Things so normal as to not fit neatly into any other area.
Not to be lame, but here is a commercial parody of my weekend.
So again a weekend has passed and my newsletter is not complete. I’ll shoot for next weekend and I’ll keep from walking several miles to prove that I can.
Oh how I hate comment spam. I have tried everything and it just keeps coming. Now I’ve found a site with the best way to kill it for your WordPress 1.5.x install: CJD Spam Nuke. You install it, activate it, go to the comments moderation page, then nuke every single last lame posting. It happened so fast I had to check it twice to make sure it worked.
If you have comment spam, go get this plugin and kill it dead. I did.
As I sit here wondering if my leg will stop hurting, I think back to a weekend only 8 days ago. I was on the slopes of Heavenly, watching the snow fall in feet per day, knowing that I was pushing it to move so fast in such varied conditions. Yet I zoomed ahead, and at the middle of the last day of the trip, managed a spectacular high speed 180, putting me flying backwards down the mountain.
If I would have just fallen over I could have been alright. Instead, I tried to complete another 180 to put me back in the right direction, only my left leg stayed in place. This helped pull me to the ground in a crumpled heap, courtesy of my now painful knee and ankle area. Fully one week ago I was in agony, now I sit here with nagging pain when I sit in place too long (at least its not from walking).
I really wonder sometimes how I get myself into these messes. But then I remember: it’s me and I seem to enjoy having something to complain about. So now I know.
I had a trip out to Tokyo last week and found this when I returned:
What happened? Does California think it’s spring time or something? Maybe I brought back some of the cherry blossom festival with me? While you’re at it, take a look at my new favorite trip pic from Tokyo:
There’s a few more where that came from. Click through to the photos area of the site for more of that kind of thing.
Looks like I now have a way to highlight pictures from my Gallery based photo gallery setup without having two copies of the images hanging around and eating up space. Yay php hackers!
I have just returned from another Heavenly ski trip. Now that I’ve been up there more than 6 times the season pass has paid for itself. That is good news. The bad news is that the runs were jam packed with people over the 3 day weekend (since some companies observe MLK day in the US) and many of them were inconsiderate weasels.
In the course of two days I was fully run over by a snowboarder who just said “sorry dude” after tackling me to the ground in a semi yard sale bending my right thumb all out of sorts. Later I would find he severely cut into my skis. That evening I awoke at 1:30am to find the upstairs neighbors rocking out, and after confronting them I again got a “sorry dude” while they continued their noisy gathering until well into 3:00am. At a little after 5:30am one of the cabin mates got up and started making coffee, giving me a grand total of about 2 hours of sleep.
I really need to take a vacation from vacations, I think.
After procrastinating far too long, I took in a bundle of change to the local Safeway and used one of those change counting machines to convert it back into useful currency. On the way in to the store I probably lost $2 or so, plus another $1+ from the house to the car. Anyway, after what seemed like an eternity (in reality only a few minutes) of noisy shaking and clanking, the machine spit out a receipt that read like this:
Change counted: $242.58. Counting fee: 8.27% Redeemable Value: $222.39
Now I’ll admit that it isn’t fun to take change and make it into dollars, but is a $20 fee on that conversion really necessary? I suppose I’ll never get the satisfaction of asking that question, since no one at Safeway has anything to do with that machine. I do get the satisfaction of knowing that I filled up the coin conversion machine so completely that it warned the next customer that it was full and could not take their change.
In the meantime it looks like I have some walking around money again.
I spent this past Sunday and Monday up at Heavenly skiing, using up some of those pre-paid season pass days where I can. On Sunday the skiing was pretty good, temperature was in the 20’s, and the lifts weren’t too crowded. There was a base of about 8 feet of new snow since my last trip up, so it was pretty easy to ski.
On Monday everything changed, however. The temps dropped into the 10’s, visibility went to nearly zero, and the few people on the runs we saw were having a tough time keeping upright, thanks to high winds and no ability to see. The day was cut short due to the weather, but on the way down I found the California side of the mountain to be nearly clear of fog and wind. Wish I’d been on this side of the mountain all day!
Thanks to a generous gift from April and Steve, I now have the beginnings of a home cocktail setup. As my first action, I went out and purchased all the necessary ingredients to make a “good margarita.” Looks like the one thing you need is practice, which you cannot buy.
My first attempt came out really sour and reasonably strong. I definitely need to work on it further to get it to a good combination of taste and kick. Right now I have a lot of sour and not so much sweet. All of this is being done without the pre-made mixes you find in every US supermarket, so I shouldn’t be surprised at the outcome.
I’ll try again soon and see how that goes.
I’ve just gotten home from the joy that is holiday air travel. As is typical for me, it was freezing cold weather for most of the OK stay, and upon returning to “always sunny” San Jose it is raining. On the upside, that should mean some awesome new snow up in Tahoe, so I’m hoping for some really good powder to ski on soon.