Thursday, January 31, 2013

Back in the Saddle Again


 Maybe it's been the winter blahs, maybe it's been being busy...who knows, but I've been neglecting my blog of late.  A brief update:


After 7 weeks post-surgery, I decided I'd had enough.  I cut off the bandages and dressings and pulled out the long suture that was used to close the incision, about 3 inches long.  

I gave the foot another week to heal up and then I went skiing.  This photo was taken from the ski club's cabin at 2000 m looking out toward the Bugaboos across Kootenay and Duncan Lake.  Typical of this time of year, at elevation you're above the clouds and fog with great views in all directions.

One highlight was towards the end of the first day.  As we climbed up along a long ridge, we stepped out on the ridge crest and saw the setting sun's colors painted all over the peaks across the Lake to our east.  It was fantastic, but even better was to come.  As we climbed higher, the setting sun to the west colored the few clouds and the ski brilliant oranges and reds and mauves (I think that was the color - I'm not so good with things like that...).  It was really quite stunning.  Sadly, the camera's batteries had died in the cold and I'm not convinced that my little camera would have done the view any kind of justice.

It was a nice 2 days out skiing, although I was totally bagged after day 1 and could barely eat my supper.  I felt better the day after.

Since then, I've been out a couple of times, including one the other day when I and another fellow climbed for 2.5 hours and had a 2000 ft vertical ski down through the trees in knee-deep powder.  I was pretty bagged after that too.  Must have been the deep snow....

I've spent quite a few hours building and configuring a new computer.  My old one was about 9 years old which in human terms must be about 95.  It was getting pretty slow and clogged up.  So a new Gigabyte MoBo, a 3.4 GHz i7 processor, 16 Gb RAM, a SSD and a 1Tb drive later....and I'm back up to near light speed.  Should do me for another decade.

Anyhow, it's time for a couple of days with the twins, then back for some skiing and the continuing task of migrating everything from my old machine over to the new technology.

Never a dull moment.