Great Shao Yang Winter of '09

At least, everyone here says it's atypical and ridiculous, what with record heat alternating with record freezes. I last left off kvetching about flying to LA. It has now been 3 consecutive weekends I have been home, and not had to take a class or go to a seminar. It has been glorious.

LA turned out well--Steve picked up Mikel and me in his awesome White Maurauder® and after a lovely gorge-fest at Tacos Plus we set about trying to make sure we had memorized all the exams for all the body parts. Mikel's friends collected him around 9, I got my hard drive back from Karen around 10, and Steve and I stayed up until nearly 3 studying like fiends and cursing ourselves for waiting until the last minute. But it went fine--the written exam was painless, and the practical nearly so, even being as punchy as we were. With plenty of time left until the mandatory party, we headed out to the beach and went for a walk in the 85º sun, and hatched a plan to go to the trapeze school on the pier when I come out in May for the final NBAO board exam. After the party we hiked off some of the meal at Fryman Canyon and caught a spectacular sunset on the way back to the westside for a quick dinner at Terried before dropping me back off at LAX.

It was clear and not too cold when I got in and drove home. Imagine my surprise when I woke up 5 hours later to 4 inches of fluffy dry powder all over the world! I got to shovel the sidewalks and everything. But it was beautiful--the snow settles onto the branches of the leafless trees like delicate lace and it is so, so quiet. Within 2 days it was back up in the 50's, was in the 60-70 range through the middle of the week before plunging down a yawning gradient into highs around freezing. But that week was amazing, besides enabling me to get out the Chacos and tshirts and gad about relatively naked. It also enabled a road ride in nothing but shorts and jersey and a perfect day out at RMNP. No wind, temps in the 40's, bright, bright sun, not even that many people out on our trail--pretty near perfect. I'll update with pics when I get them transferred over to the new machine--the other exciting thing which happened in LA was the death of my logic board signaling the call to the next Macbook.

I also managed to get in a trip up to Brainard to poke around but didn't end up getting much further than Brainard Lake, owing to a late start and taking the hilliest and longest route to get there. Once I started back on what I thought was the CMC snowshoe trail, only to realize after a bit that I was going in the complete opposite direction of where I wanted to go and the signed snowshoe trail I was on was not on the shitty trail map I carried. I backtracked to the dam where picking it up should have been obvious, and no--the map was unequivocally shitty. Like a good little orienteer I crossed the dam, found the parking lot on the other side and picked up the trail there. I never did find the CMC cabin, although I suspect if I'd only followed my first return trail further I'd have run right into it. I've got to get some nav worthy topos, that's all there is to it. And next time I would prefer to take the easy trail out so I could have more time to push further back to maybe even Blue Lake. Otherwise you're in the trees the whole time until you get to Brainard Lake when the terrain opens up a little and lets you see some pretty great views of the peaks around you.

Walking on frozen lakes is a trip. Skating on them is a trip too, or it is to someone who grew up without even an ice rink around for hundreds of miles. My friend Garrett took me out to Evergreen last week though and showed me how it was done. Garrett is from Rhode Island and has been skating practically since he could walk. It was a beautiful night--not too cold, no wind, but the ice was pretty rough, making things interesting. Still, I did reasonably well for it only being my 2nd time ever. I held on to Garrett for the first lap or two, we tried moving over to other sections that looked glassy but really, really weren't, and finally back on the main space I wobbled along by myself and only fell once. To my embarrassment, however, I noticed that after a few laps I could not keep my ankles from collapsing, no matter how hard I concentrated, and I kept dragging my toes which prompted a frantic kind of running step to keep ahead of my momentum and not go pitching head first onto the ice. Garrett agreed I was probably getting tired, and we headed for the warming house to sit down. Right before we got onto the ramp I went down again, this time twisting my knee, which still kinda hurts. It's been a long time since I tried to do something to do something so totally new that I hopelessly suck at it, and will until I develop that unique balance and muscle memory. But it was fun and I want to go again. And not that I didn't before, but I will really never view a hockey game in quite the same way again!