February 3, 2008

Time seems to be flying. It is now light when I get out of work. Yesterday morning it was getting light when I woke up. Winter must be coming to an end.

We have had a real cold spell. The last two weeks have been pretty cold. The worst temperatures seemed to have landed on the weekends. The good news is that we have had beautiful sunny weekends.

We have been skiing every weekend day. Last Saturday was an Alpenglow day. It was single digits and very windy. The chairlift ride was brutal. The top of the mountain was scoured down to an icy crust. A few turns down the mountain, we ran into fluffy snow drifts. The drifts were separated by icy patches, a real challenge. We had to time our turns carefully to take advantage of the drifts. About a third of the way down, things got good. The foot of snow that had fallen during the week was still sitting there, blown around a little, but not blown away. We had fun and made more laps than I had imagined we would in that weather. The snow wasn’t getting skied up because nobody was there and the wind was filling in our tracks in less time than it took to make a lap.

We worked with a beginner on Sunday at Alyeska. It was her first time out this year, but she quickly picked up where she had left off and began making more progress. We skied with her for a couple hours in the single digit temperatures. Then we skied with a woman Kris knows from an internet group. She is a competent skier, but doesn’t get out much. We took a few laps from the top. She would fall every time we left the groomed snow so we stuck mostly to the groomed runs. We escorted her back to the bottom and headed back to the top for a couple more runs. We took a run on North Face and were surprised by the barely tracked powder. We would have made another run, but the run was closed by the time we got back to the top. We skied some of the advanced terrain to the bottom, satisfied with a very long and varied day in the cold temperatures.

This weekend was all Alyeska. No appreciable snow fell this past week, so the snow was mostly skied up. Since the temperatures haven’t really been above the teens in the last couple weeks, the snow has maintained a soft consistency. Today it was -2 when we started our ski day. The skiing was good this weekend, but the cold really takes its toll. We did manage to take a couple runs with our ski patrol friends as well. It is still strange to see people we know and just ski a couple runs with them. This was never a part of our ski repertoire in the past. We either brought our ski acquaintances with us or we were so far from home that we never ran into anyone we knew. We almost feel popular running into people and taking a run or two.

We did get home in time to see the Super Bowl. I wasn’t really interested, but it was a good game. We watched the whole thing.

My job situation continues to progress, but slowly. I had my pre-employment physical. It was primarily an exercise in filling out forms. I have never filled out so many forms. The added twist was that every form required my birth date and the exam date. Since I was having my physical on my birthday, it became a little confusing. I had to scribble out the year on one date as I entered it wrong. I passed every test, hearing, lung capacity, vision, and the few physical things that they tested. The doctor told me that I was healthy as a 33 year old. Hmm, I thought I was in better shape than I was in my late 20’s. Maybe I wasn’t so healthy back then.