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At the risk of turning this into Ben's seldom updated car blog, I'm starting adjust to this whole having a nice (ish) car thing. I took it down to Winter Park on Saturday, had terrible roads for almost half the drive, and still managed to enjoy the drive. The fact that i was averaging high 30 MPG for the trip helped.

It was Winter Park's closing weekend, and I just had to try out the new skis at least once before I put them away for the summer. They're pretty great. I found a guy on Ebay selling those Rossignol's I demo'd last month in a 170, which is a little shorter than the 178 I had demo'd. As sidecuts have only gotten more radical since the introduction of so-called parabolic skiis 10-15 years ago, the effective edge of these 170s is probably only a little shorter than my old 188 El Caminos. 6 or inches of fresh meant I spent all day pounding out short turns. Which these 170's were way better at than the 178s. That lack of 8cm doesn't seem like it should have made that much difference, but I think it did. What I wansn't able to check out was how they would hold for big fast GS turns. To much crud to really try it. Speaking of which, Rossi ain't kidding when they talk about the crud busting capabilities of their AmpTech flex pattern. I'm a fan.

Yesterday I tried fitting my bikes in the car. I'm not sure i want to put my bike rack on. 1. I don't really feel like buying the new towers i would have to buy, and 2. I like the fuel economy I'm getting. I think a roof rack would probably wreck it. I wasn't able to fit the mountain bike in the back seat like Honda shows in their promotional materials. But my 29er is a little bigger than your average mountain bike. I did have to drop the seats, but I managed to get two bikes in with room for other stuff. What you can't see, is that the rear tires of both bikes are poking into the front seat area. Not enough that I'm going to bumping into it while trying to shift, but somebody getting in the passenger seat might have some manuvering to get around that 29" rear wheel. I'm ok with that.

*tap* *tap* is this thing on?

Ok, so that was a long pause. It was a combination of not much going on and, let's face it, lazyness.

Spent my Chrisirthday/Birthmas? money on a pair of ski boots. I like them a lot, but now I'm trying to find a pair of skiis to buy. the demo selection in town is really slim. Probably because there are no ski shops. There is a rental place in west laramie, where I tried a pair of Vokels that I kind of liked. Really lively and carved like a beast. But this particular pair was a little short for my height/weight. So really fun and quick in short turns, but pretty chattery at speed. Plus the bindings were set too low, so I kept loosing them on hard turns and in powder. Snow Range itself has a few demos, but they're all Elans, and the only non powder skiis they have are more intermediate level. And even comming off a 10 year break from skiing, I was outskiing them. I'd really like to try a pair of these Rossignol S86s (or anything else with the new reverse-camber/rocker/insert-marketing-term here hotness), But the nearest place I can try a pair is Ft. Collins, which is not near any ski areas. The next closest place is probably Steamboat, where I've been meaning to go to some weekend. But lift tickets are almost $100 a day. And I'm too flipp'n cheap for that.

I also finally broke down and got myself an account on the tweeter. Which you can look at over here.

I'm still refusing to get a myfaceonyourspacebook account. Screw that.

It took almost three months, but i finally finished watching The Shield. I really liked it. Of course, i was getting the DVDs from work, so my netflix account was pretty much dormant for that entire three months.

The Banff Mountain Film Festival was also in Laramie the last two days. The only things that really stick in my mind are a movie the first night about fly fishing on the Kamchatka peninsula that was more entertaining than a film about fly fishing has a right to be. If you get a chance to see Eastern Rises, do it. The second was last night's edit of Life Cycles. I still loves me some pretentious artsy-fartsy mountain bike films.

For about the 80th time, I have been planning a complete rewrite of this site. And this time i might even get it done. However, I'm planning on using the Zend Framework to handle a lot of the CRUD programming that usually bogs me down. Besides getting this thing a little more professionally done and maintainable. Unfortunatly, I'm still trying to teach myself the framework, so it's going to be a while. I thought I might get it done in time for this site's 10th anniversary, but I doubt I'm going to make that.

Also speaking of seldom updated sites, Hyperbole and a Half had one of it's all too infrequent updates. I laffed. If you haven't read it before, I would humbly suggest starting with The God of Cake and Dogs Don't Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving. If you don't laugh, you might check your house for ninja doctors, because somebody removed your funny bone without you noticing.

To the relief of legless green pigs everywhere, I have a new obsession: Fruit Ninja.

For the first time since i moved here, I put my money where my mouth is, and got a season pass to the local hill. I went out Sunday morning, and enjoyed myself immensely. But I'm still sore. Guess my snowboarding muscles where a little out of shape.

Now I just need a new snowboard. hint hint.

On the way back to Laramie, I caught this neet-o picture of the backside of sheep mountain.