News From Us

April 6th, 2005

Since we last parted…

I have not made any more progress on my gimp lessons. I should probably be doing that right now instead of all this forum reading and email group catching up that I’ve been working on for the past couple of hours.

We took the kids snowboarding on Saturday. They had fun and ten minutes hadn’t gone by on our drive home and they were both sound asleep. We should have taken pictures of that. We do have a couple of them getting off the lift, but we didn’t do a very good job of capturing the family snowboarding memories. I’ll post those when I’m not too lazy to run upstairs and get the camera.

Since this is a website named after me, I will not hesitate now to tell you that *my* snowboarding skills have increased exponentially. Well, I can’t really prove it to those of you who are reading from far off lands, so you’re just going to have to take my word for it. Exponentially.

Being the kind of person that I am, I spent a lot of time reading about boarding on the internet. I like to research things. Sure reading everything I can get my little monitor on may not get me any closer to being the pro boarder I know I am meant to be, but it sure makes me feel better, knowing that I tried. Theoretically I know how to do it. For the most part I don’t fall on my butt anymore, (Mom and dad, did you know that in canada they say “bum” and not “butt”? It’s like the Tom Greene song where he says “my bum is on the sign, my bum is on the sign, bum bum bum, my bum is on the sign.” Kimo knows what I’m talking about.) except when I try to be all masterful on hills that are a little beyond my scope. Soon enough, though. I’m feeling much more confident out there, and dealing well with falling off the lifts over and over and over again.

So back to my point about reading and learning. I’ve learned that girls learn to board differently from boys. Jim and I find that this makes total sense, because we can see huge differences in our learning styles. See, I learn step by step, very methodically. Jim prefers to barrel down the hill and figure it out as he’s going. I like to practice one thing at a time, and only want to move on to the next level when I’ve completely mastered the last thing. Sure my form may be better than his, but he will be able to tackle black diamond runs way before me.

I did go down some blues last weekend though. (Nakiska blues are not the same as Louise blues. Just to be clear, I went down Nakiska blues and do not plan on touching a Louise blue for quite some time.)

The snow in our yard is melted. There’s only one small strip of sludgy ice stuff in the shady corner of the yard. Everything else is melted, and the puddles have sunken into the grass. It’s great to walk accross a field and not be worried about sinking into the mud midway through.

Today I picked up some winter dog poop. See, in the winter, she goes out and poops, and it snows, and we have no idea where it is. Even if we could see the last poop she made on top of the snow, because some piles were lost track of, no one really wanted to be trekking across the snow, possibly stepping in more puppy poop along the way. So since the snow melted, it was time to clean that shit up. Heh.

So weather, nice, sun, above 0 temps. We’ve gotten the bikes back out. Jim has been fixing his for a few days and now after three, yes, THREE trips to bow cycle I think it is finally fixed. Fixed as in useable and shiftable and nothing falls off it. Jim’s pretty handy, no?

And I started running again, which is much easier to do when you live in Calgary than when you live in Hawaii. For the life of me, I don’t know how I ever ran in that heat. I guess you just get used to it. That and when you’re done you get to jump into the ocean. I wish we had some of that here.

Sunday we lost an hour. For our hawaii viewers that means we’re an entire FOUR HOURS ahead. It’s such a pain having to readjust to the time difference.

This hardly ranks as news, but we picked up some strawberries earlier today and I’m totally disappointed. They are lacking in flavor. Strawberries are supposed to be berry liscious. These are not.