Gone West

Yikes Wednesday already.  I was in West Yellowstone skiing last week and have been playing catch up since. The skiing was great, plenty of amazing snow and really nice weather.  There were a lot of familiar faces out there this year, and my brother and sister both came out, so I did a bit less skiing than years past on account of hanging out with them, which was really great.  I still ended up with about 200 miles total skiing for the week.  Not to shabby.  The drive out and back was slightly less exciting, but still pretty good.  It is nice to have a car full of people to talk to on that long of a trip.
Coming back to a lack of snow is a bit depressing.  The road tips go back on the ski poles today for a bit more rollerskiing, hopefully not for long though.
I did a lot of my skiing with Bjorn last week, and he gave me some pretty good technique pointers that I'm anxious to work on, but have a bit of trouble with that on rollerskis.  It is too easy to let technique slip when you don't have a real edge to ski on, or classic skis period.  Over the course of the week I could tell I was getting the snow feel back, so I'm sad to leave it behind and get back on the rollerskis.
Before I left I did buy some new running shoes, and have been putting them to decent use so far since returning.  Trying to get some hill bounding in and ingrain a bit of that technique work.  My endurance seemed alright during the trip, not great, but enough that I'm not all that worried about putting in big hours.
I updated my workout spreadsheet and am at nearly 340 hours so far this year, so I should easily clear 350 by the end of next month, although I won't make it to the nearly 400 I was at last year.  I think that is ok, I'm enjoying doing a lot of other stuff (and way too much minecraft).
The first world cup races went on as well, and it looks like Bjorgen is going to continue to be an unstoppable machine.  Several of the other Norwegian women also looked on very good form.  Northug, Roenning, and the Russians also have had a good start to the season so far.  The racing has been on low snow courses so far, so it will be interesting to see if things shift around a bit when they get into the meat of the season and start racing on natural snow.  Things have looked very promising for Kikkan so far, and Liz Stephen is showing the kind of form that got her on to the USST, which is a good sign.  Now they just need to get Jessie over to Europe and they will have a pretty solid relay team.  Not that Holly or Sadie are slouches by any means, but the way Jessie tore up the West Yellowstone races makes me excited to see how she does against much stronger competition in some head to head racing.
Sorry this post has been a bit disjointed, I'm still not settled back into any kind of routine, so my thoughts are a bit scattered right now.  By next week things should settle back down and I'll give a bit more comprehensive update, unless it snows and I'll just be thinking about skiing all the time.

A quiet week

It has been a busy week, mostly work, but not too much of note has been going on.  Mostly trying to get all of my ducks in a row before leaving for a week for West Yellowstone.  Here are a few odds and ends.

• Minecraft: Detrepid is working on a nuclear reactor (rebuilding after the first one blew up under our cabin) and I have been making a large structure in the Nether.  I have it all laid out in cobble, but the plan is to have the entire structure be reinforced glass eventually.  Also had a working oil harvesting/refining platform going offshore for a while.  Something about this sat well with the chemical engineer in me.
• World Cup:  I might be doing a bit of FIS Nordic world cup analysis this year, just for funsies.  I'll start by posting my Skitrax fantasy world cup team.

Team: Siggy's Speedsters

Female Skier #1; Marit Bjoergen (Nor) 

Female Skier #2; Justyna Kowalczyk (Pol) 

Female Skier #3; Therese Johaug (Nor) 

Female Skier #4; Kikkan Randall (Usa) 

Female Outlaw Skier; Vibeke Skofterud (Nor) 

Male Skier #1; Dario Cologna (Sui) 

Male Skier #2; Petter Northug (Nor) 

Male Skier #3; Emil Joensson (Swe) 

Male Skier #4; Alex Harvey (Can) 

Male Outlaw Skier; Jesper Modin (Swe)

• The winning technique is to get the skiers that have the best chance to hold one of the leaders bibs (sprint, distance, or overall) since they accumulate points every week.  It is also better to get occasional great results compared to consistent good results.  This is the reason Charlotte Kalla, Lukas Bauer, and other very good athletes are left off the list.  I see Marit and Justyna as no brainers, Therese and Kikkan are both solid options to lead the distance and sprint standings respectively if one of the top two doesn't, and the outlaw skier is usually a bit of a crap shoot (except last year where Therese and Ola V were pretty easy picks).  Racing starts this weekend in Sjusjoen, Nor.  Hopefully I'll still be able to find Eurosport coverage to watch all of the races this year.
• I won't be posting next week because I'll be in West Yellowstone skiing, but will post about the week when I get back.  Snow conditions sound great, so I'm looking forward to being mostly cut off from internet and such for a week with nothing better to do than ski all the time and hang out with family and friends.

      

Bright White Morning

A somewhat slow seeming week where I still have had no downtime.  Here are a few details.  Note: I am sadly no longer able to deny that I'm an adult when my first several bullet points are all work related (or maybe the fact that I'm using bullet points is enough evidence anyway).

• The process engineer who recently left from my group was in charge of all of our database systems here.  I have been taking an intro to databases class and combine that with my tiny bit of programming knowledge and I have just enough skill to keep the database system running and do some troubleshooting.  Now I'm getting to the point where I might need to start designing pages and queries though, so that will be a step up.  Learning my way around that system is occupying any down time I have at work.
• The copper plater I'm working on has been running quite well lately, but chose one day this week to hiccup.  Not a big problem, and fairly quickly solved, but it had to happen while running the most expensive product we run on that line, causing some amount of scrap, and it had to happen at 3:00 in the morning, so my sleep schedule is still readjusting from that.  Had the same problem happened on day shift on our normal product nobody would have batted an eye, but instead I get a phone call in the middle of the night that we are scrapping out expensive material.
• It Snowed in Northfield last night!!  By the time I woke  up it was all gone, from the ground, but evidence remained on my deck, so I took a quick snap shot.

• The West Yellowstone trip is coming together.  Still not sure about vehicles, but there might be 10 of us U of M skiers/alumni out there this year, so it will be a good crew.  They have been getting snow it sounds like, so things should be in good shape by the time we get out there.
• Several of the bloggers I read are fans of reducing the amount of stuff you have to simplify your life.  I seem to be moving in the opposite direction, since I am a bit of a hoarder.  I just bought a new SSD since I have a hard drive failing, and this picture shows how ridiculous my boat situation has become.  In fairness only one of them is mine, but even so...

• I have started playing Minecraft again.  It is a great game, and a great reminder of how fun legos were, but legos wouldn't let you build nuclear reactors or play with people 1000 miles away, so here we are.  Garrison and I joined a MP server running a couple cool mods, and I am now spending way too much time building solar panels, quantum armor, chainsaws, and macerators, and of course mining all the resources it takes to build those things.  I got a teleporter working yesterday, so hopefully the server creator, who has a Lets Play Youtube channel, will highlight our progress in his video in the next week or so.  Not that there is a ton of progress so far.  We've built a cabin, some solar flowers, a wind farm, and some industrial equipment.  So far just laying the groundwork so that when we decide on a large project all the infrastructure is in place to get it going.
• Finally, I got a chance to chat with my friend Annie, who is in Tanzania right now.  It was good to catch up to her.

Lining 'em up

My blog posts tend to ramble, as I realized when I looked back to try to find some info from a few races earlier in the year, so I'm going to try to do this post in bullet points and see how it goes, because bullet points are fun, unless they are piercing your flesh.  Then they are less fun.

• New canoe maiden voyage - My boat repairs were finally finished last Tuesday, so Thursday Emily and I hit the mighty Mississippi (and Minnesota) river to give it a test run.  It was 18.5' of quiet fast magic.  Now I need to start saving up for a paddle.

Paddling off into the sunset

Emily keeping us on track

• Jallie's Meeting - Allie works for the City of Lakes Nordic Ski Foundation, and I got to go to a meeting she was putting on about growing participation for the Hoigaards Challenge series.  It was all very adult like discussing things like advertising tactics, entry fees, and demographics.
• Write up for Hoigaard's Challenge - On another note related to the Hoigaards Challenge, I was asked to do a short writeup on the event since I won it.  It was really hard to describe three events in under 300 words, my writeups here are probably 400 words for each of the events, and that is without trying to ramble too much (and not always succeeding at such).
• Rollerski With Bjorn - Got out for a long rollerski with Bjorn on Saturday.  I handled the distance fairly well considering my lack of rollerskiing, but any time the speed amped up I was dropped pretty quickly. Great day to be out though, and Bjorn's rollerski route is really great.
• West Yellowstone - Rooms are booked for West Yellowstone over Thanksgiving week.  Staying in the Holiday Inn this year, which is kind of the epicenter for the Festival events.  That will be a change from the peaceful, homey feel of the Brandin' Iron, but it will be fun to try out something different.  There is a good crew this year.  My brother and sister are both coming, as are Emily, Bjorn, and Jallie.  Now all that is missing is the snow.

Well, I don't know if it is shorter or sweeter, but it does seem a bit more organised than previous posts, and it is easy to drop bullet points in over the week so I don't forget anything.