The last two weeks have been a blur. Two weeks ago I took a much needed vacation and headed to Winter Park, CO to do some skiing. 5 of us hopped in an SUV (sweet Lexus Hybrid) and began the 15 hour trek south-west. I drove most of the way so the time passed quickly…especially when averaging 90mph…seriously, that lexus rode soooo smooth. 
We arrived at Winter Park Wed evening and checked into the hotel/condo. Benny hooked us up with a really sweet deal at the Silver Creek Inn. The founder of his company had a condo there so all we had to pay was the cleaning fee! ($50 for 3 nights…total!).
Thursday morning, we hit the slopes. I was a little worried considering I’ve never actually been skiing in the mountains (snowboarded at Red Lodge MT a few years ago and had a BLAST, but it wasn’t quite the same). The rest of the guys were pretty good skiers so I just did my best to keep up. Thankfully, I know how to both stop and crash so keeping up with the crew wasn’t too much of a problem. After the first two runs I thought I was going to die. I had borrowed skis and boots from a friend and my feet felt like they were in a vice grip! Not quite as comfy as a nice pair of softboot skates 
The sun was shining and it was nearly 50 degrees so it was a beautiful warm-up day. After a hard day of skiing we retired to the hotel, relaxed in the outdoor hot tub, and grabbed a burger at the restaurant.
Friday was absolutely perfect. Having gotten a feel for skiing again, we decided to step it up a notch and hit some crazy awesome tree/powder runs. To get over to the run we took a lift up to the bowl (above the tree line) and took a traverse over to a neighboring hill. The traverse was INTENSE! I’m guessing we hit 40-45mph and there were a couple of times that I thought I was going to die…crazy fun! We had to ski some difficult terrain to get to the backside of the mountain but it was totally worth it! There was so much untouched powder, and it was very serene and quiet. Matty kicked off the craziness by attacking a jump that could have just has easily been a rock or a drift by a tree. We all took turns hitting it. When it was my turn they all said “don’t check your speed, you’ve got lots of space to land”. So I bombed down and got some nice air. Oh man it was fun. Ben got some video of it so I’ll post it when I get it from him (I had it but the HDD in my powerbook died on the way home…ugh…so I can’t post it now). The second time down someone spotted a nice boulder with about a 15′ drop off. If was crazy because there were evergreens on both sides which you had to rip through on the way down. I was about to chicken out but decided I might as well give it a shot. I headed straight for it hoping I could keep on a straight path and avoid the trees. I went off the boulder, got slapped in the face by the trees and just closed my eyes….and fell…and fell. I hit the powder and yard-sale’d! After realizing I was ok I could only laugh hysterically! What a RUSH! There were tree branches everywhere and I felt amazing! Then Timmy took his turn and it was hilarious to see him bust through the trees and crash violently into the powder. Oh what a great time! After another solid day, we hit the hot tub, drank some brews and crashed early.
Saturday was a mixed bag. Winter Park/Mary Jane got about 5 inches of snow so the powder was sweet. Unfortunately, the wind was blowing strong and it was cold so many of the lifts were closed due to the frigid wind chill (-50 at the peak). It turned out to be ok though as it forced us to find some other tree runs at Mary Jane. These runs were essentially mogul runs surrounded by trees. I was totally out of my league but it was still a blast. We found plenty of jumps and I just did my best to stay alive. The final day was wonderful and we retired to the hotel, hit the hot tub, and had dinner at an amazing rib joint (where ski films were displayed on the big screens ).
We woke up at 4:30 on Sunday morning to begin the trek home. A large wind/ice storm had been sweeping through our path so we were a bit worried about the travel home. We counted 16 semi-trucks in Colorado, Nebraska, and Iowa that had been blown over or skidded off the road. We also counted 45-50 cars in the ditch. It was NUTS! Thankfully, we were traveling just behind the storm and the roads weren’t too bad. I drove the last few hours through Iowa and MN and we finally arrived safely in St. Paul late sunday night. After digging out the Honda and getting stuck a few times we finally got out (thanks to Ben pushing). I made it over to Marianne’s place and crashed hard.
Monday morning I tried to resurrect my powerbook (with no success), did a load of laundry, and packed up for my trip to San Diego (for work). It was great to spend a week out on the left coast. It was “cold” in San Diego (like 50 degrees) and I had to laugh seeing people walking around with big jackets and scarfs! Sissies! It was a good week in San Diego. I wasted about 2 days doing support…which I loathe, but the last two days were very productive. RoyK and I worked late Thursday night and got a TON of work done. We’re preparing for the relaunch of our wiki farm and got all of our storage migrated to Amazon’s S3 (which is a killer service, btw). Roy and I work well together and it was amazing to see what we could get done in such a short amount of time. Oh, and if AaronF or SteveB are reading this, whatever you’re paying roy, it isn’t enough.
I stayed at Steve and Brigette’s place which is absolutely beautiful. Waking up every morning to a 24th story view of the San Diego bay simply cannot be replicated! They were very gracious hosts. The food was also amazing. I had authentic Italian food in Little Italy (where the office is located), the best mexian burritos I’ve ever had (I had 3 of them ), an assortment of delicious Chinese served family-style, and a fantastic chili burger in the Gas-Lamp district.
On Friday it was finally time to get home. My flight was delayed a bit and I got back to snowy Minnesota shortly after midnight. I took a cab to pick up my car at Corey’s place. MN got another snowstorm so I had some digging to do. I made it over to Mare’s around 1:30am and crashed hard.
Saturday was a nice lazy day. I slept most of it but did manage to get my powerbook over to the apple store for repair. Apple support was awesome. I told them the HDD was spinning up, clicking, then spinning down, then mentioned that I had booted the tiger CD, and a couple of linux livecd’s none of which recognized the drive. The apple “genius” said “well, there’s no use wasting time doing what you’ve already done so we’ll just put it in for service.” What a refreshing response! The powerbook had an applecare warranty on it so they just checked in in for service, no questions asked! I love apple support!
Today I went to church and then went to lunch with my mom (who’s in town for the week), my sister, Mare, and Aaron and Peggy. Mom paid so that was pretty cool Then I stopped by the Apple store and picked up my powerbook (with new HDD). Leah and I stopped by Best Buy and she bought a new laptop (nice toshiba Core2 duo). I spent the afternoon getting my dev tools setup on the powerbook and spent the evening at Mare’s place. My hair was crazy long so I brought the clippers and Mare gave me a haircut. I made a mistake and put on the wrong sized cutting blade so I look like a military man now. hehehe, it’s pretty funny actually. I look almost bald
Tomorrow (or today I guess) I’ll have to get back to work. 
It’ll be a busy week as we’re launching our wiki farm and I still need to get our open source release out…It’s ready but my stupid linksys router quit routing packets on Tuesday so I couldn’t access my box remotely for the entire week! What a drag…
I’m looking forward to a more normal week and getting some time to hit the gym again. Needless to say, the half-marathon training isn’t going so well. hehehehe….I don’t care though. time for sleep…zzzzz
