It's ski season

The world cup is in full swing, and there is natural snow for skiing here in Northfield, ski season has arrived.  While West Yellowstone was mostly a chance to just get used to the skis again and put in plenty of km at elevation on amazing snow, it is the day to day training back here at home that makes a season.  I'm planning to race the Breadsmith Relays this weekend with Dave, so I've started to mix a bit of speed work into my training already.  I did 2x2km today, pretty much the same as I'll be facing this weekend.  As long as I don't go out too hard I think I'll handle it ok, although the cold, artificial snow always makes Breadsmith a tough race.
As exciting as the snow here is, the real news from the weekend was Kikkan's win in the sprint at Dusseldorf, followed up by a her and Sadie taking 2nd in the team sprint the next day.  Kikkan is the real deal this year, and if Sadie and Liz keep going the way they have been it will shape up to be a great year for the American women.  Seeing Crawford qualify for the final and just miss out on a podium was exciting too, a much needed result and confidence boost for her.  With more North Americans committing to a full season in Europe this year it should be exciting to see what they can do.  The men have been a bit slower to get rolling, and face a very deep and competitive field, but the Canadians especially have shown that they are capable of getting in the mix when things come together, so hopefully they turn things around.
In other news my network card went out last week, and my new card just arrived.  This allows me to host a minecraft server now, which I got up and running (albeit not in the form that I hope to have it running in, but at least it works).  As I have time I plan to add some mods, such as a wrapper, minimap tool, and bukkit.  I might also create a new server using the industrial mods I have been playing with on Iskidar's server, but since I already have access to those things on his server there isn't a lot of motivation for that.
I'm going to try to push the posting schedule up to Monday from now on, since by Thursday last weekends news really is old news.  We'll see if it happens, but at least that is the goal.