January 26, 2008

January has been a week of near record cold followed by a week of near record warmth then, just to keep the average right, a week of average weather. The temperatures have normalized. We got a little snow to recover from the massive meltdown of last week, freshening up the appearance of things here in town and improving the skiing slightly.

We had an earthquake on Sunday. It was the first one I felt in a long time. It was a pretty strong and sustained one. I was on the phone with my father during it so he got the play by play. It was a 5.7, but it was centered at least a hundred miles to the south. On a related note, we are now expecting an eruption of Mount Redoubt, one of the closest volcanoes to Anchorage. I can see this one out my office window at work. I keep looking out expecting to see a plume. It is a little weird to just go about life as normal when a volcano is about to blow just outside of town.

We got out cross country skiing on Wednesday. We did our normal loop down around the lake and back. The greenbelt trail had melted pretty well down to slush in the warm weather. The people, dogs, bicycles, and moose chopped up the slush so that when it refroze, it was pretty lumpy. We had an inch or so of snow on top of the frozen slush. It didn’t help. The icy surface underneath the snow was incredibly fast, but it bounced the skis all over the place. The skis never went far, but it was disconcerting enough to slow Kris down to a crawl. It took us almost an hour to cover a course that should have taken half that time. The only truly terrifying part was the downhill on the back side of the lake through the woods in the dark. We were moving really fast, although the GPS says we barely topped 10 mph.

Our social schedule was a little busy last week. We met a large group for dinner on Monday to see our friends from Fairbanks off again. We had dinner with a slightly smaller group on Tuesday to celebrate a promotion of a former coworker. We had to look at a condo on Thursday for a young friend who is shopping for her first home. Oddly it was in our condo complex. It was in fair shape, but it made me feel pretty good about our place.

It was nice to get to the weekend and ski. The skiing was pleasant enough, but nothing special. The snow was a little weird as a few inches of snow covered up this wet, heavy, firm snow. The sounds were most disconcerting when our skis skidded and scraped their way down to the lower layers. Some of the snow was just nasty lumps under the smooth looking surface. North Face had the additional thrill of avalanche debris with lumps and ridges that tried to extract my legs from their sockets. But the good stuff was good and we found plenty of good stuff. Mostly it was a bump skiing weekend and we were both feeling pretty talented for 40 somethings.

I even talked Kris into trying Christmas Chute. We haven’t had much snow since my first descent on Christmas Eve, but we had at least a few feet that widened the chute to at least a turn and a half. Large amounts of snow flowed down the chute with every turn, hiding the surface with its almost liquid state. I let Kris lead. It was her choice. I am sure she made that choice because if something goes wrong and you lose a ski, it is nice to know someone is coming behind you who can help you out. As the leader, she had the joy of discovering the 40 foot stretch of the narrowest part of the chute that was pure ice underneath the light flowing snow. She didn’t fall, but she put a hand down as her skis slid out from under her. I had ample warning and negotiated the stretch with reasonable grace.

Sunday was beautiful sunny day. We skied for almost four nonstop hours, logging over 16,000 vertical feet of skiing. While bump skiing is done at relatively slow speeds, we found several opportunities to let our skis run a little. The run out from North Face is a nice groomed run that has the unique advantage of only being skied by advanced skiers. One stretch leads into a long flat that demands a little speed to get through. We comfortably broke 40 mph on that stretch each time, once briefly topping 45. My silly new GPS is quite fun as it allows us to review four hours of skiing in just a few minutes.

I bought a new camera. I know, how many cameras do you need? I had been contemplating getting something more portable for the primary purpose of web photos, but most of the current offerings are just silly. They have so many mega pixels as to reach the level of insanity. Compact cameras have small sensors. It isn’t really possible with current techniques to cram that many pixels into a small sensor and truly achieve greater detail. There is a reason that most of the expensive cameras are limited to just a couple mega pixels per square centimeter of sensor area. Larger sensors can handle more pixels, but cramming more pixels into these smaller sensors achieves next to nothing except to provide you with files that chew up disk space. Web photos are typically less than 1 mega pixel.

I also only want a camera that works like a camera. Most of the current offerings are aimed at people who know little about photography, who don’t want to think about aperture and shutter speeds. Since I am someone who does think about these things, I don’t want to have to dig through menus to get to my settings. I also don’t want all the excessive features offered in compact cameras like image stabilization or face detection. These ideas might be great for some, but for me they are annoyances. And while the prices are much lower than they were in the past, the batteries and memory cards were going to add to it. I concluded that there was nothing on the market that interested me.

I do occasionally check Craig’s list for photography gear. I keep hoping to find one of those $5,000 lenses offered by someone who doesn’t know its value. On Friday, I noticed a cheap, older, Canon digital camera for sale here in Anchorage. I looked up the specifications and was surprised to see that it was a pretty good fit for what I had wanted. The real bonus was that it used the same rechargeable batteries as my older DSLR. It also uses the older, less popular, compact flash cards. I have plenty of compact flash cards so that was perfect. For $50, I decided I couldn’t go wrong. The camera had an original list price of $600. And while it probably only sold near that price for a short period of time, it did reassure me that it was an enthusiasts camera in design. And while it isn’t as light as some lesser offerings, it does comfortably fit in a pocket. We will see if that means that I take more pictures.