The stretch of vitality

Last week I went rock climbing again on Wednesday, which was a lot of fun.  Thursday I went to two music performances.  First I heard classical guitarist Lily Afshar, which was really nice.  She is apparently the first woman to earn a Doctoral degree in classical guitar performance, which was surprising to me.  She ended up playing two encores, which I don’t think I have seen before, which were her guitar arrangements of some Persian folk ballads.  These had some nice virtuosic touches and were quite lovely.

Then I headed to a dive bar for some local rock bands.  This was quite a scene.  The crowd ranged from punked out guys with the big earrings, tattoos, and mowhawks, a huge group of hard core lesbians with all the trimmings, a bunch of girls in 1950′s party dresses apparently coming directly from some completely different event, some geeky looking guys, your standard college rock fan guys, and two older loner men who looked like alcoholics.  I later realized that the headlining band was an aggressive lesbian punk band, and thus their fans were out in force. Some were going for the college boy disguise with the baggy jeans, baggy hoody sweatshirt, and baseball cap pulled low over their jawline-length hair.  This included a couple, one of them sporting an “Alaska Grown” sweatshirt that settled into the booth in front of mine.  However, more often the boy disguise was paired with the punk-o version: dyed hair with the sides shaved, several pieces of gaudy fake jewelery, outfit revealing several tattoos, jeans with no belt showing the occasional glimpse of butt crack, fingerless gloves.  Before long there was quite a horde of these folks occupying the booths on either side of me – me solitary in my booth designed for four or six.  As I sat I lamented that fact that my writing skills are so clearly lacking compared to most of my blogging friends.  I have been going through and reading  No Simple Highway , written by a coworker of mine during his nomadic days in 1992, which has given me a lot of interesting material for perspective and comparison.

Chris arrived late Friday night and we decided to come back to Park City and hunt for a restaurant still open after 10pm.  This turned out to be a big challenge, but about the sixth or seventh place we checked was open late – a barbeque joint called Bandits.  We had a nice meal and started to catch up a bit.  Saturday we rented Chris some skis and then skied Park City Mountain Resort.  It was a nice day and we skied a bunch of blues most of the afternoon while Chris was getting back into it. He hadn’t skied since out last outing in the Poconos in 2005.  Just before it closed at 3:30, I talked Chris into heading for the Jupiter Bowl, which is of course marked double black diamond (all bowls usually are as a matter of course), but I convinced him it would be easy to traverse his way down.  After the brief hike up to the bowl, we headed down. There was so much powder that even though it is quite steep, there was no worry about going too fast or losing control, so all was well and Chris made it down without any problems.

Then, after a seafood dinner in Salt Lake City, we headed to the University for a student production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which I had never seen live.  Although all the trimmings of a student production were there, overall I found it enjoyable, and there were two strong lead voices, plus what I thought was a decent coloratura for the Queen of the Night. Chris, having lived with an opera singer for years, has much more exposure to outstanding coloratura, so he was less than impressed.

Sadly, it was raining on Sunday and windy so skiing was out of the question.  As plan B we went rock climbing at my favorite rock gym so far: the Front Climbing Club.  This is all bouldering, but the vibe is nice and they have a good weight room, cardio equipment, a yoga studio, ping pong, and billiards.  We then checked out the Utah Museum of Natural History, which was OK but we’re used to NYC museums, so when we had seen it all in about one hour, we were feeling underwhelmed.

We debated whether to eat in Salt Lake or head back to Park City and chose the latter.  And it was lucky we did because it started to snow heavily and accumulate.  By the time we were a few miles from our exit, it was the treacherous 25 MPH winter driving I have become all too familiar with this season.  So we headed home to wait it out with farfale with butter, peas and sautéed garlic.  We hung out at home Sunday and watched Babel on DVD. It was actually nice to have a day off the slopes and a night at home.  Chris returned home Monday.

This week I went into overdrive at work as we’re now at the meat of my first major deliverable project on new functionality.  I did stop Wednesday to go back to the rock gym which is so fun.

More photos here.

Park City has been fun so far.  The house is really nice so I’ve enjoyed working here. Since this was another great craigslist find I was reflecting on how many great apartments and friends I have found through craigslist, and it’s pretty impressive.  I’ve found my 15th street apartment, my 8th Avenue apartment, my Hoboken apartment, plus Santa Fe, Boulder, Park City, and Boise houses (so far).  I sold about six pieces of furniture. I met Marcia, Pat, and Jamie, three of my NYC friends, and it’s how I found Confunktion Junction and met all those guys. Craig Newmark is just an awesome dude.

Wednesday we got two batches of snow that probably amounted to eight or nine inches accumulation.  Thursday morning the shower water came on luke warm and quickly went ice cold.  Ut oh.  So I had to go re-light the pilot light on the water heater.  I think I had done a similar operation once before on my stove in the Union, NJ apartment, but never on a water heater.  So this was a good little taste of the things you have to do to keep a home humming along. Thursday evening I checked out one of the five rock gyms in the area (in Salt Lake), which was very good.  It was set up for mostly bouldering, but it had some pretty interesting routes. Of course, the requisite shirtless guy with full back tattoo was in attendance.  Speaking of which, there’s a Tattoo convention happening now in Salt Lake, although I probably won’t have time to get to it.

Friday night my cousin Ed flew in.  The Colorado Pizzis did NOT fly in because they are lame-o’s.  Ed and I ventured from the airport into downtown Salt Lake City to explore around a bit and find a restaurant.  We drove through the financial district and the area around the capital, past the big Mormon Temple, and eventually parked to walk around the antique district, since this was the first time we saw people walking around.  We passed some interesting art galleries and book/music stores.  There is a big hipster scene here, apparently, and the skinny-leg jeans were on display in full force.  However, the restaurant scene seemed to be  mostly non-existent.  We asked a passing couple who pointed us at a few restaurants on Main St.  However, of the few restaurants, many were already closed at 9:00 pm, and none of the options were particularly compelling, so we gave it up and decided to head back to Park City.  However, on the way back to the highway we passed a block that seemed to have some night life and some open restaurants, so we parked there and ate at a Macaroni Grill.

On the way back to the highway we had a little trouble finding an on-ramp and had a nice tour of some industrial lots between the highway and the railroad, but eventually we did managed to make our way back home.

Saturday we made the hour trek to Alta and had a nice day of skiing there.  I particularly enjoyed the Catherine Bowl we skied at the end of the day.  Saturday night we headed to the University of Utah for a home town performance by The 5 Browns.  They are five sibling piano virtuosos and their “hook” or gimmick is that they play all together on five grand pianos on stage.  They also play solos, duos, and trios to fill out the program.  I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, but I found the concert very enjoyable.  The program was chock full of works by late romantic Russian composers, and you just can’t go wrong there.  Each of them is truly a virtuoso and they each played impressively.  The only shortcomings were the program was almost entirely sure-fire crowd pleasers, with the only somewhat risky selection being a Scriabin piece.  So Kudos to Melody Brown for playing something ever so slightly adventurous, although she did find it necessary to caution the audience before beginning.  Also, the works were all extremely short single movements, which leaves ones attention yearning some more expansive development.  Ed revealed his woeful lack of familiarity with the early works of Stravinsky, which we promptly corrected on the subsequent road trips.

I felt some guilt at having made nocturnal Ed wake up early on Saturday so on Sunday we slept later, had some eggs, and then headed out toward Deer Valley.  However, Deer Valley was sold out of lift tickets and turning people away, and Park City had resorted to auxiliary parking lots at a nearby school, so The Canyons ended up being our only available mountain.  the skiing was good though and The Canyons is so large that the crowds at the base area are easy to get away from.  Sunday night we made the first visit to Main Street Park City and had a nice meal.

Monday we skied Deer Valley, which was completely overrun by ski-wees and their inattentive parents.  We did managed to do a few great runs in the morning on the far right lift and a few in the afternoon including the Orion Bowl, but many runs were just very crowded (by Rocky Mountain standards at least).  Monday night we went back into downtown Salt Lake City for dinner.  Then we headed to the airport.  Unfortunately, we got severely lost and way out of our way.  When we eventually realized that we were in fact no longer in Salt Lake proper, but in North Salt Lake, which has a complete decoy set of cross streets that reassure you that you are where you think you are on the map even though you are fifteen miles away.  When we finally realized our mistake Ed’s flight was set to take off in about 40 minutes.  We raced (to the extent that the Green Machine is capable of racing, especially considering we’re on non-light highways with invisible lane markers and construction) to the airport and managed to get Ed onto the plane, but just barely.  He had to gate check his bag since he was so close to takeoff time.

At this point I should note that the streets in Salt Lake City are named according to the distance and direction they lie from the big Mormon temple.  It is therefore completely valid and normal to say things like “The restaurant is on the North side of East 400 South”.  Think about that.

So that concludes the Edzilla visit and next weekend Chris is here.

More photos here.

Well, the travel nightmare didn’t quite end Monday morning. I got to the airport parking lot OK even though it started to snow again when I was still about five miles away.  The SLC airport stuff was easy and I got put onto an earlier flight.  My flight was scheduled to be 1:45 put I was at the airport by 9:30 since I just wanted to drive as soon as it was daylight, so I got on a 10:30 flight to Phoenix. I booked a layover because the HP travel booking web site shames you into it rather aggressively.  However, I failed to realize that this was the day after the Superbowl, which was in Phoenix.  In the end the football fans didn’t cause any real issues.  I made my connection in Phoenix but we had a series of major delays.  First the door in the rear of the plane wouldn’t close so it took technicians about forty minutes to correct that.  Then we taxied away from the gate only to hear the pilot announce a computer error with one of the engines, so we taxied back to the jetway and waited another forty minutes or so for the technicians to conclude it was not fixable.  So we were all ordered to collect our carry-on luggage and get off.  Back to the terminal.  Long hike to terminal B where another plane was waiting.  Of course, it was a full flight and there had been a lot of last minute seat switching, so now we’re waiting to board the replacement plane and some people have either moved seats or lost their boarding cards.  You can smell the impending chaos.  Anyway, randomly, the staff decide we’re going to re-board in alphabetical order (the staff doesn’t seem to improvise that well), so they call letter “A”, at which point sixty percent of the passengers line up to board.  So they start boarding and never call any additional letters, and it becomes clear that the staff is out of ideas and it’s time for “OK, everyone just get on the plane now”.  I think perhaps the new boarding system should have three phases: First, any aggressive/assertive people, then average wishy-washy people, then any passive/patient people.  That’s basically what ended up happening anyway.  So with all this instead of leaving around 2:00 pm, I think we left just before 6:00pm.

OK, that’s the end of the travel nightmare blogging.  So on Tuesday I gave my presentation to the boot camp training we were having, with about sixty people in attendance.  That went fine and there was a good amount of Q&A.  Plus I got to see a few of the guys from other regions or EMEA that I rarely see, which was nice.

It was otherwise a good week of work in Sunnyvale.  We went rock climbing Wednesday night but my buddy failed his belay test so we ended up having to boulder, which was OK by me since I had been mostly bouldering in Boulder last month.

Friday night I went out to dinner with Bogdan from Romania, whom I had met on my trip to Romania in October, and another colleague based in Germany.  We had Japanese food.  Somehow Bogdan, in the US for the second time ever, had a small network or Romanian contacts, so we were soon joined by two other Romanias at dinner.  We then went to shoot some pool, and again were joined by two additional Romanians.  So it ended up being me, a German, and five Romanians.

Saturday I flew uneventfully back to Salt Lake City and then drove the twenty miles to Park City.  I met my landlord Gunter, who was exceedingly gracious.  he showed me the house, which is a really fantastic place with great light, a gas fireplace, and a whirlpool tub.  He also had a nice dinner of lobster bisque and spaghetti with ragu sauce to heat up, which we both enjoyed.  It was very clear that Gunter is a well-traveled and educated man who is in the habit of making fast friends with a wide variety of people, and we both were very willing to scratch each other’s back as it were.  So after dinner we shared some of the cookies and biscotti Elise baked me and I helped him get his WiFi network secured and update his anti virus software on his desktop and laptop computers.

This morning Gunter made us waffles then we headed to Park City Mountain Resort (5 miles away!) for my first ever day of Utah skiing.  Gunter has skied Utah for twenty years and worked as a ski instructor at Deer Valley, so he really knows the mountain.  We covered almost all of it to some degree, including a few steps hiking to the Jupiter Bowl.  The weather was just gorgeous – clear skies, bright sun, and no wind.  By the afternoon I was skiing with my jacket unzipped and my mittens folded down.  Gunter took off around 1:00 to go run some errands in Park City and then take the bus home.  I stopped for lunch then skied some more in the afternoon on my own.

After a quick nap and shower, we heading into Salt Lake City for a faculty chamber music concert at University of Utah School of Music.  There was first a modern piece for viola and cimbalom, which I enjoyed, then a Chopin piano work and a Dvorák String Quintet.  I particularly liked the Chopin piece.

So now I’m mostly settled in Park City.  Gunter will be here two more days then he leaves for Singapore on Tuesday night.  I have also booked my next rental house in Boise, Idaho starting March 8.

Disclaimer: this post is dedicated entirely to chronicling bad winter driving, so if you don’t feel like reading about that, just skip this one entirely.

Wow, I just went through some serious winter driving treachery.  I left Boulder at 8:30 am Saturday heading west on I-70.  Once I got into the mountains, it was bad news.  The roads had a thin snow pack on them, but enough to spin you out of control like nobody’s business.  So I drove between 20 and 40 mph up and down windy, steep hills – for about seven hours.  My wiper fluid froze so I had to just deal with the dirt slowly accumulating on my windshield.  My side windows were splashed with slush that turned into dirt as the slush ran off, making them and my side mirrors useless. So I didn’t even reach the Utah border until around 3:30 pm.

Once I got into Utah, the drive was nice.  I made a pit stop in Green River, discussed the vast underestimate with my landlord, who was expecting me in Park City that afternoon (Google estimated 7 hours 7 minutes for the driver – clearly based on summer measurements. Ed, let’s get some seasonal relevance in those google driving directions, OK?), While I had some lunch and used the restroom, the cashier had gone out and back twice for cigarette breaks. Although the stop had six gas pumps, five of them had no squigy and the one that was there was falling apart and dry, so I cleaned off my windows with a gimpy squigy and bottled water.  Then I headed back out there. The road flattened out and straighted out and the Sun came out. My wiper fluid thawed.

The next section of drive was fantastic though. Straight roads, 75 mph, and beautiful rock formations and canyons all around.  Since by now I had realized my initial plan of going to Park City first then Salt Lake City were completely unfounded, and even getting to Salt Lake City was out of the question at this point, I started enjoying a few “view area” pull-offs and looking at Black Dragon Canyon and Eagle Canyon as the Sun prepared to set.  My camera wouldn’t sit flat on the roof of the car, so I improvised a surface out of a ziplock bag containing the chocolate biscotti Elise hade made for me.  They make a suitable camera stand.  However, I left them on the roof and as I turned to get back on the highway, they fell down and got caught between my side view mirror and the window.  And of course, having driven about nine hours at this point, I thought the natural thought: “Oh goody, it’s raining chocolate biscotti” Horray!”. I made it as far as Salina, UT when it got dark so I bunked down for the night at a Rodeway Inn and caught up with Andrew on the phone.

I tried to go to sleep around 10pm, but my normal schedule is clore to 1am these days so I awoke at 2, 4, and 6 am.  By 6 am I figure the Sun would be up by the time I showed and enjoyed the make-your-own waffles and hot cocoa with a splash of coffee, so that’s how I started the morning.  I discussed with the hotel manager whether I should head straight North on the state roads to I-15 or continue on the larger I-70 West, which would take me about an hour out of my way but at least it would not be mountainous.  She said the state roads were straight and flat and they should be fine.  While navigating by a pocket US Atlas has a certain elegant simplicity: each state has its own page about 2″x3″, when you get down to details, it can leave things up to the imagination.  Therefore, I thought the entry to Route 89 North would be just a few miles down I-70 West.  However, in fact I-70 West at this section is the same thing as 89 south, but it’s a divided highway with very sparse exits, so I ended up wasting thirty minutes round trip to make and correct my error right off the bat.  Of course, later I realized that the little side road off the highway where my hotel was WAS Route 89 and I could have just turned left out the driveway and been on my way.  It was a bad start, and things just got worst.

Route 89 was indeed flat and straight, but it was also covered in about a half inch of snow with no visible lines.  So now I’m about sixty miles south of I-15 doing 30 mph on a very rural country route.  After about 10 miles of hoping things might improve I seriously contemplated turning around and sticking to the Interstate, but I pressed on.  I only encountered about six oncoming vehicles the whole way, but each was fairly nerve racking since you can’t see where the center line is nor where the shoulder (assuming there is one and it’s not just grass) starts), so you just have to try to avoid head on collision and also avoid driving off the road.

So this took a long time and it was about nine AM or so by the time I crawled my way onto I-15 North.  Things were initially better in terms of amount of snow on the road (but it was still slushy).  However, strong gusts of wind were blowing snow off the plains into the air across the road and visibility would suddenly go from quarter mile to about thirty feet.  Luckily I saw the lights of a plow a ways ahead and between wind gusts made my way up to three cars behind the plow.  The plow was going about 50 mph, which was faster than I would have gone otherwise, but my trade off was do 50 behind the plow and have its lights in sight or fall behind and risk slamming into a stopped car.  So again a good long period of white knucle driving.  Of course periodically one of the varieties of snow driving lunatics would pass on the left doing 70.  This was sometimes a truck, or once a bus, but usually it’s some complete jackass in a pick-up truck with a the body raised up on shocks and the extra large tires sticking out the side.  Of coures, these assholse don’t have mud flaps, so when they pass you, they dump about 50 gallons of slush onto your windshield.  Their other nice trick is if they pass you and then come into the right lane, they come back into the lane ten feet in front of you so you can be completely blinded by their slush trail and pelted by the rocks they kick up for a while.  Folks out there reading this, if your significant other is one of these pick-up truck driving fuckers, please, do the world a favor and kill him in his sleep.

I still had about 110 miles of this to go to reach Salt Lake City.  After a while the ground conditions changed and everything was melted so the road was just wet and the plow turned around.  This was fine, but it only lasted a few minutes before the big snowstormhit full force.  The snow accumulated quickly so in a few minutes it was that horrible 20 mph right hand lane drive we’ve all done.  All the sedan-driving people staying together in a 2-wheel drive convoy.  Before long it just got way too risky and I pulled off.  Off the highway, there was already six or eight inches of snow on the ground and I was worried I’d get stuck in or near the gas station.  I filled up with gas and chatted with a local guy who had also just come off the highway.  He said further up I-15 it just gets more steep and dangerous.  The snow was going into blizzard mode, so I decided to try to reach the Motel 6 two hundred yards behind the gas station and figure out what to do.

Well, the Motel 6 didn’t have Internet access, so for me to stay there would be admitting that it was a complete fallout type situation, so I decided to brave one more drive back under the highway where there was a Best Western that had Internet access.  I had to do a little creative U-turning and a moment or two of looking at other drivers indicating “Yes, I’m in a Sentra, and no I can’t get into a better position than this, so just wait till I get where I’m going”.  But I did get there.

So I’ll have to stay one more night and hopefully fly out tomorrow.  The snow only lasted a few hours and then it warmed up and melted.  So if I left now I could probably get to the airport OK in terms of road conditions, but I suspect they are still delayed and backed up a bit, although the flight I was scheduled to be on was delayed but then apparently left on time anyway.  It did start to snow again briefly, so I’m going to stay here and let the airports clear up and the plows clear things off and try tomorrow.  My main fear is that all the snow that’s melting now will be ice tomorrow morning.  It was good to stop though because I needed a nap and now I’ll just have a little over thirty miles to drive tomorrow.

OK, tomorrow morning I load up the car once again and head out to Park City, Utah for the greatest snow on earth.  I’m hoping for decent weather to hold out at least until the afternoon.

This is what all of my stuff looks like assembled on the floor ready to be loaded into the Green Machine.

This last week in Boulder was good.  On Tuesday I heard CU piano faculty David Korrevar play Beethoven’s C Minor Piano Sonata and the Bach Goldberg Variations.  The seating in the theater was packed and they had to set up about thirty chairs on stage to accommodate the rest of the audience.  It was a nice concert overall, and I haven’t been to hear classical music in a good long while, so I really enjoyed it.  If all the logistics and weather work out tomorrow, my new landlord and I will go hear the Symphony in Salt Lake City tomorrow evening.

Thursday I again joined my family on their weekly outing to the restaurant “Med”, which was quite good.  Then I went to the rock gym one last time. I was only able to use eight of the the ten sessions on my ten-pass, but I think it is still a good deal.  Tonight I went to Bill’s house for one last home-cooked meal.  I played the remaining movements of the Bach Cello Suite Number One (having played the first two New Years Eve).

Now I’m packed up and ready to go.  Boulder has been really fun, but I’m looking forward to Park City. However, before I officially start Park City I have a week in Sunnyvale next week, which will be a nice break from the cold.