I'm Back!!

Yes, I'm back, its been a while, maybe two years. It actually took me quite a bit of wrangling in the internets to get my account back, but alas the blooger is now back in the hands of its rightful owner.

I guess I'll start with a little piece on what I've been up to since my last post. Man, quite a lot actually. I'll give you the readers digest version:

I spent one more winter in Tahoe living it up, working at Alpine Meadow for one last season. That last winter I lived in a house with my buddy Jeff (read about Jeff above in my Heros post) and some new folks courtesy of craigslist, Elyse and Steve. Throughout the season we had many a guest resisdents, mainly Neil (300!!), Heidi, Jordan, Stephan, and Heather.

It was a great January, we moved into the house on January 3rd and on the 4th it started dumping, and dumping, it snowed the entire month of January. There was many a Munchkins run done during that month. Which was especially awesome for me because while I have always been fine with riding deep pow, I finally got good enough to traverse through the tight trees at high speed on skier tracks (which is the way to exit Munchkins). Yeah, that is kind of like the cross that snowboarders have to bear at Alpine Meadows, a total skiers mountain. Alpine really separates the snowboarding men from the boys, because you are always riding with skiers and they are always traversing to get the fresh, and you either have to learn quick, or you get left behind. Many a dedicated snowboarder has landed at Alpine Meadows and came away from it a skier.

Most of the rest of the season was fairly tame and not too many dumps so I spent the rest of the season working three jobs trying to stay afloat,

By February my charm had landed on Elyse and we started hanging out quite a bit. I take it she found my snowboarding lessons quite enchanting and the rest was history. We started dating and lasted through the winter. I knew I was going back to grad school at University of Colorado in the fall so we dicided to have as much fun as we could over the summer until then.

Elyse and I travelled cross country in the newly acquired 2001 Ford Escort (a total dream of a car with 19K miles on it courtesy of Nana Schaffer who can no longer drive and has no need for the car). It was a great trip, driving and camping and hanging out. We even got caught in a quick snow storm on I-70 just west of Golden, CO. It was probably the most memorable moment of the trip :)

We next spent a few weeks in Santa Barbara California hanging out with Elyse's family and witnessing a heat wave and the Gap Fire of 2008, right up in the hills of SB. I even decided to take my road bike up into the hills a few times to get ready for Ironman Lake Placid in July. After hanging in SB for a few weeks we decided to go to Guatemala and Belize for a few weeks before I went back to school. It was a cool trip, but unfortunately we hit Guatemala right as the rainy season began, and after getting wet wet wet we headed for Belize and the Caribbean Island of Key Caulker, a true tropical paradise. After all the best way to train for an Ironman is to go to a third world country and lounge around!!

To be continued because frankly, it's been a while since I've posted and I need to warm up to it :)