Snowboarding, continued

Sunday, Stevens' Forecast: Rain
Well thank goodness for inaccurate forecasts!
I've never had a stellar day at Steven's. Bad timing I guess. This time we had a triple certed(Skiing, Telemark, Snowboarding) level 3 instructor at his home mountain.
Needless to say it was fun. We had to kill 20 minutes to get our lift ticket coupons so we practice on some pvc pipe for freestyle. 50/50s and a couple mediocre FrontSide board-slides.
Third day out of four I ended up in a natural half pipe created by a deep cut creek bed. That right there made the 10$ lift ticket worth it. Then we dropped another run with warning for cliffs through the trees(jeez this weekend was fun and tough!). More chutes/ double diamonds. Some food after 3 hours of leg burning laps on some of the best/hardest terrain at Stevens. Time for some freestyle.
Got our park passes and hit it. Rusty at the pipe. But hit the mid-sized hits cleanly with just straight air. BS 180s off random hips. Need to work on bringing the A tricks to the bigger terrain.
Got some credit on my riding again for fellow instructors. It's nice to here from peers or people I consider better some props. It's been a lot of work over the last 3 years to unlearn and relearn snowboarding on challenging terrain.
Got some good pointers too.
Over all this week I rode thousands of vert, lots of diamonds and double diamonds(WA double) at three major resorts. Did some huge drops, free style, 3 different natural pipes, three different tree routes. It felt great to slay to three resorts in Washington. Some great narrow lines including the middle stretch of Chute.
One of my best weekends or riding, in terms of fun and in terms of quality of my skills. Rode a ton of terrain.
Now time to bring it for the exam.

Long Time, no Blog

So it's been a long time since I(Bryce) expressed any adventures or thoughts.
My life has been consumed by way too many hours behind a desk and too few on the snow(thought I've been super busy with that too)!
Lots of teaching adventures to share at a later date, but I want to share my weekend first and foremost.

So on adventures:
This week I took Thursday and Friday off. That was the smartest thing I've done in a while. We lucked out and Julie had Thursday off so we went with Ted (whom I encouraged to take the day off as well). A powder day on Alpental was a blast. Ted and I have very similar riding styles/instincts. Face shots, cliff drops, stump booters. I felt like I was in a video at times even when I got bogged down in the wet snow or had heel slide a 6 ft wide gulch between two cliff bands.
Friday I followed it up with an early start and long car ride up to Mt. Baker with Ryan and Ted. While the snow wasn't exactly fresh or uncut, the weather was beautiful blue skies and the company was awesome. We rode our asses off on any thing from groomers to iced out tree runs to small powder fields(3 turns max) to soft but cut chutes.
Highlights: 19$ ticket, first run, some beautiful control dynamic turns down a 12 foot shoot rated double diamond, watching people drop the backcountry, 3-beer lunch, dropping a ~10-12 drop into cut powder then an accidental somersault but ending right back onto my board, the weather, the lift convos, jamming out on the way into and out of the parking lot, and finishing the day down the canyon in the sunset...
Yes a whole paragraph of highlights.
Saturday was some casual turns at Alpy with Julie and her work friend Karen. A good time. Karen was super jazzed to ride some Washington snow and it was infectious. The girls both had energy and it helped because I was tired. Met up with Nate(another ski school friend), and got a few turns, even found 3 more powder turns. Finished the day with some yummy Ethiopian food and an early bedtime.
Sunday was a clinic at Stevens...
More to come on that, too long of a post and it's bedtime.

Facebook

Facebook is really helping me out here. I got in touch with an old co-worker who mentioned that she stayed in NZ for an extended period-- I got a wealth of information out of her. Namely, hostels on the south island are really cold and you have to pay a premium for heat (shoot!). Also, the drive from Auckland to the south island is so long that it's preferable to fly. Also good to know. I wanted to get plane tickets this week and just figure things out later, but the rigid part of me really wants a plan! I checked the Ministry of Education's website and there's still no SLP job openings. Man I wish I could have taken that Auckland job that was available over Christmas-- if only I had known about it.
Right now I think that a good plan would be to just live in Christchurch or Wellington-- the two cities that we hear are the best-- and settle down so I can get an internship in a hospital setting and Bryce might get a little job with snowboarding or cars. I'm studying up on all my old med speech notes and I have more observations planned. I've got to get myself marketable!

Life isn't a rehearsal!!

I'm trying to learn how to be a medical SLP so that I can be more marketable (esp in NZ). Today I went to a nursing home in Renton to follow an SLP for a few hours. S. was great and even invited me to observe her for a whole weekend in a few weeks! While she was writing up notes at a nurse's station, we could overhear the news broadcasting from a nearby TV area. The news was about the stimulus package and the economy... S. looked at me and said something like, Can you believe all this happening? I told her that we were taking off to NZ and weren't going to wait around for the economy to get better; it could take years. She basically told me, Good for You and then said that this mess has made her realize that you aren't really as secure as you think you are, which she said was kind of freeing in a way.
I like that way of looking at things, and told her so. She said her sister has a quote,
Life isn't a rehearsal!!

Later we went over a client list that showed that someone just passed away over the weekend. The computer software actually stated, "Expired." Not a very compassionate term... S. was unsure of how I would react to that and just looked at me. I said, "Oh she went to the play."

filtered sunlight

On the radio yesterday I heard that the weather would be "filtered sunlight." That's a nice sounding phrase for the worst type of sky at all: High Clouds Sky. yuck.

The day started off right with blue sky and bagels at Hot Bagels in Ravenna. We walked around Green Lake, got Sarah a souvenir in Fremont, and tried to get burgers at Gordo's in Ballard but found it was closed! We checked out Twinline Motorcycles in Georgetown and ended up at Starbucks in Alki to read for a bit. The day was just sunny enough to make me really, really dread the forecasted rain for the next day. I sat in a parking lot in West Seattle reading and watching the blue sky until it got dark.


I desperately want to live somewhere where I don't have to feel so depressed on a sunny day because I know how fleeting it is.

Hawaii?!

A woman at one of my schools is married to a Kiwi. I talked to her today about how she gets to NZ; she said that since she has kids, they break up the long flight by stopping over in Hawaii. Now THERE's an idea!! Bryce and I looked up flight info and it's totally feasible; just a few 100 bucks each for us to fly there. We're pretty excited because losing out on our Summer by spending it in Southern Hemisphere's winter sounded a bit dreary. Hawaii might make us feel A LOT better. We're going to see if we can use one of our timeshares in Honolulu to make the trip even cheaper. Plus the trip will coincide nicely with our first wedding anniversary!

Goals

So I don't beleive in N.Y. Resolutions.
I read someone quoted as saying they're a procrastinators excuse and while I'm the ultimate procrastinator I don't partake. I like to pick any day to make a change.
However it just so happens to be the 4th and I'm thinking of goals. I'm going to keep the published ones limited to physical goals.
My life has changed a lot since the last time I really made a goal list. I decided to start the climbing that I've always wanted to do last year but I haven't truly made a goal list...
So here I go...
Use ellipses less in my online posting... J/k
Run a new type of race, I've ran two 1/2 marathons now. I've improved and want to continue to improve but need a new challenge. See below post...
Get a stamp on my passport Julie encouraged me to finally get my passport, now it's time to use it. The worlds an amazing place, or so I've read and heard.
Snowboard my rear off 360s, boxes, big air grabs, exiting a super pipe and carving the Nat(sh). A late start of the season is no excuse to not hit 40, and why aren't I hiking more once the lifts stop.
Climbing is my summer snowboarding That means train, study, get better, stronger, faster, etc. I need another volcanic summit this year.