February 5, 2010

We are trying to adjust to a new lifestyle.  I have been through this before.  Kris is a little newer to it.  The last time around for her, we were in the midst of rapid activity that demanded attention.  We are both coming to terms with the reality that we have an infinite number of choices available to us each day and we can only accomplish a small amount.  Kris found some wisdom that people overestimate what they can do in a day, but underestimate what they can do in a year.  Since we are really working on the year, we are hoping that is true.  The days aren’t measuring up at this time.

We have maintained our level of activity.  We were pleasantly surprised to find that someone groomed a classic cross country trail on the Campbell Creek Greenbelt, making skiing a little bit easier in our back yard.  Wednesday we skied eight miles along the Coastal Trail.  It was a beautiful sunny day so we just kept chugging along.  The temperature didn’t seem quite as cold as the sixteen degrees indicated on the thermometer. 

We downhill skied Monday and Tuesday.  No new snow had fallen since Friday so the big bumps were back.  We put in another big day Monday with some high speed skiing on the groomers.  We took some longer radius skis on Tuesday, hoping to make bigger turns on the nice groomed snow.  Instead, we had to slow it down for the fog.  I am getting better at fog, but no one can ski when the only visual input is white.  It is dizzying.  At times I couldn’t even see the grooves in the snow from the grooming machines.  I kept trying to use them as a pointer to the fall line.  There is nothing worse than making a turn in total whiteness without understanding which direction is down.  The mountain wasn’t totally fogged.  The top remained mostly clear and visibility at the very bottom was pretty decent.  The middle was variable, but mostly bad.

We returned to the resort this morning, hoping that the several inches of snow in our driveway was going to equate to good conditions.  Unfortunately today was one of those rare days that Anchorage got more snow than Girdwood.  We still found fun on the smooth fresh snow on the groomed runs.  Off piste consisted of hidden firm moguls under a fluffy layer of light snow.  We also tried some new skis since it was a free demo day.  I skied two different skis.  One of them was dramatically different than anything I own so it was fun, but a bit one dimensional with long high speed turns as its only trick.  The visibility wasn’t really supporting this type of skiing, but it was good to get on something like that.  Kris tried three different skis and generally liked them all, but didn’t like any of them more than her current skis.

Kris has been working on our health insurance options.  The prices are pretty widely varying.  The coverage options are, as well.  It is a risk benefit analysis that takes us back to our insurance mantra, insurance is only for what you cannot afford to lose.  We landed on a policy with a high deductible of $3000 per person with a maximum out of pocket of $5000 per person with a few odd exceptions that could have us spending a few thousand more in a worst case scenario.  This should cost us less than $350 per month.  It is not too scary.  The application, on the other hand, was overwhelming.

I have been continuing to organize old photographs and video.  I have backed up about half of my digital photos onto DVDs.  I have been attempting to digitize old VHS tapes.  I thought I had developed a workflow plugging the VHS player into my video camera to record onto the miniDV tapes.  Then I uploaded from the video camera to my old computer because it is the only computer with a firewire input.  I tried making a DVD from my old computer, but it took all night and the end product had some major speed problems.  The video occasionally shifted into slow speed and worse, high speed.  I figured it was a problem in the DVD generation since it took hours to chug through so I just downloaded the raw footage onto my portable hard drive.  This, too, took a painful amount of time since my old computer does not have a high speed USB port.  When I viewed the raw footage on my new computer, the speed problems were there as well.  Now I suspect that my old hard drive couldn’t keep up with the video when I captured it from the video camera.  Maybe I will just keep the VHS tapes.

Reputation can be a funny thing.  I got some phone calls yesterday, first from some old co-workers asking if it was OK to provide my contact information, then from a North Slope development company.  They are looking for some engineering help.  I explained that I wasn’t really looking for work right now, but that I might consider some part-time work in the short term.  I doubt that I will hear from them again, but I left the door open on my terms.