow seemed to be on a particular valley that only had black runs on it, thus ensuring that the lift at the bottom never had any queues on it.

I did have a bit of a stack on Sunday, and it was a good and proper one, where you spend five minutes walking up the mountain picking up your skies, poles and items of clothing. Unfortunately it seems my camera copped a battering in the process - see the photo below!
Luckily I was just carrying around a budget point-and-shoot that I have precisely for occasions where I don't want to risk the D700, so it's not a great loss. I am slightly disappointed that the screen broke though, but I guess it must have copped a ski binding or something to the back of it while I tumbled down the mountain.
I had contemplated taking the old Nikon FE up the mountain, as it's practically indestructable - however maybe it's for the best.. I suspect if I landed hard on it, I'd be more likely to break a rib than to break a camera!

Oh FFS! I know I've said this before, and so have others, but really - Don't order anything worth anything from 7dayshop.com!
They're great (and cheap) if you want stuff like memory cards or rolls of film or batteries.. but that's about it!

I cannot believe how absolutely useless they are, in general.
I've had issues before (and so have lots of friends) where you order something "in stock", then it turns out to never come into stock, but they forget to refund you until you remember and remind them, six months later.

However my current problem is thus: I ordered a camera from them, which arrived last week, but was faulty. I had to ship it straight back to them, at my expense. I asked for them to send a replacement. However that replacement hasn't arrived, and I haven't even received any notification from them that they've received the faulty unit. However I noticed today on my bank statement that 7dayshop refunded me the cost of the camera, several days ago. (Just the cost of the camera though - not the delivery charge. Nor my return postage).

I've emailed them to say "what the fuck?" (politely), but yeah.. total muppets. I'm so never dealing with them again!

Why does this always happen to me??

(In other news - my LCD monitor at home is on the blink, and 512Mb of my memory has developed a single-byte fault. (It used to pass a one-hour memtest86 check fine.. now it fails within a minute or two). *sigh* I should start building mud huts or something.)