Good luck getting the song out of your head.
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Tag Archives: skiing
Some Housecleaning
After we moved, there was a long period of time where all our spare moments were taken up with sorting through stuff, moving things around, putting things away, etc., and then all of a sudden it was the holiday season. By about mid-January, I could sense that we were moving past that stuff and a little extra time would be opening up. I’m glad, not only for the sake of my sanity, but I feel like I can start making lists of other things to worry about again. A little quality time with this site is one of them.
I changed to a new ‘theme’ shortly before we moved out of Milwaukee, and I still like it quite a bit. It has some limitations with a few things– the photo gallery “sub-pages” no longer display correctly, and using an image in the banner at the top is troublesome. These are things I want to work on sooner than later.
A few other miscellaneous tidbits:
- I’ll be getting an event created on FB in the next several hours as well, but be advised that Michelle and I are inviting all sorts of peeps we know to come out to Sun Prairie/Portage on Saturday, 2/27, for a ski weekend at Cascade, followed by a party back at the “lodge” (i.e., our residence) about 30 minutes to the south. More details to come soon.
- Speaking of event planning, it’s time to think about Brewers baseball (even though I hope to get *plenty* of skiing in before opening day). I’ll add some other details about possible outing(s) to the Brewers 2010 page in the next couple days.
- I just realized that the Mozilla project Sea Monkey just recently came out with a 2.0 release. They say there’s a better/easier extension system with this version, so I’m going to give it a go; if I can get most of my Firefox and Thunderbird extensions to work with SM, that would be cool.
OK, I should probably return some phone calls. Have a good weekend!
Weathered the Weather
The weekend didn’t quite turn out as we planned, thanks in part to Saturday’s snow storm. We made it to Sunburst on Friday evening (a day early, as it turned out), and had a good time skiing for a few hours. It’s not a bad little hill they’ve got up there, although we could tell on Friday that most of the snow was man-made. Jason Hill said that he had a successful evening of remembering HOW to ski, too, so the trip served its purpose. Now if only we can get enough people together to go up to Rib Mountain next month…
Saturday morning, we were greeted by a blanket of fresh snow that we hadn’t quite been expecting; I read the forecast the night before, and didn’t quite realize that the storm would be lasting through most of the day. Consequently, Michelle and I had to cancel our plans to head up to Oshkosh for Dave’s birthday celebration. Fortunately, he is going to be in town on Tuesday (actual day of birth), and we’re planning to meet up with him and his brother for dinner.
Michelle was tentatively planning to go in to work to make up a few hours that she missed earlier in the week because of a class, and I met up with some friends for the Lakefront Brewery tour. A handful of new pictures in the Milwaukee gallery are from that excursion. Later that night, Michelle and I stayed in and got a nice specialty pizza from Pizza Shuttle.
On Sunday, I was at Pulaski High School for a few hours for College Goal Sunday. The event was a success, but it wasn’t the best-organized thing I’ve ever participated in. I ended up spending about three and a half hours of my day there, where I was only productive for about 90 minutes or so. I guess that’s one of the things you put up with when the whole thing is done on a volunteer basis…
Had to do some laundry to get ready for the work week; right now, I’m thinking of getting to bed by 10 so I can be good and rested when the alarm goes off at 5:15. These weekends sure cruise by in a hurry.
Successful V-Day
Michelle and I had a nice weekend up north. We left MKE around 6:30 on Friday night to head up to Eagle River. We stayed at Mom & Dad’s house, and then left for Indianhead to go skiing the next morning. We almost considered a couple other hills, because we realized kind of late that there was no night skiing at Indianhead. We were glad we still went for the 12-4 afternoon.
Granted, I still have enough fingers to count the total number of times I’ve been downhill skiing EVER, but these were definitely the best conditions I’ve seen yet; there was fresh powder from the night before, and it snowed most of the afternoon, so all the runs were in great shape. Indianhead is pretty big, as Northwoods skiing goes, and so there was plenty of variety. It was cool to take some runs that lasted more than a minute, too.
At one point, we made our way over to the pair of double-black runs. Michelle tried to explain to me that a good way to control your speed on this one would be to make wide, criss-crossing turns on the way down. That might have worked if there wasn’t 3 inches of fresh new snow on the top. Neither one of us had a successful run down that one; we might as well have just popped our skis off at the top, thrown them down, and went summersaulting after. Later at dinner, I told Michelle that when she wiped out, it was like when Charlie Brown gets knocked out of his clothes by a screaming line drive.
We ended up staying in Ironwood, but drove back to the resort for dinner. Very nice and not very expensive at all. We enjoyed perusing the placemats, which were laminated 60s-era brochures from the hill. Funny to think about (a) riding up to Ironwood by train, and (b) paying $4 a day for renting wooden skis.
The only bad part of the weekend is that I was feeling pretty sick by Sunday. We made more than one stop trying to find a combination of meds that was going to work for me. Ended up getting some decongestant that works pretty well, but Michelle did all the driving home on Sunday, and I stayed home from work today anyway.
If you’re off work today, enjoy the Presidents’ Day! And if you’re not, then remember you had off for MLK Day last month. Err, wait you didn’t..?
Down, But Not Out
I have caught a whiff of whatever illness befell Michelle earlier in the week. I seem to have the symptoms under control with a steady dosage of generic Day-Quil every 4 hours. I am not about to let a little cough and runny nose keep from going skiing on one of my last available weekends of the winter.
So, we are overcoming both weather and illness in order to persevere– rather than staying at home for a quick day trip to Cascade Mtn near Madison, we will be driving up to E.R. this evening, staying @ Mom & Dad’s, and then we’ll head up to Indianhead on Saturday.
I better get done packing before Michelle is out of work; enjoy your V-Day weekend, however you choose to spend it!
An Awfully Good Sunday
Michelle and I took a ride up to Nordic Mountain today so I could try out my new skis, and we could work on our plan to ski as much as we can [afford to] this season. It went great. The new equipment that Michelle got me for Christmas and my birthday is going to serve me well for a good long time. Jen and Joe were also right about my boots; they were exactly the right size, they’ll just take time to break in. After a few runs, I had forgotten the agonizing lengths I had to go to just to get them on…
Meanwhile, in the NFL, I went a lousy 1-3 in my Wild Card Weekend picks. At least the one that I got right was a Vikings loss. Funny epilogue to that comment– we ate dinner at Fratello’s in Oshkosh after our ski day. We had missed the end of the football game (they had it on in the bar at the hill, but we left part way through the 4th quarter), and I asked our waiter if the Vikings lost. He told me they did and I gave him an enthusiastic, Borat-style, double-thumbs-up. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m from Minnesota.” Haha. Don’t worry about it; we tipped him well…
But now I’m tired and I’m going to bed. I did fall once today too (trying to stop too fast at the end of a run) and I think I sprained my right thumb. That’s my spacebar thumb, so this typing kind of hurts. Sleep tight!
Digging a Hole
First week of school.
Assuming I survive, I’ll catch you on the flipside.
I would really like to ski this weekend. Some fresh(er) snow, cold, but not unbearable– yeah, that would be nice.
I’m kinda sick, too, so we’ll see.
… and Spring Training starts in 25 days.
Prepare for Your Weekend!!
First of all, I need to mention that THE NORDIC MOUNTAIN PEOPLE FOUND MY DAMN CAR KEY. HOLY LIVING CRAP. With that in mind, Michelle and I may make another run over there on Sunday if the weather’s OK. You wanna go?
Anyway, then last week I was listening the Brewers in spring training, and getting excited about the new baseball season, and I let my temptations get the best of me– I dug out my copy of the last MLB baseball game that EA Sports released (MVP Baseball 2005), which is not a particularly fantastic game, but it does let one run a “franchise” for up to 150 years, so I played the game this week. I played it too much, as usual (with the sports games in particular).
But, I had my fun, and now I’ve returned the CDs to my drawer at work, and it’s back to business at the homestead. Michelle is “staying in” this evening since she has to be up early for a cheer competition tomorrow, and that suits me just fine, since I was thinking of staying at home tonight anyway. Here’s my list of things I want or need to get done on Friday night:
– clean up all laundry
– clean up all dishes
– pick up the junk laying around the living room
– sort out/through ski clothing
– watch and return the current Netflixs
– scan in and shred some bills from the last month or so
– devise a plan for the balance of the weekend
There is a Bucks game on Saturday, and I haven’t been to the BC for one of those in almost 2 years. Is that right? I should ask Schneider, he’s great with calendars…
Oh, one other thing I think I’ll do, just to practice the technique, is to straight-euro-lace another pair or two of my shoes. It was the first hit on the Googles, so not a major “find” by any means, but I think this page is pretty neat. What are you doing with the Internet that’s useful or cool?
Finally, soloshootsfirst made me change my password today for the first time. Who knew? I hope I remember the new one…
And Then It Was Thursday
Last evening, I missed LOST, but I doubt there was much to write home about.
Instead, Michelle drove up because she really wanted to go skiing on what very well might be the last cold week of the winter. We took a ride over to Mt. Morris and Nordic Mountain. It was pretty nice, without a lot of people, several runs open, and some fresh snow from the day before.
This was my second ski trip ever, but I impressed myself by actually advancing a little in a relatively short period of time. I think properly-fitting boots and thinking through how skiing should work were a big help (and that’s not to mention my very sexy ski instructor).
We had gone down a number runs by 8:30, and for some reason I patted myself down at that moment, because I had my phone, my ID, and my car key all in pockets inside my jacket.
As it turns out, it was right about then that I realized the car key was no longer present. I didn’t freak out too much– felt really stupid, more than anything. I don’t know why keeping something important in a pocket that doesn’t zip or button closed seemed like a good idea when we first got there, but…
I also felt sort of bad about ruining that last hour that was had on the hill for Michelle– I know this was probably the only chance she was going to get to ski this year, and she had been spending the majority of the night babysitting me on the way down each run.
So between about 8:40 and 9:25, I was fumbling around in the snow in the one spot that I really took a digger earlier in the night, to no avail. Michelle gave the heads-up to the staff people, and one of the patrol dudes came out and ran his poles around in the snow with us a little. One of them tried to be optimistic, saying maybe the groomer would pick it up the next day, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
How did we get home, you ask? I’m lucky that I have a network of reliable friends who know that I’m a douschebag here in Oshkosh. Dave Schrubbe ran over to my house to open the door and retrieve my extra car key, and then Joe and April drove out to meet us there so we could get back home. This, and Joe had a paper to write for today, too. I didn’t realize that when I asked if they could help us out…
When all was said and done, we were asleep by about midnight, which probably wasn’t that much later than we usually would’ve gone to bed. My shoulders and ankles are a little more sore than usual, but, all things considered, we coasted into Thursday no worse for wear.