Occassional ramblings from daily life

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tiki + velvet = ?
a strangely amused me.

http://www.velveteria.com/index2.htm

My apologies if this is old news.

neuropathy
My diabeticist always is very enthusiastic whenever I see him. He tells me I'm his star patient because I keep things under control and my sugar tests and other checks come in nicely. They always do this very simple test on the feet with a slim piece of plastic, basically designed to see if you still have feeling on the bottom of your feet. Circulation problems in the legs frequently haunt diabetics and feeling is one of the first things to be affected. I've had no problems "passing" the tests every time.

Well, last trip in December, the doc took out a tuning fork like instrument and set it vibrating. Then he held it against my foot. I tell him when I stop feeling the vibration is the idea. Well, in both feet, the response is definitely not up to normal...after I tell him that I can't feel it, he holds the device to my hand and it is clearly still vibrating. At that point, he says not too much to worry about, some deadening can be common in runners and there are other causes too.

So, this trip, he does the test again and he thinks it has worsened some since the last time. The most obvious cause is from the diabetes - my legs just aren't getting quite good enough blood flow down to my extremities. This causes neuropathy - loss of sensitivity in the nerves. He decides to do some other blood tests though to rule out certain other causes. Evidently vitamin deficiency of various types can contribute among other things.

Dr Alamia now has a clinician on site full time to draw blood; that was nice I didn't have to go somewhere else for once to have the blood work done. This was the first time I've ever seen the phlebotomist use foil to cover some of the tubes. Evidently a couple of the tests require the blood to not be exposed to any light after being drawn.

I got the results for the tests; everything looks normal, no vitamin deficiencies, etc. Hmm. That makes it much more likely that the problem is with my diabetes. So the question is now what? I already take much better care of myself than the average patient according to everything I've been told. My glucose numbers, short and long term, are pretty consistent and good. There are some meds that will help out with this sort of problem, but I guess the problem hasn't gotten bad enough to warrant that yet. The question is, with 4 years of diabetes behind me, how long will it be before this does become a real problem?

Current Mood: gloomy
Current Music: www.pandora.com

an ipod moment
I was out running on Wednesday when my iPod through me a curve ball. The mix I have on as default is just a selection of the things in my iTunes library, randomized to fit on the iPod Nano.

It played "The Highway Cafe of the Damned" from the album of the same name by the Austin Lounge Lizards. At one point in the song there is the line
"The radio is playing Barry Manilow incessantly; it almost drives me mad."
I realized that the song played prior to this was a Barry Manilow song (yes, I have Barry on my iTunes list and I'm not afraid to admit it).

I truly had to do a double take, though, when another Barry Manilow tune came on to bookend "The Highway Cafe of the Damned." It's not easy doing a double take near the end of of a 5+ mile run, but at least I was amused.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Austin Lounge Lizards

Train Raider, other gaming
On Saturday, K&D had a few people over to play Train Raider. It was a first for all of us. It's sort of like a crayon rail game, but with racing and battles. Not very difficult once everything was translated into English and finally I have my mapboard all done up too so now I can play with my very own copy. I'm looking forward to playing it again. It's not a deep game, but I enjoyed it and it is certainly different.

On Sunday we had a good turnout for the Meetup group at the Cafe Express over near the Galleria in Houston. Amazingly, to me anyway, N got folks to play Dune again. That's two times in a row. I just don't appreciate that game, though. Did get to play Traumfabrik. I've decided I really like that game. I still need to paste it up with the English translations.

humid, yet dry
What a difference a year makes! This year the summer is hot and lacking in rain, yet it is still way too sticky outside. If we aren't going to get any rain, could we at least have less humidity? Assiduous readers will recall that last year we rain, rain, and more rain down here all summer almost. This year, I can see the ground seriously cracking out along the bayou when I go running rather than getting lots of mud on legs and shoes.

Lots of sun means lots of opportunity to exercise, especially cycling and I've been taking advantage. That's going pretty well and so I've started training for doing a triathlon. Today, I did the full biking of 24 miles and a 5K run. And I did it relatively short order. I did have a little stiffness and pain around my left knee this evening, so I'm going to lay off a bit and keep an eye on the knee. I need to do more swimming anyway as I haven't done any in some time.

The knee pain is more of a muscle type pain, so I don't think it is going to be a big deal. Probably I've just been overdoing it a bit.

Anyway, today was a good day and got me out of the mental funk I was in over the weekend for which I, and I'm sure John too, am appreciative.

Oh, lately my iPod has been picking good running music. Today the run ended on Andreas Vollenweider's "The Glass Hall" which is my favorite tune of his.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Andreas Vollenweider

Top Gear meets Gardening
with shotguns and all sorts of goodies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnULw25t7xk

We've been fans of Top Gear for a while. This is just absurd and funny.

(If you don't know Top Gear, some of the in-jokes will not make sense but it will still be funny, I hope.)

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Fresh Aire

a long road
Update: I almost forgot! Thanks to all those who donated towards my ride. I made my goal of $2000 this year. If anyone still wants to donate, I think you can do it online until the end of the month. Even though I hit my goal, more doesn't hurt.

The Tour de Cure has come and gone again. I must admit it did not start very well and it ended rather badly after the bicycling finished, but I did it. This was the longest ride I've tried to, being listed as 77 miles. It was also number five for me, it being a little over four years ago that I was diagnosed. I set my goals higher on the fundraising too.

And I was successful on both counts!

The ride looked like it might not get started at all. The first bad thing happened when I discovered that I had no water bottles with me the morning of the ride. Then I got to the ride start and it was not there. I drove a little bit around the Texas State campus and couldn't find anyone, but I did see a couple of motorcycles with guys with vests driving around. I followed them and it turns out they were the lead out for the ride and they didn't know where the start was either. Fortunately they know how to get in touch with folks that could tell us! So we got there.

I had to rush off and get my registration packet with less than 15 minutes until the ride. Found the table for that, grabbed a muffin for breakfast, got my number on, turned in my bag for showering at the finish and tried to find any source of substitutes for the water bottles. A couple of different ladies pointed me to different places but no joy. All they had were tiny bottles of Pickle Juice which wouldn't stay on the bike. I finally gave up and went back towards the car to get my bike out and presto, there's the mechanic guy with a couple of water bottles all shiny and new on his work table. I bought 'em and hightailed it back to the bike.

One of the things I heard as I was rushing around was that the ride would start at 8am instead of 7:30. So I relaxed a little as I got back to my bike. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. As I was assembling the bike and putting on my gloves, etc. they released the 80-mile course riders. This was around 7:45. I rushed through, got to the front of the milling next wave of riders and took off...without having anything in my new water bottles. Well, I was sure I could survive 12 miles without water, so I wasn't too worried. Still, not the best start I've ever had to a ride. At least my start was better than the three riders I saw in the first mile who all got flats at the first railroad crossing.

From there the ride went very smoothly. My blood sugar fell amazingly slowly the whole ride. So I had very little to eat at the rest stops. I did make an extra effort to drink more than normal since I started out not drinking at all and I took advantage of the sunscreen they had available when I was about halfway. I did have a sore neck for part of the ride, but took some Tylenol at a rest stop and massaged and stretched a bunch.

I was getting pretty tired the last ten miles or so of the ride, but I finished without a hitch. Of course since I was doing the longest course of the day, I was near the tail end of riders, although folks continued to come in for well over two hours after me. I finished a little before 1:30, got showered, checked my sugar level and went to find out about the shuttle. Most of the booths/tables they had set up for the crowds were already closed, but the food stuff was still available. Had half a peanut butter and honey sandwich. Evidently the first shuttle bus left around 1:15 or so, so I'd have to wait around for the second and last shuttle since no one I asked about going to the Salt Lick was available this weekend to pick me up. So I waited. And waited. I did have the foresight to bring along a book, thankfully. We did not leave on the shuttle until just about 4pm. I did not make it back to the car in San Marcos and thence to West Lake Hills where I'm staying in Austin until after 5. Well, not quite the end to the ride I was expecting, but at least I didn't have any other plans that got screwed up by the wait.

I decided I didn't have the strength to head down to the Salt Lick by myself; instead I decided to go to Hoover's Cooking. As usual everything was yummy there. The green beans seemed to be particularly good as was the cobbler. I'm sure I overate, but it had been a long day in the saddle.

I ended up in bed by 8:30. I could have gone to sleep earlier, but I needed to make sure blood sugar was actually not going to go too low before doing so. It was actually a touch too high, so I took a little insulin and dropped into sleep like a stone.

Current Mood: accomplished

everyone knows it's windy
Quite the storm came through Austin last night. At the last moment, I ended up having to work, so I was at the global domination headquarters when the storm hit sitting in amongst all those glass windows. At first, there was just the standard rain and wind, but then the wind gusts really seemed to pick up speed. I could hear windows flexing and groaning a little under the onslought. After that there was definitely some hail that came through. I could hear it hitting the windows, but couldn't see it. All this was pretty standard for storms. I must admit I had not really watched a lightpost sway in the wind before, though.

Then came the intense stuff. All of a sudden everything just let loose. Lots more windows started groaning, flexing, and generally just being noisy. The rain went crazy. It was so heavy that I could barely see the street light down on ground level any more but I could see that the light was moving back and forth enough for me to be able to follow it. At one point I heard a crack/crash noise somewhere above me in the building. Not sure if a window gave out or not, but I decided that did not bode well. I didn't actually get scared, though, at least not until the whole building actually swayed under the wind. I felt the darn building actually move back and forth. I must say I did not care for that feeling.

Fortunately, that level of intensity did not last long although the power went out not long after that and came back almost immediately. It got the street lights too, which are usually on a separate circuit from the regular power in my understanding.

Lots of limbs down today around Austin, that's for sure. The house across the street in Westlake has a big limb down. Looks like it didn't hit anything, but I'm sure the folks living there are a bit frustrated as their car is stuck in the driveway by the thing. Overall, not as much damage as I saw from the big storm a few years ago in St. Louis, but I didn't actually see that storm, just the results.

Current Mood: thankful

dumber things have been said
but perhaps not by that much:

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” -- George W. Bush

I'm so glad he's sacrificing so much to support this war.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10314.html

Current Mood: aggravated

last big training ride
So, it's amazing how different two long rides can be. I had so many issues with my blood sugar last week and absolutely none on this ride. Here's the route I rode:

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1887497

Nifty little tool, ain't it?

My bike odometer claimed just shy of 47 miles, so I think this is pretty accurate. The real route had a few more winds too it then the straight lines on here, so seems pretty close.

Strangest moment of this ride came along FM 270 in League City. This particular stretch is pretty rural and had cows in the field across from me. Just as I passed closest to a cow, but still across the road, the cow started bellowing. I'm not talking a gentle moooooo here, but more like somebody had just yanked on the poor things teats. I couldn't see anything disturbing the cow, though. The bellow really startled me, I must say.

I only checked my blood sugar once and it was around 110, and that was after 25 miles. Of course, I had had some hard candies, but nothing near the amount I had the previous time. So I did not buy Gatorade even to refill my bottle, just water for one and Propel for the other. I guess I will call myself ready for the 80 miles next Sunday...

One last plug for fund raising:
http://main.diabetes.org/goto/martang

you know what they say about assume
Long training bicycle ride for the upcoming Tour de Cure. I managed to do 44.5 miles today; I'm planning on riding the 80 mile course at the ride, so still a ways to go.

I started off fine, but by about 4 miles my legs were feeling rubbery. That's not good on such a long ride. At first, I didn't believe that it could be my blood sugar. About 45 minutes before the ride, I checked my level and it was at 80. So I had a Z-Bar energy bar; that should have been enough to raise my blood sugar to 140-150, which is where I like it before exercise. I continued on and did not feel any better, so I stopped to check my sugar level around mile 5.5 or so. 53. That's not good. I always carry sugar sources with me, so I had a power gel that had around 30 grams of carbs. That should pretty quickly raise me back up to around 150.

Back on the bike, things are going fine. I got down to the Kemah-Seabrook bridge; I haven't ridden across that in some time. Boy, that's pretty steep. I was definitely huffin' and puffin' by the top. It's nice to get that speed up on the way back down, though. Not long after that I was feeling wobbly again so I had a couple of jolly ranchers to see if the feeling would go away. Those are very fast acting, but no dice. So I pedaled through a little more of League City and found a Valero convenience store where I could stop again. This time the sugar was at 61, not much better. What the $#!@%? I even took less basal insulin today than normal so I don't know why my body is burning so many carbs. Anyway, I get a bottle of water and a 32 oz gatorade, which should be plenty of carbs for the rest of the ride. I'm just over half way at this point. While I'm there I see a Ford Think! electric car, which is sort of a neighborhood electric vehicle It has two elderly guys smoking cigars in it...

I head back across the big bridge and get the bike all the way up to top gear on the way down; I definitely hadn't done that in a while. Then through Seabrook along Todville road. Lots of construction and places for sale down there, not sure what is up with that, right along the waterfront, but elsewhere in Seabrook too.

I hit the head for home point and decide to have some more sugar so I have another couple of Jolly Ranchers. I've also been drinking more of the Glacier Frost drink I bought. I get to Taylor Lake Village at about 33 miles into the ride and I can tell I'm tiring out and my legs are feeling wobbly again. Dang, and I thought it just couldn't happen that fast...so one more stop at a Chevron on Red Bluff Rd where I got a banana and had some more of the blue stuff in my bottle. Then the final 9 miles or so home. Had the rest of the Gatorade on the final leg and got home feeling a bit bottom sore and tired. Blood sugar level: 105. Thank goodness.

Still a good ride overall. No assuming that my blood sugar levels will react normally when I exercise hard, that's the lesson here. Fortunately, I'm pretty diligent about watching it even though it's a pain.

Oh, yeah, and I even had a new meter today...my old one went on the fritz yesterday when I went out to boardgaming. I ended up next door at the Walgreens where they were having some sort of sale on blood sugar meters, so got a new one for $20, normally $75.

And just in case anyone still wants to donate for the upcoming ride:

http://main.diabetes.org/goto/martang

Current Mood: tired

knee update
I haven't posted about this in a long time...

I started running again in ...checks records... around the beginning of September. Things seemed to be fine at first, and I continued the physical therapy, slowly ramping up to 6 miles or so per run. I was definitely a little slower than I had been, but much of that started to come back. However, there were some occasional twinges in the knee after running. The doc and the PT people thought this was normal so I continued to run, watching for pain and troubles. Near the end of February, I went back to the doctor and got the "Ok, you seem to be back to normal" green light. Of course on the next run after that, I had some significant trouble. Blech.

I went back to the physical therapist place and she looked at my knee tracking; it was definitely a problem. My kneecap was sliding off to side again. So, I backed off on the running again, at least lowering the miles. That seems to help, but the key seems to be that I need to keep doing strengthening and stretching for the muscles around the knee indefinitely, maybe as long as I want to run. So I'm trying to be better about incorporating a little stretching and muscle work into my work day during some breaks from the keyboard and in the evening when I'm watching TV. Still, I wish my knee would just be better on its own...

At least I can still run now and hopefully I can build back up to the 10K/6 miles I'd like to be able to run in an ongoing fashion. And I don't need a knee replacement.

Current Mood: pensive

Moy's
Forgot to mention a couple of things about the Columbus trip:

Best Chinese food I've ever had: Moy's restaurant right off the OSU campus. Little tiny 6-8 table place run by a couple. The food was darn good and I'm looking forward to getting back there next year when I'm in town. The Rainbow Tofu (not a vegetarian dish) was excellent; the sesame chicken was extremely good. I had nothing there I did not like quite a bit.

Goat Cheese and squid ink: When we went to North market, Zack bought some fresh goat cheese that was darn good. The cheese purveyor also sold squid ink which Zack thought was some sort of cheese, but it was just squid ink.

Annual diabetes ride
It's that time of year...less than one month to the San Antonio to Austin ride. I'm of course riding and raising money too...

http://main.diabetes.org/goto/martang

Please help out if you can. I'm trying to raise $2000 this year.

Another Gathering trip over
Well, it is April and another Gathering of Friends has come and gone. For those who might not know, that's the 10 day long gaming convention (used to be just 7 days) that I've been going to since 2000. I always have a great time and this year was no exception.

( Vacation! )

Current Mood: focused
Current Music: 80's music

the fun of having an unusual car...
So, I drove John's new Smart the other day. It takes a little getting used too, but I like it so far. As I was coming near home, I turned off the major street and the guy behind me turned as well. He followed me home. Then he started talking to me about the car with his window rolled down. Now that is fine, and I'm happy to talk about the car. However, another person happened to come along after about a minute and he is blocking the road (we live on a dead end street so there is no way around either). The lady waits a few seconds and then honks. I tell the guy he better move along. He starts to pull into the driveway to turn around and then starts backing up again to ask me another question. I had to yell at him to stop! He came about 6 inches from hitting the woman behind him...

Evidently he never heard her honk and didn't bother to look behind him before backing up.

One does get a lot of fun reactions in general, though. On that trip I had probably 4 or 5 people give me thumbs up, at least two people snap a picture as we are driving down the freeway, and one couple who waved and smiled enthusiastically at me (or the car).

Current Mood: pleased

Man survives ski trip, film at 11
Well, we're home. We had two more days after the lessons were done. All told, we decided to take it easy on Thursday with the skiing and only ended up skiing the Olympic Chair run (learning green run) several times. We felt like we were doing fine with that, but didn't want to take on more that day. So we just made it an early day and ended up at 21 Steps for dinner that night where the food was yummy. I had an icewine martini that was pretty good too.

On Friday, we headed to Olympic first and did that a few times and decided that after lunch we'd tackle the green run down from gondola (1/3 of the way up the mountain) down to the village level. That run didn't really go so well for me; I ended up on my butt several times, but we both made it down ok. I did manage to slightly twist my ankle or do something to my foot. It started to hurt later some.

I think the hardest part about the new run we did is that there were several places were we could not see what was ahead due to trees or a rise in the slope, etc. That made me very anxious and got my fear of heights a bit on edge too. Still we made it down all right. We then went back up to Olympic and did that once more just to end on a positive note.

That night we decided to have our big splurge dinner of the week; we went to Araxi, which is pretty darn nice. It is certainly not cheap, though. I had the butternut squash soup and the rack of lamb and a vanilla sidecar. The rack of lamb came with maitake mushrooms and roasted parsnips on some sort of cream sauce. The only real trouble here was that I was expecting that part of the meal to be ...more substantial. So, I took enough insulin for the drink, some bread before the meal, the soup, and also a fair bit for the parsnips. Well there turned out to be exactly two small strips of parsnips on my plate. There were a fair bit of the mushrooms, but those don't have hardly any carbs in comparison. So we ended up having to hustle off to get some dessert afterward as my blood sugar dropped precipitously low. I guess I need to consider more carefully what type of restaurant I'm eating at. A fancy restaurant like that seems to treat veggies in the description of the plate as simply more of a garnish than as a real entity on the plate. That's fine...but makes it tough for me to figure out what I need to take ahead of time.

We ended up at Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory for ice cream. They make a pretty nice collection of flavors and do it pretty well. I certainly liked their ice cream more than the stuff at the place called Cows. Theirs had more texture. It had a certain amount of elasticity to it since it was not a very creamy ice cream, but I actually like that sort of ice cream. Their mango raspberry flavor was quite good. Not up to the level of my previous experiences in Columbus, but pretty decent nonetheless.

The last thing worth a mention is that I bought a lottery ticket at the pharmacy on a whim...and won a few $CAD. So I cashed in and bought another and won again. In all I ended up at least breaking even or winning a few bucks 6 times in a row over the course of the week. The clerk at the pharmacy was amused the last time when he recognized me. Probably payed for one of our meals while we were there, but still amusing.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: The Wyrd Sisters

and today's winner is
neither the mountain or the man, but rather irrational fear.

The day started off fine and we could actually see a little bit of blue sky. We started off at the very gentle learning area. One of the five of our learning group had a problem with his boots, though and he ended up leaving us after not too long. I hope he got things worked out okay and was able to continue his lesson. Not long after that, we had another person join our group and then we went up the Olympic chair lift again. That went pretty well. Our teacher today was from Slovenia. Tom tried to teach us to do parallel turns, where we bring the skis around together instead of the snow plow turns we had been doing. That went okay, but I'm definitely stronger at turning to the right (right foot starting on the downhill side) than I am at turning left. We did that twice and it was time for lunch, so we headed to the top where we were going to ski down from the top. The girl who had joined us in the morning had to go down to the village, so we arranged to meet up at the bear...but I didn't realize there was a bear inside the lodge and one outside. We did not find her and finally Tom decided we needed to get going.

I had some trepidation about doing starting near the top, but things went fine. There was a drop off right near the start of the Upper Whiskey Jack run and that scared me a little, but we practiced our turns and things went fine. Fell a few times on the way down, but things seemed to be going well. We took the Emerald Chair lift from about halfway down the mountain back to the top. Sandra, visiting from Bermuda decided she was too tired and took the gondola back down. I was starting to feel tired too, but felt good about doing the run again or so I thought. We started back down and stopped a little ways down kinda near the drop off. The view was stunning...almost literally. I froze up and started freaking out. Fortunately, I was able to tell folks what was happening. I sat down on the snow and they had me test my sugar levels which was a little low at 75. So I had some candy that I was carrying. I still was feeling very nervous, though, so I said I would walk back up to the lodge and take the gondola down. John was amazing through it all and stayed right with me, although I thought he should have continued the lesson since it was our last one. We sat up in the lodge and got something to drink and then took the gondola back down.

We'll see how it goes tomorrow; I need to get my confidence back up and we won't have an instructor there to keep me pumped up. Maybe I'll end up doing another lesson; it might be worth it. Or maybe we'll just take it easy and do the very easy Olympic run a few times and then relax for the day and got to the spa or something like that. Playing it by ear is good; after all this is a vacation. Still I don't want my fears to keep me from getting back on the mountain; stopping now would be bad I think. I don't want to feel uncertain about starting up again the next time we get to go skiing. It would be nice to feel some confidence again.

So, we'll just play it by ear. The muscles are definitely a bit sore and the ligaments on the inside of my left knee are hurting a bit where they join to the bones. Tonight a nice dinner, maybe some hot tubbin' and some laundry duty.

The Westin has single use boxes for $3.75 CAD in the room; silly when the grocery store a five minute walk away has the same box for 99 cents...

after 3 falls
Marty is declared the winner in today's bout of mountain vs. man!

Day two of ski lessons dawned gray again. However, there had been somewhere between 3 and 5 inches of snow a little above the village, so our spirits were high that at least the weather would be better than yesterday.

Pablo (ski instructor from yesterday) got assigned to a group from Mexico today, so we had a new instructor, Nicky. She was a nice lady and she's been teaching for some time, although the past few years she's been teaching almost entirely little kids. It turned out we were honorary members of UK group today as everyone, including our instructor was from the UK other than us. It turned out to be a nice group, though.

We started out on the learning slope again, concentrating mainly on turning again. We did that for the whole morning and headed up in the gondola to the top to have lunch up there. That was nice, but it was still pretty foggy and cloudy up there, so we couldn't see too well. After lunch we headed back down in the gondola after running into one of our classmates from Monday; he and his wife were about to ski the green run from the top. Lloyd was a little nervous, but looked ready for it. We hit the chair lift up to the easiest green run after getting back to our skis and had one more thing to learn before we went back down, sidestepping. Definitely a useful skill if you get onto a slope you don't feel comfortable skiing down.

We ended up doing two runs down the Olympic (green) run back to the learning area and that went pretty well. I was feeling pretty jazzed when we finished and I'm definitely looking forward to our last day of lessons tomorrow. Nicky said that John and I are definitely ready for group 3, so we'll probably do a lot more actual skiing tomorrow, including the green run from the top hopefully.

Tonight, hot tubbing to relax and ease some sore muscles.

Current Mood: accomplished

you only fall twice
John and I are in Whistler, BC for a vacation. Hooray! The trip did not start off well. We missed our bus to Whistler because one of my bags did not make it to Vancouver. No explanation as to why other than "Possibly a weight and balance problem" with putting the bag on the plane. At least they knew it was still in Houston. We got put on standby for the next set of buses to Whistler from Vancouver and fortuanately were able to get on one. They were very busy, though and the bus was quite full.

By the time we got there, it was getting dark and we were hungry. We got into our room. We're splurging some and staying at the Westin Resort right in the Village. It's nice and the room is comfy, but we're annoyed at the management. The Internet Access is extra (15/day/computer), the ski valet and access to their "health club" is $20/day (per room). They are already charging quite enough, I should think. Still it's comfy and at least we have a kitchen so we can buy some groceries and save a little money that way. Everything is expensive here, though. We ordered a takeout pizza and it was $36 CAD!

We spent Sunday just recovering from the rigors of travel. For some reason, both John and I were pretty wiped out Saturday night. So we did some wandering around the village and not a whole lot else. Monday is the start of a busy holiday week of, you guessed it, skiing! Neither of us have really skied before, so we were prepared for an adventure. We had taken a short lesson on snowboarding and found it difficult to start off.

We bundled up well for the cold, although it was warm enough that it was raining at the bottom of the mountain. Fortunately, it was a little colder up where we went for the lessons. There were 8 of us in our group originally, but as it turns out there were only 9 of us for 2 instructors (less than they expected), so we split into two groups, one of men and one of women. We had 5 total in our group and our instructor, Pablo, seemed pretty good. He is from Las Leñas in Argentina. Since our summer is winter down there, he hasn't experienced a summer since 1999 evidently. He's been going back to Argentina for their winter and up to Whistler for winter season here. Wow.

Skiing definitely started out more easily than snowboarding. We were standing and not falling down all the time right away! It didn't take long for us to learn to make the pizza shape to stop or to start learning how to turn. Actually we spent most of the day working on learning how to control speed and how to turn effectively. It seems to be a lot about balance and leaning and pressure on the right ski to control turns and speed. Pablo thought we were doing well, so at the end of the day we took the chairlift up to the top of the Olympic run and skied all the way down to the gondola. I only fell twice the whole day, so I think it went pretty well. It is very tiring, though, and John and I were glad to get back to the room for some chocolat chaud and a shower. Hearty dinner for tonight, once we pick a place to eat.

I bought a snowboarder hat to wear; it has tails that you can tie under your chin to keep it on, although I've never seen anyone with them tied. Anyway, John came up with a good one. I said I felt like a dork wearing it, especially with a goofy grin on my face and John replied that I looked adorkable. He's a clever one.

Current Mood: amused