9 posts tagged “skiing”

It's been a while since my last entry; I haven't really been in a writing mood, but I thought I'd post something as a sign of my continued existence. Some things that have been happening:

Australia
I went home for a couple of weeks. It was great as usual. Even though so much has changed since I moved away, it takes about 40 seconds for me to become completely immersed in life at home again. Except for the light switches being the other way around and driving on the left and things like that, which took a little longer. Funny how the superficial differences take longer to get used to than big things like being with family again.

I squeezed in the usual catchups with friends, and as usual most of them felt too short for either party to do any more than skim the surface of what's rolling arouund each other's heads these days. I guess that's part of life; drifting away from people to such an extent that although you trust each other to talk about things, you have so little time with each other, and so rarely, that to dive headfirst into such topics feels like plunging into cold water and so you don't do it.

My parents organised a family trip to South Australia for four days, which was amazing. The highlight was definitely Kangaroo Island, which is like a huge wild menagerie of all different sorts of animals. Growing up in Australia I stopped seeing the novelty of kangaroos or koalas a long time ago, but seeing them just casually doing their thing in the wild really brought back some excitement to the tired stereotypes in my head. It also helps that Kangaroo Island is stupendously beautiful, with wild jagged coastal cliffs, pristine beaches, iconic mallee scrub, green meadows, and random sand dunes in the middle of nowhere. The other places we visited on the trip were the Barossa Valley for some wine tasting, and a tiny bit of Adelaide (unfortunately, we didn't get to walk around and explore very much).

Work
Work has been busy, have been staying past 7 most nights (although the hours that Jon puts in make me feel lazy). Some interesting news from this week is that I will have someone reporting directly to me from next week onwards. It'll be a challenge juggling that with my own work, but I guess it's a good opportunity to figure out whether I like the whole management track or not.

Oot and aboot
There are several travel plans in the works: going to New York for a few days next week, visiting Sam in Victoria (that's Victoria, British Columbia) a week or two after that, and Thanksgiving in Whistler. By all accounts the snow is bucketing down in the mountains, so it's likely we will have some fully sick pow, bro.

Music
Have been to some decent shows recently: Fujiya and Miyagi last week (pretty good), Great Lake Swimmers (even better), Patrick Wolf (outstanding). I also brought back the 2 latest Cat Empire albums from Australia, Cities (more of an experimental album) and So Many Nights (a mainstream release). The former is outstanding and hard to stop listening to on repeat; the latter was pretty disappointing, unfortunately. New album means touring though, so hopefully they will make it to Sea'le.

Pics from Crystal today.

In other news, I think I might be turning Canadian. I've started calling it a toque, and pronouncing my r's.

I skiied my first black diamond yesterday, and I am still buzzing. Oh skiing, how did I ever live without you? Tell me we'll never be apart again. I would be living only half a life.

Yesterday's powder fix was at Summit West at Snoqualmie Pass - I'd only ever been to Summit Central, so the prospect of all those new runs had me pretty excited. Nabeel stayed with Astha and Kosta on the green slopes (it was Kosta's first day - he seemed to pick up boarding amazingly quickly), and Sean, Punit and I tried going off some jumps at the terrain park. We got about 3 inches of air, we were so proud. Fully sik bro.

Once we got sick of pretending we were worthy of the terrain park, we headed up to some blues as per usual and then eventually decided we weren't falling over enough, so we decided to try out the blacks. One of them was lame, two of them were hard enough and one of them was well near impossible, it was almost knee-high powder up top and slusherific at the bottom. I fell over and lost my skis a few times. Punit got a lot of snow up his nose. But it was so, so great. I know it's only Snoqualmie, but soon it'll be blacks at Stevens and Crystal, and then one day I'll go up the t-bars at Whistler and do batshit insane double black diamonds with my eyes closed, and I'll know my life was good for something.

I am not obsessed.

This is my current favourite skiing video (wait for the 1440 degree turn at the end - mind-boggling stuff). I am amazed by people who can jump off 60 foot cliffs without batting an eyelid. Not just because of their amazing skillz0rs (I want to know how it is humanly possible to rip up moguls like that - he must have rubber knees), but also because you know that for each time they pull off a ridiculous stunt, they probably wiped out about a bazillion times and still got up to try it again. Stupidity, persistence, call it what you will, but you know you love your sport when you're happy to risk breaking every bone in your body to be good at it (and not even get paid). I don't see myself jumping off any cliffs in the near future, but maybe I'll stop getting psyched out by 5 foot mounds at Snoqualmie some day soon.

Today is a momentous day.

The apple juice can sculpture on my desk at work has finally reached perfect 6x6x6 pyramidal form. 56 cans, the ancient Egyptians would be proud. It's all about setting noble goals in life, folks. Stay tuned for the 7x7x7 edition (may take a few months - I don't drink *that* much juice.)

On a less frivolous note, a lot has actually been happening at work. Our team just started on the next major release of our product, Subscription and Commerce Service (SCS) 7.0. I don't talk about work much here, so here's a quick summary. My team, the Subscription and Commerce Group (SCG), is responsible for Microsoft's online monetisation platform. In plain English that means that we provide e-commerce services like credit card processing, subscription management, and so on, that other groups in Windows Live (formerly MSN), as well as our external partners,  can plug into to sell things online.

Anyway, after spending a year working on a very obscure backend feature called Payment Gateway (namely the interface between our system and various banks), I'm happy to report that for our next release I'm going to be working on possibly the most visible feature our team owns - Microsoft Points. Ok, so it isn't by any means as instantly recognisable as Office or Windows, but most people who are active Xbox gamers, or own a Zune, or run their small business websites over Office Live, regularly interact with my feature. Basically Points are a digital currency you can use to buy things like songs for your Zune, premium content for your Xbox like extra levels, weapons, and so on.

It's really motivating to work on something which my friends are interacting with (albeit unknowingly) on a daily basis. My neighbour Thejas, who is addicted to his Xbox and whose TV speakers regularly shake our common wall with the rumblings and explosions of Gears of War, was pumped when I told him that I now work on Points. The guy probably spends half his salary on Points, god bless him.

It's also pretty cool to think about all the possibilities of combining our features with the other interesting stuff that's going on in MSFT. For example, late last year another group in Microsoft shipped XNA, a toolkit that anyone can use to develop games for Windows or the Xbox. Combining this with the Points world, could we see a whole new marketplace emerge for Xbox enthusiasts to upload and sell content they've created themselves to other users? Exciting stuff :)

I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to talk about in regards to what we're working on, but there are some interesting things in the works, and with all the MSFT head honchos pushing the "software as a service" doctrine these days, it looks like our team's work is only going to become more important to Microsoft as a whole. Even the Economist is talking about it.

Anyway, enough about work. In other news, I have to find a new place to live. My lease runs out soon, and I've been trawling online classifieds for apartments to rent downtown. Since I seem to spend so much of my spare time in Seattle or wishing I was in Seattle, it makes sense to move there. In an interesting twist of fate, Astha's roommate is taking off to India, possibly for good, and therefore has to move out of their apartment, and Astha asked if I would consider taking her place.

The arrangement does have the potential to be awesome - Astha is a champion and we get on great, so it could be a lot of fun. Her apartment is also gorgeous, in a ridiculously convenient location, and will save me a hell of a lot of money compared to living alone. There is of course the question of whether the fun will continue when we have to be in each other's faces 7 days a week, and how the hell all my stuff, which currently takes up a whole apartment, is going to get consolidated to a single room. A lot of stuff will obviously have to go into storage, but the main issue is, I have gotten used to having my own space, and it will take a bit of adjusting to. I do think it's worth a try though, and the fact that it's a month-by-month arrangement is good - if it really doesn't work out, we're not stuck in a lease.

Some other tidbits:

• My new skis are really doing wonders for me. They are so light and manoeuvrable, I am charging down runs I used to be scared of. I hope we get some good powder in the mountains this week, I want to hit up a black diamond. (Best case scenario: I won't die.)
  
• Nando's has landed in Seattle. Hallelujah. Hot on its heels - Baker's Delight.
• This is hilarious.

Wow. This day did not go to plan.

After picking up my new skis on Friday, I was positively rearing to hit the snow this weekend. I roped in a few friends to head to Stevens Pass, and after a late night on Friday we decided to head out for the afternoon session of skiing which started at 12. We somehow managed to squeeze everyone (Nabeel, Atul, Al and me) and everything (two sets of skis, a snowboard and everyone's other paraphernalia) into Nab's Civic, and then headed off to the mountains, stopping only for the traditional Macca's hit in Monroe, and to chain up just before the pass.

It was snowing pretty hard the whole way - good thing Nabeel had decent chains. His car was stalling and sliding around my apartment complex last week, so I was pretty relieved that it handled the road to Stevens without any dramas.

We got to Stevens around midday only to find that all the parking lots were full, and that the only way we'd get a spot would be to wait for someone to leave. That wasn't about to happen anytime soon - most people start leaving Stevens around 4pm. So we decided to drive on to Leavenworth, the next town down the highway, for some lunch and a poke around.

I did not like Leavenworth. It is a town built up entirely for tourists in the style of a "quaint Bavarian mountain village". A bunch of Microsoft teams have had offsites there, and I have had friends bring back positive reports, so in theory, it really didn't sound too bad - after all, Whistler is also a Euro-style alpine village, and it totally rocks. Leavenworth, however, was complete ass. It is an unabashedly kitschy place where Ye Olde Bavaria meets every SUV in Seattle. It reminded me of Las Vegas in that it was completely over the top, crowded and the only thing that you could really do there was spend money on useless things.

Imagine Whistler Village minus the skiing, the nightlife, the beautiful people and good food. Now substitute these things with hideously ostentatious architecture, very ordinary German cuisine (but as Sam pointed out, is there any other kind?), shops entirely dedicated to selling faux antique beer mugs, trees decorated with pretzels, and aimlessly wandering tourists who either have nothing better to do with their time, or like us ran out of luck trying to find parking at better places, and to their bewilderment found themselves in Deutsch Disneyland hell. It was truly awful. We ate lunch at a random German place and then hightailed it back to Stevens as soon as we could.

Moral of the story: leave Seattle early to ski, or end up spending your day in Tackytown, USA. I have learned my lesson. I will wake up as early as I have to if it means I never, ever have to go to Leavenworth again.

Anyway, once we got back to Stevens we managed to find rock star parking and get some decent night skiing in. All the heavy snowfall during the day had made the slopes very powdery and mogul-y. My new skis got a good workout. They really scared the hell out of me at first, because they were so fast compared to rentals. Once I got used to them though, they were great. They are ultra light, so they really fly and don't make my feet tired, and are a few centimetres shorter than I used to hire, so they turn really, really well in powder. I will be carving up those black diamonds by the end of this season, I can feel it in me bones. I am one happy woman.

Yesterday I headed to Crystal Mountain with Tom and some of his friends for some skiing. I'd never been up to Crystal before, but I always loved how their ads say "Voted #7 mountain in North America". I was by myself for most of the day, since all the people I went with were pretty hardcore experienced skiiers and boarders. You know, the type who won't do single black diamonds because they're boring, and hike to remote backcountry parts of the mountain so they can actually get some excitement out of the damn place. (The day I can do that, I will be able to die a happy woman.)

The mountain was really, really crowded. All the snow in town during the week obviously tipped everyone off that there would be fresh powder in the mountains, because I think half of Seattle was waiting in those lift lines. It was also snowing hard, and ridiculously cold - 8 degrees Fahrenheit at the top - that's -12 in Celsius for us normal people. I couldn't feel my face, toes or fingers for the majority of the day. I have never been so frozen in my life. I swear I actually felt my extremities thawing when I got back into relative warmth. I now know why people wear those dicky bank robber ski masks. Despite all this, it was a thoroughly fun day.  The runs on Crystal are nice and long and powdery.

And today, I bought my first pair of skis! I was looking around for second-hand ones, but in the end I was lucky enough to get brand new ones for less than half the original retail price, because they are a slightly older model and the store was trying to clear them out. I get them on Friday (you have to wait a few days for them to customise the bindings to your size and skill level and so on), just in time for the weekend. I can't wait to hit the slopes with these babies! The ski tech who fixed me up with them said my skill level will skyrocket now that I don't have to get used to a different pair of rentals every time. Anyway, everyone I have talked to is sick of me squeeing on about them, so I shall take my excitement online, and risk the wrath of Andy by posting a picture here. Ain't they just so damn purdy?

Hit up Stevens Pass with Arpan and Alec today. We left Seattle at 6:30 and were on the slopes all day. It was my first time to Stevens, and excuse my French but it shits all over Snoqualmie Pass. It's definitely worth the two hour drive.

It was the best day of skiing I've had so far. Arpan and I hit up a bunch of blue runs, many of which I wasn't sure I'd survive in one piece, but I really surprised myself. The weather was nice - very clear, and the sun even came out for a while in the afternoon while we were on the backside runs. Al spent the day doing lessons and remembering how to ski, and at the end of the day I took him on one of the easy blue runs. He wanted to kill me (and maybe himself) by the end of it, but he got down it, acquitted himself smashingly, and I owe the boy a drink (or three) for giving it a go.

Great company, great runs, just all round awesomeness. (As you can see, I have been reduced to the vocabulary of a snow geek. Gnarly, man.) I just feel so, so good. There could have been no better way to end this year.

-- Click for pics --

I had my first skiing of the season today at Snoqualmie Pass - it was great. Nothing beats skiing: the adrenaline, the freedom, the icy wind in your face, the satiation of using muscles whose existence you had forgotten. And let's not forget the incomparable thrill of feeling like you're going to completely stack it and tear all the ligaments in your legs, and then narrowly avoiding catastrophe at the last moment.

I wasn't sure how rusty I'd be, so I stuck to greens and easy blues today - besides, we're heading up to Steven's Pass (a bigger, better, further away ski place) tomorrow and I wanted to save my energy for that. It all came back pretty quickly, which was pleasing.

One of the things I love about going skiing is the interesting people you meet on chairlifts.When I was at Whistler earlier this year, I shared a gondola with a rather frail-looking elderly guy who'd been skiing since before my parents were born (hell, probably before my grandma was born). He was pointing out some of the runs he'd done that day and they were all black diamonds (the hardest level you can do). I was blown away and asked if he minded telling me his age. He was 90! Impressed is the grossest of  understatements. If you're doing black diamonds at 90, you must be God. I don't know how else to explain it.

After ending up on my own for the day at Summit Central due to Astha wanting to rent a better snowboard at Summit West, I happened to share a chairlift with a 9 year old boy called Carey (Kerry? I dunno, he had an American accent). He was the kind of kid I really, really like - very intelligent, very outgoing and curious, and not at all stuck up or obnoxious. After getting acquainted on the ride up we decided to do a run together, and then ended up spending the next two or three hours hanging out - he was boarding, I was skiing.

In between runs we talked about all sorts of things from how to survive in the wilderness (according to his extensive research on the Discovery Channel, if you're swimming in open water and encounter a shark, you should box it on the nose and it'll go away), to the differences between cricket and baseball, to what kind of bindings are good on a snowboard. Once when we were standing in line for the chairlift next to the ski resort employee whose job it was to scan everyone's lift passes, he turned to the guy and asked, "Do you know what happened in the Seahawks game?" The employee answered no, to which Carey replied "By the way, aren't you bored just standing there all day? It looks like a really boring job." I was thoroughly entertained.

At one point I told him he was cool, and he looked offended and said "No way!" I asked why, to which he replied "Don't you know, cool stands for Constipated, Overweighted, Out of style Loser!" I apologised, admitted I didn't know that and asked him what I should say instead. He looked at me like I was ancient and said, "Just call me awesome." I felt even more ancient when he asked me how old I was, I told him 21, and he said "Oh ok, so you are younger than my mom."

At another point he randomly asked, "Did you see the news? That Saddam guy got excavated yesterday." I'm not sure whether the word he was looking for was "executed", or something else, but I got his drift. He asked me why everyone hated Saddam so much. I told him that it was because Saddam was a dictator and had done a lot of cruel and oppressive things to his fellow countrymen. When he asked me what a dictator was, I worried whether I might shatter his innocence by explaining the concept. I don't know, he might get nightmares or something! I decided he was smart and mature enough, so I told him about how in some countries, people aren't lucky enough to choose their own government, and are ruled by brute force instead. He was very intrigued, and then proceeded to ask me why, in that case, there were still people who supported Saddam. This segued into a long conversation about power politics, which I never would have expected to have with a nine-year-old. Honest to God it was one of the best conversations I've had lately. Like I said, I have such a soft spot for smart kids. If I have a kid like that one day, my life will be complete, end of story.

Not long till 2006 draws to a close. To all those in timezones ahead of me (which is basically everyone except the hundreds of Hawaiians and Easter Islanders who avidly follow my blog), happy new year!

In keeping with the snow sports theme, today's video is courtesy of Astha, who is somewhat disturbingly obsessed with it and is known to murmur "aaaaaahh, you know how we do" under her breath when she's not watching herself: