Hello and welcome to...sigh...an altitude problem. Havent got the time to post much these days (okay, not saying never, maybe tonight after Andy and I get back from headlamping through dark forests on skis), but for anyone wondering if the altitude can actually be a problem, and why it is that I can lock my keys in my car twice in the space of four days in the most hectic time of the year, and why it is that at least twice a year I try to board the ski lift without my ski pass, and at least once a year, without my snowboard or skis... this article might help explain it. A bit scary, actually. Maybe the slow speech and absent-minded air that seems so common to the ski bums up here can be attributed less to mind-altering substances and more to too-fast ascents.

Are the Mountains Killing Your Brain?

Although the article points out the only documentation has been in amateur mountaineers going at least above 15,000 feet, it is not much of a stretch to think it could apply to our peaks in the lower 48.

Up in the nine-seven-oh, we are happy that the shortest day of the year is past and we are on our way to summer. This month has been a cold one, evil cold, and the fact that the days are so short isn't helping. Three more days left in this year. We can't wait until we are able to do such things as drive without slamming on our brakes because a pedestrian just stepped off the curb without so much as a glance at us, make a left hand turn without having someone lay on their horn because, even though we waited rediculously long for that hole in traffic, someone still thought we cut it a bit tight, and actually take the time to do all the things we claim to do before each check in, such as check the cleanliness of a condo and change burnt out light bulbs. And if it would warm up a bit, we could stop getting the calls from the guests from Georgia who left their garage door open all night, froze and burst all their water pipes, and now can't take their morning showers, and are downright ticked off about it. And lie to our faces, and act perfectly puzzled about how it could freeze up so solid when the garage was only open for a half hour, lest we get the idea that they will be paying the thousand dollar service charges to get them running water again.

We are a bit exhausted. I went to bed at 9:30 last night, and pretty much died until 7:30, and all I can think about right now, at 5:52 this evening, is when I can crawl back between those sheets. I have done nothing but run down hallways and drive like a maniac and mumble under my breath at housekeepers and smile brightly at guests and inquire how their vacation is going and how I might make it better, then resume mumbling as soon as they are out of earshot. I have climbed hundreds of staircases a step at a time, and hopped back down them with my right leg, and now my right calf has, I swear, a bigger muscle than my left. And it is killing me. It is so sore from doing the work of two legs for miles of panicked hop-running, carrying a heavy messenger bag filled with batteries, extra remotes, everything I might need to ready a condo for guests arriving any minute, that it is by now vying with my right knee for the title of "Most painful body part". Actually, my right knee can hit 90 degrees by now if not under weight, still not enough to be able to do it's job going down stairs, but enough to get me up them and allow me to do a stiff-legged run-hop down hallways and icy driveways and walkways and all the other ways I traverse in a peak season day. And the beauty of cross-country skiing is that it never requires me to bend my knee more than a few degrees, except in a fall, so I can shuffle along nicely and carefully and make sure to keep my feet under me while Andy races in circles and rolls in the snow and runs off all the energy he has been saving up while sleeping in the Subie's backseat for the last eight hours.

So, faithful few, until later. We are out, trying to let the moonlight and an insanely happy dog calm our nerves while we shrink our world to just what can be seen in a circle of light from our new Black Diamond headlamp, and forgetting all the rest of it.

Hello and Welcome to An Altitude Problem, where, while all around us there is merriment and goodwill, we work. Actually, we have been made aware again lately how fortunate we are to have a job as several friends have resorted to selling possessions on ebay in order to keep house and vehicle. Construction-related businesses entrepreneurs thriving two years ago are now sitting in darkened houses, waiting for the phone to ring. We are fortunate. We really have not suffered at all while those around us know all too well how fast a bad economy can affect them. So we are thankful, and we do have goodwill, if we are not making merry, and hope that they can hold on until spring, and that maybe by then, someone will be building or remodeling or, at least, hiring.

Your blogger sits here on the couch, taking some ill-advised time before heading out on icy roads to prepare welcoming abodes for other travelers tired of icy roads and screaming kids. The last several days, I have run the gamut from feeling angry and isolated, no family this Christmas, no friends, no dinners and pine boughs and good china and pumpkin pie, to feeling extremely blessed, in comparison to those who would gladly drop all Christmas plans if it meant a day of work. We are not doing gifts this year, not by any actual decision, but now that the day has arrived, it is too late. We have all been too busy to be able to make the time to get to the store. My plan was to swing by a sports store yesterday and at least have one tiny giftwrapped item for B under the tree, he (we) needs both clear goggles and a headlamp, but by late last night, it still hadn't happened. Mostly because I couldn't make it out of Keystone and down to Dillon. Keystone had it's hooks in me all day. And because every step had to be a thought out, analyzed process.

Part of the reason yesterday was such a long day was because of this little thing called suprapatellar bursitis of the right knee. A fancy name for the fact that extreme impact, night before last, apparently pushed my kneecap up into the bursa, or fluid-filled area providing the padding between my femur and the tendon connecting my kneecap to my thigh, and scrambled things around a bit. With the result that I could not bend my knee under weight, or more than a few degrees under any circumstance, or do anything that would require use of my left quadriceps, such as lifting my leg into or out of the car, or switching my foot between gas pedal and brake pedal, or climbing stairs, or walking briskly, or pretty much anything that is required of a housekeeping inspector during one of the busyest times of the year, without involuntary gasps and yelps and sudden paleness and faintness. Instead, I hobbled around with my right leg straight, knee locked, swinging it around, lifting it from the hip with every step, carefully sitting down for every job that would have required kneeling (and my job has a lot of those), taking stairs a step at a time, pulling myself up with left leg and using the right one for the only thing it could handle- balance. I worked eight hours yesterday. I got five inspections done. Obviously not something I could bill eight hours for. Marci did the rest, which is to say, most of my work for the day.

Which is why I am slid far down in the couch at the moment. I have a bag of snow wrapped around the offending knee, hoping that, if the swelling goes down, the time I take now to ice will actually save me time later. I found a handy ace bandage with a pouch for ice in a condo the other day, washed away the suspicious stains that may or may not have been blood from a guest's skiing accident, and claimed it for the inevitable. Who knew it would need to be used so soon.

I realize that, while suprapatellar bursitis is fairly uncommon and usually injury related, other bursitis is a common ailment and simply life-related. People who deal with arthritis deal with this sort of pain all the time. I realize now that a few people I have known have walked in just this manner for years. Which has served to make me even more thankful that while my time will come, if I live long enough, it is not yet. Someday, I may experience pain like this that does not go away, as this will in a week or two. It has made me realize again the extent of the thing I so often preach- the time for living is now. The time for doing and being and rejoicing in one's good health and the beauty and happiness of the moment is now. This moment, this set of circumstances, this glow of well-being will not last because nothing lasts. The people we share these moments with will not last. So now, while these moments are ours, we should all claim them. Squeeze every drop of life out of them and absorb it- the joy and the pain and the knowing that without pain, life can't happen.

And, of course, I also realize the value of not skiing blind in the dark, and of remembering footbridges through ditches and not angling through said ditches in the perfect spot to collide with said footbridges, landing with one's entire body weight behind one's right kneecap when it meets the sharp edge of said footbridge, buried as it is under the snow. And remembering that it is nobody's fault, certainly not the county worker who labored for two days building said footbridge in a perfectly needless place a few weeks before it snowed. Or the friend who accidentally took my headlamp home, or the dog who thought he needed the second run of the day, or the husband who did not offer to take him.

I am blogging on a new computer these days. Although it is wonderful, and lightening fast, and I get to learn how to use Windows 7, and it is shiny and new and pretty, I am still wondering if it was entirely necessary. Remember a month or so ago, when I was whining about all my electronics leaving me sit? Well, I waffled for a long time about whether I thought I could afford to replace my 1G ipod, which did not even hold a quarter of my music, podcasts, audiobooks, etc that I force through my eardrums on a given day, and lately, had been refusing to load my music, due to an unknown error. I finally decided that yes, I could, if it was an older refurbished one without all the fun stuff that Apple put in the new one. So I ordered it, and impatiently tracked it from China to Colorado, and finally got it and opened it, lovingly turned its small sleekness over, admiring it's pretty orange color and big screen, and plugged it into my computer, and...what's this? Unknown error? Could not load my media? I unplugged it and spent the day listening to the a's and b's- all it got loaded before it errored- and a day of Abba and Blink 182 had me in a foul mood by evening. I spent the evening trying, and mostly failing, to back up music and pictures online, and just before I went to bed, tried to shut it off. When I got up the next morning, it was still trying to log off. I tried for three hours to get it to respond, with zero results. There was no way it would be turning on again. I admit to being a teeny bit mean to B, in my frusteration, and he responded with what I thought was a perfectly harmless, idle threat- one borne of his own frusteration with me. "Fine. You'll have a new computer by tonight. Go to work." And claims he did not slam the door as he left, but it was certainly securely latched.

So I accepted that the items not yet backed up, such as the story I had spent two days writing, recent music purchases, recent prized landscape photos that I had had to climb three thousand vertical feet to take, were lost forever, dissolved into useless piles of computer code, and I ran my recovery discs (instead of going to work) and by the time I left, I still only had Abba and Blink 182 to listen to, so I left the shiny new ipod at home. But my computer worked. Maybe not stellar, because it occasionally still locked up, but not indefinitely. I was ready to try to get as much data back as possible and get on with grieving for the rest. And then B called. He had just purchased, for what I thought was an exorbitant amount of money considering the amount of agonizing had just gone into my new ipod, a new laptop for me. He thought I would be extatic.

I was livid. I am laughing now, as I type that, but then, there were immediate tears of rage and frusteration. He was taken aback, utterly shocked that I would react in such a manner to his selfless guesture. He did his thing and got quiet, and I did my thing and stormed and sputtered and demanded that he say something, and he did his thing and pointed out that when one is in a hole, one should stop digging, and I did my thing and nearly popped a vein in my forehead. By the time we met for lunch an hour later, I had calmed down, and was feeling a bit silly for making such a scene, and was ready to think logically again, which, of course, proves that he was right to stop digging, as much as it pains me to admit it. When I am primed for a fight, all I want is someone to fight with, although five minutes later, when the evil wind has stopped blowing, I am left in a mellow, humiliated pile of remorse for it.

And so it was that by that evening I was actually quite excited about Windows 7 and lots of internal storage and super fast page loads. And now I sit here quietly clicking shiny new keys, and loving it.

And now, it is time to take myself to work. I just tried straightening my leg from the seated position I so carefully eased it into an hour ago, with painful results. Not sure if the ice did much at all except get the rest of me to shivering. The wind is howling around the house like a beast and I don't think the tempurature has broken single digits yet. Time to go make everyone else's holiday the stuff of dreams and fantasy, cozy, snowy mountain Christmases. And remember that just the fact that I am able to do so should make me less Grinchy.

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where we are all experiencing the five stages of ...whatever it is that has 75% of summit county on edge these days.

Denial. "I can. Not. Believe. This. They were calling for twelve to fourteen inches, so we will get it. It just isnt here yet. It is a slow moving storm. It will get to Nebraska, realize there is nothing there, and turn around. It simply cannot have passed us by again".

Anger. "Bad, bad, BAD weather man. BAD. You made me bring in my ski boots and put them by the bed, so I could land in them when I bounced out of bed in the morning. BAD front range, that trapped the storm. I will go outside right now, draw in a breath of -16 degree air, and scream at the sky until it drops a snowflake on me.

Bargaining. "If I pretend not to notice the low pressure system moving across Arizona, maybe it will sneak into Summit County unexpectedly. If I leave the snow tires off the car...if I hope it never snows...If I mountain bike on the trails and pretend to like their dry state...THEN will it snow?"

Depression. "It will never snow. Summit County has upset God. That is all. Go home."

And finally, acceptance. Just kidding. Nobody, except those few who are here for reasons other than living life surrounded by deep snow and high peaks, sweeping turns in the powder, spring runoff, and White Christmases are about to accept the fact that there is still, two weeks before Christmas, still, on the shortest, coldest days of the year, still, even as the season officially arrives along with out of state SUV's, STILL, no snow.

It is a strange feeling walking about town, mingling with locals these dark days. They snarl. They twitch. They seem to shrink when they make eye contact. This cannot be. Wolf Creek, four and a half feet of snow. Rabbit Ears Pass, two feet. Even Vail, 7 inches. But here, naught. They said two inches. I am sceptical. If there was, it was flung by the wind into low areas. I still see dirt in my front yard. Our eyes sink into our sockets, our brows furrow, we powder-starved citizens of Ski Country. There is no helping us. Nothing but a big dump of white marshmallow fluff will make us feel better.

Although there is no snow, there is still no doubt that it is winter. It has been as low as fifteen degrees below zero. Poorly installed water lines have burst, causing ceilings to buckle and drywall to fall onto floors, insulation following it, icicles cascading down exterior walls and water soaking carpets and carpet pads that, less than a year old, have had to be lifted and dried out, then all must be repaired in the ten days we have before the next booking. And do you think a single contractor would answer his phone and be available to do a speed job for a homeowner who lives in sunny Florida and thinks a broken pipe, one that has had to be repaired before because it was installed in an exterior wall, should be a warrenty issue, covered by the last repairman?

I spent a good part of my day running from building to building, condo to condo turning the heat up to 70 degrees to prevent other frozen pipes. I passed several condo doors propped open, plumbers working feverishly to contain and repair water geysers soaking floors on fourth and fifth floor condos. And today was a heat wave. 9 degrees. Although the wind whipped and howled around buildings and through plazas, pushing icy needles of pain through my fingertips as I fumbled for the right key to get me into building lobbies or into my car. And although the heat in all our condos is usually set at 65 degrees, I spent the day chilled to the bone. After seven arrival inspections, at the thought of an eighth, the thought of programming one more remote with numb, wooden fingers, filling out any more paperwork with handwriting so cramped and spiky I didnt recognize it as mine, I almost succumbed to the urge to cry. So I went back to the office instead, to a cardboard tub of steaming soup from City Market, and cookies, also from City Market, oddly glad that the friend I had agreed to meet to snowboard with for a couple of hours late in the day never called. The frost settling in my bones was stronger than my fondness for sharing turns, however icy, with another living, breathing human being. Even one as laugh-inducing as this particular friend.

I came home and built a fire, my impatience with being cold making me use an insane amount of newspaper kindling, sat and wrote the first half of this post, then B came home and we went to the gym, where my cookies and my glasses of water they were washed down with were at the perfect stage in their digestive process to provide me with a burst of energy just long enough to get me around the indoor track thirty three times, three miles, in twenty eight minutes, which is about as good of time as I will ever make indoors when I have to make a left hand turn forty four times in a single mile. It's as pointless as a Nascar race.

And now, we are home, I am warm for the first time today, and will not be moving very far from the woodstove until bedtime. The only food that could be prepared for dinner that did not involve preparation was the emergency Red Baron pizza that has been in the freezer for months. I will even be eating it. I will try not to think about the amount of time the cheese and sausage will sit in my innards, how it will completely undo my workout, how it is just white bread devoid of nutrition, covered in cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, non-sustainability, environmental and economic destruction, and cruelty.

Did that just sound snooty? I suppose so. Please do not take it personally, faithful few. I don't want to be THAT person, even though I suppose it is inevitable, once one does such far-out things as leave one's midwest, flatlands roots and embrace the mentality of someone living in a personal-and-global-betterment mountain town environment.

Speaking of which, have I mentioned that we sold our house in Kansas? We are officially citizens of only one place, and that place is not Kansas.

And now, it is time to go and chase the pizza with a cookie, crawl onto the couch with B, and begin regretting my choice of dinner, which has been eaten during the last two paragraphs, with many breaks for chewing and swatting the dog away. I do not plan to move again until bedtime.

Hello and welcome to An altitude Problem, written in an second-hand leather armchair that eats everything that comes within three feet of it, including, but not limited to- loose change, bicycle shorts, scarves, cameras, ipod cords, computer power cords, apples, silverware, head lamps, small chunks of firewood, dog toys, entire throw blankets and pillows, coats and hoodies and hats. All have been lost, then found deep inside this chair. It's slick leather surface and the way the cushion folds around the person sitting in it acts as a funnel, and once the person sittin in it gets up, it clamps shut around whatever it has managed to grab while occupied. And the things it eats do not merely stay between the cushion and the backrest. This chair has a deep channel between the backrest and the seat that goes nearly to the floor. I would not be surprised to someday find Andy, or a small child in there.

I do have a power cord now, and now, my manic need to write has passed. I spent an entire day in this chair, bent in unnatural positions, coaxing copper strands to connect so I could write just a few more lines. What was I writing that was so important? Nothing important. I got all jazzed about an idea for a story, and yes, I am finally admitting to the world that I occasionally write stories. I just do not finish them. I have never, not even once, finished a story. I write obsessively for two days, rarely more, and at the end of those two days, I suddenly look around me, surprised to see sunlight and life, feeling queasy and ashamed that I have wasted so much time and I re read what I have so far and it is total rubbish, and implausible, and the storyline suddenly seems stagnant, and it is sent to the cobwebby place on my hard drive where many other hours and days of manically tapped writing is stored and waits to die, which it does when my computer inevitably crashes. But it did serve a purpose, when the need to create was almost causing physical pain, it was a tidy way to scratch the itch, a way that did not involve spreading paints and canvas and jars of water and brushes all over the house, only to end up with more worthless crap to store, if I finished at all. I am beginning to suspect that most people are not like me. They are fulfilled by reaching goals, attaining personal bests, crossing the finish line. Why I cannot be more like that, I have no idea. I am perfectly fine with not finishing something, after my need to be doing it, and doing it well, has been met. It is frusterating even for me, let alone those who interact with me. I burn bright and hot, and then I fade out, and have no interest in what I lived and breathed while I was doing it. Fix me, faithful few. I don't like being this way. I need direction, and an end in sight exciting enough to keep me going in said direction.

Eddies of snow swirl outside my window, the window behind my stuff-eating armchair, the window that is at the moment sending a cold draft over my arms and bare feet. We need new windows. But we live in a trailer house that we are unlikely to be able to recoup any of our money back out of when we sell. All our improvements have to be something that we do for us, not to improve resale. And old windows, while drafty, are compensated for by our wonderful glass-doored woodstove with a blower that sends warmth to at least the main living ares of the house, if not the bedrooms.

We were supposed to get a lot of snow. We got no measureable amount. Twelve to fourteen inches, the weathermen said. We knew better than to hope. Although waking up to nothing but the wind blowing what tiny skiff we got against the house, swirling it under the eaves, was almost enough to reduce us to blubbering crybabies. We are still walking on bare ground. If not bare ground, than asphalt-hard packed snow. Yesterday, while mountain biking, I even found lingering green grass under a big old fir.

Behind my stuff-eating armchair, enjoying the cold draft while lying on the bay windowsill and occasionally sticking a cold nose in my ear is a stuff-eating dog. He has been a terror today. You try being used to four miles a day of
scent trails, pine needles, snow drifts to roll in, squirrels to chase and ice to skid over, and then try going a day without. So far, he has completely shredded a squeaky toy in the form of a fuzzy gray wolf in the space of about five minutes- it was in the mending pile in need of a limb reattachment, and several minutes later, it was total carnage- stuffing everywhere, three more limbs torn off, plastic squeakers found in the disembowelment and killed. I swept up all the stuffing, then tied it's shredded torso together so it is a gray wolf's head now, with a knot where it's neck should be. While picking up frozen poop in the minefield known as our front yard where he does his business twice a day, I couldnt help but notice the amount of cotton stuffing lying out there. It's a miracle there hasn't been a major internal blockage yet. He has also eaten a hole in the pocket of my fleece inner jacket, part of my new, originally $420 dollar new coat (that I paid $60 for, but still.) because he was trying to get to the pony tail holder in the pocket, he has eaten the brim off my totally cute green hat with the buttons on the band, he has tried to eat a glove, he has carried off two Christmas tree ornaments, even while trying to shake the unpleasant taste of the bitter spray I used on them out of his mouth, has been banished to the front porch twice, then came back in to race in manic circles around the house, has tipped over the laundry basket to drag out a stocking hat that laid on my car floor for a week and got good and musty in the mud and melted snow, dragged food off the counter, dragged toothpaste off the counter, ate the handle of my hairbrush, and has snuggled up to me and laid his head in my lap, utilizing full-on puppy eyes when I yelled at him for all of the above mentioned transgressions.

I am trying to decide if I should leave the house. Yesterday I worked, and sat at the computer in the office and pretended to work, then actually worked, and got about four billeable hours in the eight I spent there. That was depressing. And I left nothing for myself to do today. There are no arrivals. B talks out of both sides of his mouth these days, telling me to enjoy to slow time because the 15th is fast approaching and I will not see the inside of my house by daylight until after New Year's, then, in the next breath, telling me that my paycheck is suffering because of all of my time spent not working. What's a girl to do? I spent this morning cleaning my house, readying it for "church" wednesday night (at least, the only church we get these days- a small group of friends, a Bible study or a debate, a meal). I have fallen back in love with my house and it's me-ness, even in it's still unfinished state. I wonder how I lived in other people's houses for so long, while all our possessions were back in Kansas and we rented furnished apartments. I did not domesticate, I know that. I lived in the space, but I never claimed it.

If I left my house, it would be to go to our company's storage unit in Silverthorne to find a bedframe, then to the store to find some lights to put under my cabinets in the kitchen, to illuminate my countertops. I also want to find some leather-ish looking suede vinyl material to cover a board with, to make a headboard to hang on the wall. I want to make the office, with it's mattress on the floor, look like a real room. We had big plans to build a Murphy bed into the wall, surround it with bookshelves, and in a pinch, have a real-ish bedroom as well as a lovely, roomy office the fifty weeks out of the year when the bed was not in use. Now we do a bit of research and find that to have a bed, even one folded into the wall, would cost us our home office tax deduction, which, being self-imployed, we desperately need, and we legitimately use the room as a home office, as well as sleeping space occasionally when we have guests. So the bed cannot be permanent. It must be small and light and moveable, in the rare event of an audit. We cannot fit a sofa bed through the hallway leading to the room, maybe a futon bed that we assemble in the room. I must admit, it is kinda nice to play Susie Homemaker once in a while. Yes, faithful few, my life is not all biking and skiing and snowboarding and hiking and being all happy in the great outdoors. Occasionally, in order to feel as though nothing is missing, one must spend time in one's own nest. That is important. It is a basic human need, to feel sheltered and at home. That is the kind of day I am having. A Basic Human Needs day. There has been food and shelter and the touch of a furry yellow beast and chocolate and warmth and I have brought order to my space.

I do not read these days. Years. Havent actually read, except for during vacations, ever since we lived in Kansas. Four weeks ago, I brought home three books from the library. A vegetarian cookbook, A Fool's Progress by Edward Abbey, and some insipid guilty pleasure read with a pink cover with martini glasses on it that promised enough vapid moments to escape from any sort of real-life drama. I thought two weeks would be more than enough to read all three. Two weeks later, I had read exactly three pages of A Fool's Progress. I renewed them for another two weeks. I read nothing at all. I finally took them back, overdue, two days ago. But I occasionally get a literary fix by downloading an audiobook and listening to it on my iPod while doing other things. I have put away probably a ton of laundry while listening to the adventures of someone or other, run miles to short stories, cleaned house to abstract bits of writing from some podcast or another.

Today, I began listening to In Search of #6 by Damon Timm. It is the recounting of a bicycle trip from Seattle to San Fransisco with his best friend-nay, "heterosexual life partner"- in search of his sixth kiss. Since he achieved his goal four hours into the trip, it is rather about leaving #6, with whom he promptly fell in love, to experience five weeks of early summer on the open road on the pacific coast, the recounting of experiences and friendship more close than many share with their actual significant others, although, as is stressed, their friendship is, and always was, and always will be a heterosexual one which they also share with their respective women. I am wondering who are these men who articulate feelings of cameraderie and a deep connection with each other, who observe the pungent effects of eating a dozen hard boiled eggs one moment and the glorious connection of sharing the beautiful sight of Mt Ranier with a lifelong friend the next. Not such touchy-feeley words I would expect to hear from any of my nearest or dearest, male or female, for that matter. I might say such a thing, or write it, and many of my faithful few might titter politely and turn away a bit embarrassed. It is okay, we were raised in the midwest. And I have never known when to not articulate such things. I suppose there is a time and a place. I have not yet finished the book, there are about ten hours of listening in it, so I cannot recommend it yet. But so far, as I have been scrubbing and organizing, I have also been watching the projector inside my head throw images of snow capped peaks, old growth forests and sheer cliffs, rolling hills and wildflowers, and have been laughing out loud at the ready wit and blindside humor of someone who has spent a lot of time in places less traveled, and has the imprint of his love for the outdoors stamped all over his storytelling.

And now, back to it. Miles to go before I sleep.

Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where your blogger has been doing everything but blogging. I have until my computer dies (which isn't that long) to type, because my power cord is broken. If i straighten out all the little copper strands, and mush them together where it it broken, right by the plug, and tape it just so, and do not wiggle it, it will recharge, but that means I can only sit in my eversized, sunny armchair for so long with my computer on my lap. A good thing, probably, but a wee bit frusterating.

All my electronics are on the fritz right now. My computer, my ipod (the ipod I found at the Basin, after the snow had melted this spring) treated me well over the summer with it's 80G of memory, but it finally succumbed to internal corrosion a few weeks ago. My four year old ipod, with it's 1G of memory, is just so small I have to spend a long time arranging music and playlists so it will have what I need to hear when I need to hear it (and my playlists are as diverse as the things I do- I have music for running, music for biking, music for snowboarding, music for XC skiing, music for chilling, music for cleaning). And yesterday, after stripping bedding out of units and exposing it to static electricity that traveled up the wires and crackled and snapped in my ears, it froze up. It is working again now, after I restored it to it's factory settings, wiped it clean and reloaded all my music back on it, but I do not trust it.

Since the thanksgiving rush, I have not worked hard, only enough to get done with whatever needs to be done. I started going to the gym again as of yesterday. All or nothing, as usual. I went at 7:00 in the morning for a yoga class, only to find the time moved up to 7:30, so I ran Andy through the park, trying unsuccessfully to get his morning "business" worked out of him. Then I went back inside, hacking from the zero degree air, and ran a mile around the indoor track, finishing just in time to slip out of my shoes and into the room where about twenty strangers were already meditating cross legged on the floor, and tried to find a spot for my mat, squeezing it in the likeliest spot, still uncomfortably close to my neighbors. After which followed an hour and fifteen minutes of Hatha Yoga, during which I tried hard to remember to breathe in addition to trying to keep up with a class that is already bendy as noodles and knows all the poses without needing to face the instructor the entire time, and trying to relax through the discomfort of my unbendy self holding poses arranged in ways I normally would not voluntarily arrange it.

Then, I went to work, Andy trying his best to undo everything I did, dragging out trash, gleefully killing rags dragged from the rag box. I stripped the laundry out of two units, then went to lunch with Bobby. No sooner had we ordered our chinese food than his phone rang, one of our reservations people up in the air because an eight week old puppy was trapped, yipping and howling, on the deck of one of our units on a twenty degree day without water or shelter, the sheriff was trying to track down it's owner, the tenants were not home, and they had not gotten permission to have a puppy in the unit. B gulped his lomein, left me with a pile of five dollar bills and an entire meal to eat by myself, and went to let the poor thing into the house, well aware of the damage it would most likely do, but unable to do anything else with it. I raced home from lunch to change out of my yoga pants and into better clothes in which to represent a reputable lodging company to some prospective clients looking for a place to hold a reunion in the spring, showed them our biggest property, then returned home, Andy threatening spontaneous combustion if I did not give him some exersize. So I pulled on my snowpants, laced up my cross country ski boots, and we headed up Montezuma Road to a trailhead near treeline, where the snow is deep. We skied for two hours, taking an obscure branch trail that may or may not have been private property, and got back down around dark, the full moon casting our shadows in front of us. I drove home, put band-aids over the blisters my ski boots left on my heels, met bobby, and we ate the half of our chinese food we hadn't had for lunch, then drove down to the rec center. I want to be able to run a consistant 10k by memorial day weekend to be ready for the BolderBoulder, a road race I want to run in this spring, but right now, all I am doing is 5k's. Did my 5k, then rowed for a while, while Bobby ran and lifted weights, and finally, came home, took a shower, hit the couch and fell asleep.

This morning, I got out of bed, cleaned and did laundry, loaded up my ski gear, and went to work. I inspected the only arrival for today, then met my friend at the gondola, both of us on our skis, and made several runs, taking pictures and videos of the bluebird morning and our novice selves on our skis (both of us are excellent riders, but are both somewhat new to skis). I sat down in a massive cloud of snow at one point, sliding my right butt cheek over hard corderoy snow, and removed the back pocket from my snowpants. I am disappointed in them. Brand new this year. We got back to our cars, parked in poached parking in a building we both manage condos in, peeled out of our ski boots, and I drove to work, where I should still be, except that I had to come home to get a key, and while I was here, had leftover thanksgiving dinner for lunch, and here I am.

Thanksgiving, since moving to the mountains, has never been traditional for us. We have run the gamut from Mc Donalds chicken sandwich, to dinners with friends, all of whom have no family in the county, to actual thanksgivings that were just us, no guests. This thanksgiving was no different, in that it was different from every other one we've had. Harlan Koehn and Jeremy Becker, two Pennsylvania boys now living out west in Center, CO and Flagstaff AZ, respectively, made the trip up here for two days. We cooked, and made a spread, and spent a lazy day in the house, hardly noticing, apart from my one four mile mountain bike ride with Andy (the bare minimum to keep him from destroying the place with his excess energy), that it really was a beautiful day outside. On Friday, Jeremy, Harlan, and I took the Subaru up Peru Creek road, already covered in snow, but hard-packed enough to allow vehicles, as far as we dared (and a bit farther, looking for a spot to turn around where we wouldnt get stuck...I sorta nosed it into a hillside when I did find a spot, leaving a bit of a scratched bumper and some pretty tracks) and hiked a ways up Argentine Pass in the snow, taking pictures of the ramshackle Pennsylvania Mine, historically one of Summit County's most profitable mines, operating from 1879 until the 1940's, yielding gold, silver, lead, copper, and zinc. Now it's biggest contribution is a scar in a high alpine landscape, and being the source of acid mine drainage that contaminates Peru creek, as well as the Snake River that runs through Keystone. Two years ago, something holding a large reservoir of water poluted with heavy metals broke loose from a mineshaft, and enough toxic water was dumped into the river to turn the water orange and kill fish by the hundreds downstream. One treatment system has failed to fix the problem, overwhelmed by the amount of acid in the water, and others have been proposed, but never implemented, the state afraid of taking on the burden of liability if another measure should fail.

Andy, of course, cared naught for such atrocities as acidic orange water that keeps the creek free of any aquatic life, and before I could stop him, had bounded into the stream trickling down the mountainside, carving a deep ravine through the snow. I yelled at him as I saw him begin to drink, and he obediently tried to climb out, succeeding on the third try, slush the color of orange Gatorade freezing to his tail and belly.

We went to Breck that evening without Bobby, who stayed home to answer phones, should our in-house guests need something. He actually spent the entire weekend fielding questions, making maintenance runs, tracking down contractors on their day off to ward off potential crises. Poor man needs a day off. He's starting to get grouchy. Unfortunately the things he does, I cannot be trusted with, so there isnt really anyone to take his place yet.

It still has not snowed. I am actually still mountain biking on a fairly regular basis. Most years, mountain bike season and ski season have overlapped only a little, but this year, the ranch trails are mostly clear yet, or covered in hard-packed snow that is, at most, slightly sugary and resembles riding in sand. Another storm is moving in as I write, but looking at the radar, it is likely to be another upslope storm, hitting Colorado Springs and Denver, and unable to climb over the Divide to us. The last storm yeilded the Front Range up to three feet of snow, while we saw, at most, a few inches. And so we wait. We desparately need it to boost skier numbers in a downish economy.

And that is all for now. There actually is a reason this poor blog has been abandoned lately. If you think this blog is bad, you should see my house. My laundry room. My car. All needing attention. None getting it. I find myself going to sleep on the couch earlier and earlier lately, as the days get shorter and shorter. After the sun sets, and I get back from exersizing Andy and myself, not much gets done. But thank you for stopping by. As always, I shall try to not wait so long next time.