The stretch of vitality

I had an adventurous weekend this weekend.  Well, Friday wasn’t adventurous, but I went to the rock climbing gym.  Saturday I packed up the car and set out to explore a few smaller towns around Boulder.  I visited Louisville first, and found it to be really very nice. The outskirts are mostly recent but not brand new housing developments.  The nice thing is that they are clearly housing development communities built by a single developer but they have stand alone houses ("detached single family dwellings" as I’ve learned in my home buying studies) as opposed to townhouses, which is nice.  The downtown area is small but very nice. I checked out the public library and walked through most of town and a few nearby residential blocks while catching up with Kate on the phone.  Downtown is almost all local boutiques and restaurants, which is nice.  I had lunch at Bob’s specialty sandwich shop, and they have a chocolate shop as well, which is a plus.  It seems many things are only open Saturday morning, though.  Anyway, Louisville is a definite possibility.  I saw a few houses for sale and even one that was having an open house, but I couldn’t muster the moxy to go in and tour it.

From Louisville I went out in search of Broomfield.  I searched, but all I found was gigantic strip malls and endless townhouse developments.  I couldn’t seem to locate anything resembling a town center, so Broomfield seems out.  Next I made the longer drive toward Greeley, navigating by the wallet-sized map of Colorado in my U.S. road atlas, which leaves some details as an excercise to the driver.  On my way there, I passed through Longmont.  The Longmont downtown was decent, but I was a bit set back by a few pawn shops, gun stores, and some office dealing in "Corrections Management" or something like that.

Next was Greeley, which turned out to be just awful from what I could tell.  The downtown is approached by a Route-22-esque highway packed with strip malls on either side.  Downtown itself has a weird ghost town feel and was mostly desolate around three in the afternoon on a Saturday.  There are also train tracks dividing the town in half and limiting the number of places you can cross.  Beyond down town the residential neighborhoods were totally unappealing.  All the houses looked like they peaked in about 1972 and had been poorly maintained since then.  Definitely off the list.

From there I headed out to Steamboat Springs, having packed up all my ski gear in the car in the morning.  On the way I drove through Fort Collins where HP has a big office, but I didn’t explore at all as I wanted to do as much of my drive to Steamboat in the waning daylight.  I may go to Fort Collins one day this week to check it out.  The drive to Steamboat was rough.  I only had daylight for the first hour, and then I drove most of the four-hour journey only the 2-lane, windy, steep, mountainous highway 14.  It was slow going indeed and icy in some spots.  Sadly the roads here are mostly not black but a very washed out light gray that is low-contrast to what’s left of the white side lines and yellow center lines.  Add to that a layer of dirt and you’re basically driving by the patterns from tire marks in the road.  Apparently they haven’t figured out the whole reflectors in the road thing.  I had good music with me, but the drive was still very long and slow and nerve racking. Although that first hour in daylight was pretty scenic.  I pulled over at one point to get some snacks from the trunk and looked up at the sky.  This was when it was completely dark and I was deep into the mountains.  The night was clear and the sky was awe inspiring.  I only glanced up a moment though as it was cold and windy and I wanted to keep on trucking.

As an aside I want to state for the record that Queen’s Shear Heart Attack is the greatest album of all time.

I arrived at Steamboat Springs around 9 pm and hunted down a motel room.  Even the Super Eight was $108/night, sadly, but I gues that’s the story in a destination resort.  Then I drove into town, walked up and down the street a bit to check it out, and then selected a Mexican restaurant for my ski-fuel burrito.  I ate quickly and headed back to hit the sack.

Sunday I skiied the world famous Steamboat Springs.  The first few runs the light was incredibly flat due to cloud cover, so there’s just not enough relief to see the terrain.  It literally was like skiing on a white photographer’s backdrop – except the backdrop wasn’t flat.  However, the sun did come out for about two hours in the latemorning, which was terrific.  I found some nice runs with some scattered trees that had deep snow and interesting features.  One thing that Steamboat does really well is make runs where the only clear away some of the trees to give you a nice middle ground between a fully cleared slope and dense tree skiing.  Steamboat is also recognizable for the fact that much of the forest is birch trees in addition to the more common pines.  There was plenty of snow, although it was not fresh so it was a bit heavy and sticky.

I stopped for lunch at a small mid-mountain hut that was standing room only so I had to eat outside.  By this time the wind had picked up considerably and the cloud cover was returning.  This was almost enough to get me bummed out, but I decided to go check out the back side of the mountain where they have some bowls and more open skiing.  The skiing on the back side was really great and very new for me.  I even took off my skis and hiked up to one of the double black diamond runs.  The first bit was very steep but had the deepest powder I have skied in, so you don’t have to worry about falling because it’s two feet of fluffy snow the whole slope.  So I made my way down that and into the next section which was denser trees, which I navigated a bit cautiously since I don’t ski with a helmet (although I think next year I might start).  Once I got down through those trees it dumps you out into a vast flat clearing.  This was just spectacular.  It really gave me a sense of how beautiful the snow-covered trees are and the fact that I had to hike a ways then ski down a double black diamond to get to it made me feel priveleged to be there.  There are some photos and a video linked below.

(This one is for Jamie)

I ended up skiing until past 3:30, which is somewhat unusual, before taking the shuttle back to free parking and getting ready to head home.  I thought because I was taking a different route back to Boulder I might get to a respectable highway sooner, but no such luck.  The drive back ended up being even more treacherous than the drive there – partly because this time there was more traffic building up behind me in my slow moving Sentra.  I had to pull over about four or five times to let faster traffic pass on the steep, curvy, mountain roads in total darkness.  After over three hours of bare knuckle driving I was relieved to finally get onto I-70 and drive 25 mph in traffic toward Denver.  I forget which road I was getting on to, but toward the end getting onto 93 north or maybe route 6 as I made the left hand turn onto the road from the off-ramp of the previous road, again thanks to the zero-contrast road painting plus fatigue, I very briefly drove the wrong direction on a divided highway.  It only took me a few yards to realize my mistake, and thankfully there were no cars in sight in either direction (initially), but let me tell you, that realization gets your heart rate going.  Thankfully, I was able to make a quick U turn and get back on the correct side going the correct direction with only one car passing me in the other lane head on.

I was surely relieved to arrive back home in Boulder and scratch my puddy tats. Note to self: no driving in the mountains at night.

More photos here

So things are cruising along nicely here in Boulder.  I’ve been skiing at Winter Park, Eldora, and Copper Mountain so far.  I’ve been loving the huge King Soopers supermarket that is open 24 hours and the Boulder Rock Club is great.  The cats have been fun and amusing when they aren’t pooping or puking out of the litter box, which they do fairly regularly.  I busted Fred the neighbor’s cat stealing food a few times, too.  I’ve been trying to get Elise in to Six Feet Under with good results so far and I have the BBC Blue Planet documentaries here from NetFlix, which are pretty cool.

I’m reading up a lot on house buying and trying to get my finances understood and in order so I can get a mortgage, etc.  I’m going for a consultation with Uncle Bill’s financial advisor tomorrow. Hopefully he won’t react as poorly as my banker when I explained how all my Opsware stock earnings would be taxed in 2007: "Oh that is going to kill you. (Head in hands) That is definitely going to kill you."

Today I took off again to go skiing.  We went to Copper Mountain again and it was just spectacular. They had about five inches of fresh snow, sunny with a few scattered clouds, and zero wind.  It was a bit cold (15 degrees at the base) but we seemed to stay comfortable.  Elise, Les, and I took a group lesson on skiing bumps.  The lesson goes from 10 to 3.  In the morning in addition to our instructor Donny, we had Tom who is Donny’s supervisor and also a good teacher, and Jerry, a ski patrol guy who was tagging along for the fun of it.  We all got some really good pointers and made a lot of progress on skiing moguls with the contemporary technique.  Poor Les was struggling a little bit since she has been skiing with her skis completely together in a tight slalom for a few decades and it’s hard to adjust to the modern technique of having skiis about six inches apart.  The snow was perhaps the best I have skied.  We covered a lot of terrain (all with moguls) including the Spaulding Bowl on the back side.  The scenery at Copper Mountain is really spectacular at points, often enough to make you forget you’re at 12,000 feet above the tree line in single digit temperatures.

I’m all settled in here in Boulder now.  The cats are friendly and funny.

Here’s the house I rented:

I took off Friday to go skiing at Winter Park with the whole crew: Les, Anne, Elise, and Lewis.  It was overcast in the morning but sunny and nice in the afternoon.

Afterward Bill made us another delicious dinner.  Saturday I had lunch downtown in the Pearl St pedestrian mall area.  It was unseasonably warm – 60 degrees, which was nice.  Today I went again to the Boulder Rock Gym and did some nice climbing and exercising.  It’s a really nice big gym.

For the full set of photos so far, click here

Tonight Nancy made us a nice chicken salad and we watched Eastern Promises.

OK, I’ve made it through Holiday and moving insanity 2007!  I flew in to Newark late night Sunday the 16th and worked from the Opsware NYC office most of that week.  I was staying in my Hoboken apartment and trying to coordinate a bunch of logistics.  I also had some NYC errands to run including getting my alto sax regulated and getting my watch repaired. Oh yeah, and I still had a good bit of Christmas shopping to take care of.

The following Saturday my Dad drove out to Hoboken and we loaded up his car with some of the final remaining personal belongings I had in storage in the basement of my Hoboken apartment (books, scuba gear, etc). Saturday afternoon/evening I went with my parents to two movies back to back: The Kite Runner then Charlie Wilson’s War.  Both were well done.

Then began the holiday feasting.  Sunday we were at the Zippis for the December birthdays. Monday Christmas Eve we were at Kate and Steve’s, and Christmas at my parents’.  It was lots of good food and good fun.  Sunday I played some of the Bach cello suites I’ve been practicing at the party.

Wednesday morning we had pancakes and conversation.  When Frankie mentioned that “Hanukkah was done a week before Christmas this year”, Mom chimed in with “Who’s Annika?”.  Then I took Mom’s car back to Hoboken for the last minute fire sale of all my furniture.  So I blasted out about 10 craigslist ads and begun coordinating with lots of strangers to sell my stuff.

Thursday and Friday involved lots of craigslist emails and calls, selling some stuff, and lots of packing.  Unfortunately I was unable to locate buyers for a lot of my furniture.  I was worried that I would have to rent a van on Saturday and haul a bunch of it to my parents’ house.  However, after conferring with Chris and double checking the Hoboken garbage policy, I determined I could put pretty much any furniture out on the curb Friday night after 9pm and the trash guys would take it.

So thus in earnest began the great “beasting” of my furniture out to the curb. This consisted of a 2-piece sofa, a queen size mattress and box spring, a dresser, a cabinet, and a book case.  See the Urban Dictionary definition number 9 for the verb “to beast”.  Basically, I’m using this verb to describe the process by which a single person gets all that furniture out of his apartment, around a narrow awkward corner, down a flight of stairs, and out 2 doors to the curb.  So after a while of that and a penultimate loading of miscellaneous boxes of stuff into the car, I drove back to Lambertville to sleep being as my bed was now out on the curb in the rain.  I was nervous about getting fined because the information I had seemed to indicate I might have needed to call ahead in order to throw away all that furniture, and also that I needed to wrap the matress and box springs in plastic, neither of which I had done.  Since at this point it was just very mildly drizzling I wasn’t too worried about the plastic since the garbage collection would be happening shortly anyway.  Of course, as I set out toward Lambertville, this changed to an all out downpour.  Sorry about that, garbage collection folks.

Here’s me just after the beasting.  By chance on Saturday I checked the mail at my parents’ house, and I found that my extra keys had arrived from Boston.  So I went and shipped them off to the new tenant and purchased a poster tube which meant my beloved Queen posters would survive the move.

The spoils of a good beasting.

Anyway, I was greatly relieved that I didn’t have to rent a van/truck.  I drove back again Saturday morning to meet the person who was buying my coffee table – the last piece of furniture in the apartment, and do the final sweeping and cleaning.  Once that was taken care of I headed in to the NYC office to rest up a bit before meeting Chris to go watch UFC on the big screen at Madison Square Garden.  First we had a very nice meal at a cafe on 23rd street.  Then on the way back I gave Chris my stereo from my apartment and left the keys inside and completed the final exit.  I enjoyed my stay there for the past two years.

Then another long long drive to Lambertville and much needed sleep.  Sunday morning a friend of my parents took me to the bus pickup point and I took a long, crowded bus ride to the airport.  I flew out to Denver, got a bus to my car at the parking lot, and drove to Boulder.  My Aunt, Uncle, and two cousins had also just flown back from Mexico at the same time and arrived back in Boulder just an hour or so before I did.

So I stayed with them Sunday night and Monday for their New Years party.  I also played some Bach cello suites – at this point I’ve covered pretty much all my Aunts and Uncles except for Jane and Dennis with Suite No. 1.  Next time it will be the more brooding No. 2.

Today after blueberry pancakes for breakfast I drove about 5 minutes across Boulder to the house I’ve rented for January.  I met the owner and the two cats I will be cat sitting – Samui and Phuket (islands in Thailand).  So now I’ve moved in and stocked up on groceries and looking forward to just enjoying a few moments of calm before I have to again search craigslist in earnest for February housing (hopefully in Park City, Utah).

More photos of the new house and the kitties tomorrow.