If you’re not on the notify list
If you aren’t on the notify list, you haven’t heard the news that I’m writing somewhere else now. The url would be realfirstandlastname.com, substituting my real first and last name appropriately. I’m not linking from here because I don’t want the two to be easily linkable in the world of google. email me if you need further assistance.
The new site runs on drupal. Yay drupal. Wordpress is nice, I don’t hate it, but drupal handles my photos better, allowing for multiple categories assigned to individual photos. Also if every I want to become *that* kind of online journaller, drupal has forums. And some nice book review modules.
Anyhow, I’m not shutting this down. Yet. I’m sure there are entries that will belong here rather than there. For now, though, most of what I’m saying is going to the other place.
Thanks for reading.
Filed under Uncategorized, go go gadget technology | Comments OffDay 3/4/5 of our annual linuxnet snow-together event
Since I am so late with this and terribly unmotivated to write it all, I’m smushing the last few days of our snow weekend into a single entry.
So on Day 3 I took a rest day and sat in the Louise Lodge all day, stitching my Rogue. Which, incidentally, is finished blocking and this week I will stitch hems and completely finish.
Day 4 was our first trip out to Sunshine this year. (My first time, Jim’s first time this year, as he went last year for the geekski.) Sunshine is a little different from the other places I’ve been to. You park your car and get on a gondola that takes you up to the main ski area.
jim!
Jim in the gondola
me!
me in the sunshine gondola
gondola doors
The doors to the gondola. That’s my board in the basket.
After the ride up, we went off in search of lockers.
Tips for Sunshine:
1. There are lockers in both the pub building and the day lodge. To avoid having to smell the camp-bathroom aroma in the basement of the pub building, use the lockers in the day lodge.
2. The lockers in the basement of the pub and the first floor of the day lodge are $2.00. Loonies only. No Toonies. Get change.
3. You could get change and then save yourself a buck by going up the second floor of the daylodge, where lockers are only a buck. Half price lockers! AND if you walk all the way to the back, where the women’s washroom is, the dollar lockers are even bigger. Most people don’t bother walking that far, but if you have lots of stuff to lock up, that’s a good place to put it.
4. If you aren’t concerned with security, there are bag hooks all over the daylodge. There are also shoes and bags stashed all over the place, unattended. Same at Louise.
5. The bathrooms in the daylodge do have a ledge shelf thing. The ones in the pub are crappy.
6. The strawberry lift is for beginners. It’s slow and not all that high up. If you’re scared of the lift, go there. If the super slow speed is *still* too fast, ask the lift operator at the bottom to ask the operator at the top to slow the lift down when you get there. They will, not that it helped me any.
7. Lastly, the lift operators at Sunshine don’t scan tickets. Only the ones at the gondola scanned. I don’t guarantee that this is ALWAYS the way it goes there, but I’ve been there three times now, both on weekends and weekdays, and it held true. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions there.
I sent the guys off to do their fast skiing thing, and I proceeded to look for something easy to do. The baby section at Sunshine is hideously small in comparison to the one at Louise. And it doesn’t have flower slalom. I hopped on the magic carpet and hey, I just realized that sunshine has no t-bar.
So the baby hill at Sunshine is too short and too shallow for my liking. I decided to go look for something a little more challenging. If I were smart I would have noticed that the baby section is RIGHT NEXT to a lift that’s totally marked as a beginner lift. But no, I tried to act like I knew what I was doing and whipped out my trusty Sunshine map in search of some nice short green runs that didn’t require a lift to go down.
I headed down the snowed over street that in the winter serves as a green run. run #2 from the daylodge, if you’re following along in the at home version, and found it to be rather unsteep. Spent lots of time trying to skate down. Finally I got to the bottom of the jackrabbit quad, where I had the option of walking back up the hill, or getting on the lift. Being the lazy girl that I am, I decided the lift can’t be THAT bad.
I got on and didn’t fall off at the end. Luckily, I also didn’t have to ride with anyone else. That would have totally made me nervous. After getting up there, I proudly phoned etc to inform him that I had gotten on a lift all by myself, and not fallen off. Left voicemail on his crappy phone that doesn’t seem to get very much reception at the tops or bottoms of skihills.
At lunch Jim informed me that the Strawberry Chair was for beginners. Apparently it runs slow and if I had taken the time to just LOOK at it, I would have realized that it moves totally slower than the rest of the lifts. The trailmap doesn’t exactly tell you this. So Jim came with me up the strawberry lift. I fell off, but we made our way down twice – once through run 41, Dell Valley, and once through 40, Rock Isle Road. I think Dell Valley is easier because Rock Isle Road has a long section that is very flat, almost uphill.
Jim took some photos of me coming down the end of Dell Valley:
me at the top
only a true pro snowboarder could handle a plunge like this.
dsc02243
action shot
This one is proof that I’m actually moving and not just pretending to board. See the snow spray?
woohoo
Sometime today I figured out the toe edge. It’s much easier on your legs to be able to flip edges.
On the last day we went out one last time. It was the bonus, unplanned day. I wasn’t really feeling up to boarding the entire day, so I opted out of a full lift ticket. Got the gondola +1 lift ticket… If you just get gondola only, you’re not supposed to take gear up with you. So I took my board up on a gondola +1 lift thinking that I’d possibly ride strawberry once. Or go down the ski out and come back up the gondola. Never bothered asking if you can come up and down the gondola on this type of ticket. Surely that’s ok – what if you forget something in the car?
Anyhow I ended up going up strawberry a couple of times because, like I said earlier, no one scans tickets at the top of the hill. I got better. After all these days of boarding, I’m getting more comfortable with linking my turns.
Now every morning we wake up and say to each other, “hmm… How can we find more money to go boarding again?”
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments OffShopping Spree and Easter Boarding Weekend
Today we went shopping for our new pro snowboarder careers. Yes, I forgot to finish writing about our annual linuxnet ski/snowboard weekend, but I promise to take care of that tonight. Backdated, of course, because that’s just the kind of girl I am.
Are you guys watching the rss feeds? That Heather Armstrong updates A LOT.
So, shopping spree. There were a few things we needed to get before going back out tomorrow. See, we went to Sunshine again yesterday. This time Jim boarded with me. Thursday night he picked up a used Anthem board for a great price – with boots and bindings, for less than boardzone is asking. Great condition, too!
On Friday we spent the day boarding in Sunshine. I can’t give you details yet because I haven’t even talked about our first visit to Sunshine and my feelings about it. Plus yesterday I took more photos, so two photo entries are coming. While we were boarding we realized that we could use stomp pads. I had read about them on the internet and I wasn’t entirely convinced that we needed them until trying to get off a lift and finding my boot slipping on the surface of the board. It’s hard enough to stay upright while flying down a lift ramp with one foot strapped in. Now try that with one foot strapped in and the other having difficulty finding a stable position. It’s tricky. So we decided stomp pads were needed. And then we proceeded to buy everything *but* stomp pads.
I got a great pair of $40 sunglasses that were on sale for $7. Deal! Oh, and gloves! I didn’t actually have a pair of gloves that were snow-worthy, so I needed a pair. I had been borrowing from one of the kids, but said kid recently went boarding and managed to rip three holes in them. It’s a good thing everything winter is on sale now. Snow gloves are terribly expensive, but the 30% off really helped. A nose wiping thumb panel may seem silly to you now, but when I’m at the top of the hill, nose-drip free, you will eat your words. Plus it came with a free sticker.
Also I got a new Nalgene. I had been bugging Jim about this pretty pink color (and what do you know, according to the website its color name actually IS “pretty pink,”) because it’s really pretty and there’s even a flower on the bottle. Anyhow, it’s silly, but I had been wanting the pink bottle for awhile. Now I have it.
What might even be more exciting than that is the splash guard that we go to go with our bottles. This thing is amazing! Wide mouth nalgenes are the best because they are easy to clean. The narrow mouthed ones are easier to drink out of, but I don’t know how to clean inside the corners of the thing. Now this guyot design people have made a little device that you insert in the top of your bottle, and it keeps water from splashing all over your face. Especially useful in the car, on the cardio machines, or in bottles that you’ve half-frozen. I see now that nalgene is marketing an “easy sipper” of their own… The only thing that I might be wary of is that the guyot one has a nice contoured lip that you use to drink out of. Jim calls it the “sippy cup” method.
We picked up a cool book on mountain biking in the area, complete with maps and levels of difficulty. And a pair of walky talkies since we tend to get separated a lot on the mountain due to different skill levels. Those mountains tend to be big too and we will spend less time milling about trying to find each other if we’re able to explain where we are. AND Jim’s blackberry doesn’t always work so well on mountaintops.
We also got some furikake and miso soup for dinner tonight (chicken katsu!) so I should go now and start working on that.
Oh, and sometime at the end of the day, we finally found those stomp pads at the ski cellar, which we try not to buy too much stuff from since they tend to charge a lot.
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments Off
