12-30-03
The snow was good at Paradise yesterday. Sue, Lisa and I drove up 2 days after a heavy snowfall. The wind had converted much of it to a breakable crust, but it had stayed below 20 degrees so it was still skiable. In places, there were still long slopes of virgin powder. Best of all was the lack of wind and the incredible Paradise views. We got a late start, arriving at 1 PM and skied until dusk, the prettiest time of day.
       Snowshoers have taken over Paradise. We enjoy seeing city folks take an interest in the Park, but we miss the crowds of skinny skiers who used to help us break trail. When snowshoers break trails they cut them straight up. It took me an hour to find a trail cut by skinny skiiers, especially one made by a skinny skier without skins. When I finally found it I was amused at how perfectly the switchbacks matched the gripping power of my no-wax skis.
       Snowshoeing appeals to the mass market because there is no learning curve. Sue and I used to snowshoe when we needed to carry overnight gear and in fact I used snowshoes to get to Camp Muir the year I climbed the mountain in the winter of '79. One soon realizes a dismaying fact about snowshoeing: while it's true that one can walk up anything in snowshoes, at the top one has to walk back down. There is no option for getting down faster: walk up, walk down.
       We tried ski mountaineering skis for a couple years and they are cool because you climb up with skins, then lock your heels down and ski back downhill style. The downfall of ski mountaineering (randonee) skis is the weight. We finally settled on our current gear: skinny cross country skis. They are light, and after a lengthy learning curve can handle anything, even with packs.
       The snow was so cold our no-wax skis had very little gripping power, not helped by their worn down bottoms. After two hours I put my skins on...what a difference! Trouble is, there were 3 of us and only one pair of skins. Sue had forgotten hers and we've never bought any for the kids. Still it was a great day. I worked 7 days on freelance projects and can feel the burnout.

12-27-03
Christmas came and went since I've written last. We saw Sue's parents and relatives Christmas Eve, then drove down to my parents Christmas day. I not sure how it came up, but when we were leaving Sue's parent's house Christmas Eve we started talking about the rubber chickens I keep in my cars for burglar alarms. One can't talk about rubber chickens without having one to hold so I ran downstairs to the car for the chicken.
       Sue's mom had never held one before. These aren't ordinary rubber chickens. These are Screaming Yellow Chickens from Spencer's at the Tacoma Mall. As I walked into the kitchen, I squeezed as I handed the chicken to my mother-in-law. That was funny enough, but what really busted us up (and put Clint on the floor in hysterics) was when she began squeezing it compulsively.
        She couldn't seem to get enough of the screaming. They are quite cleverly put together. There is a voice box built into the neck, and the body is filled with a compressible foam that resists squeezing just enough to expand when you let go, thus, the scream. By varying the squeezing pressure, you can just about make the chicken talk. It was the most laughing I've done in months.
       What it really comes down to is rubber chickens make people smile. Enough said. On Christmas day we went walking with my dad across town. He's in his early eighties but still gets around fine, if a little slower than I would like on a frigid day.
        I've been burning myself out getting a web site ready for a client. It was almost done until she asked me to re-create 12 pages of patient forms from scratch. Her printer had gone out of business, and all the digital files had vanished.
      She's been Xeroxing the old ones to get by, which made the OCR recognition pretty chancy. Still, I've got 9 out of 12 done and converted to pdf. I've been building them in Illustrator and Word, depending on the complexity of each form. This is work above the bid, so I'm billing by the hour which is nice.
       Clint picked up a used canopy for his pickup. He bought it from someone he knows from work, and got a heck of a deal: $230 for a nice canopy with matching color. Now he wants to build a sleeping platform so he can sleep inside when he goes on his BMX road trip.  Between Clint's projects and my freelance work, I don't have a spare second. It's nice to be needed, but I could use some veg time.

12-22-03
Went skiing at Paradise Sunday. Just me and Sue and Lisa. The snow was almost unskiable with a 2 inch hard crust that prevented turning. If we had the new $300 boots we could have managed it, but all our gear is antique early eighties stuff and we bailed after 2 hours. We will wait for better conditions next time. I've got a ton of freelance work piling up. I thought I had just the one site for the clinic, but two more have cropped up out of the woodwork, plus a pile of extra work for the clinic that I wasn't expecting.
      School starts up in 2 weeks, and I need to reserve some time to get ready for the new class I am teaching. It's supposed to be easy, just an introduction to web design without any heavy software. The previous teacher said I could teach anything I wanted which leaves it pretty wide open.
       I'm still drooling over a new camera and would love to blow $1300 on the canon digital rebel. Trouble is, this laptop is 3 years old and needs to be put out to pasture. It's become so prone to locking up that I use my base computer if I have serious work to do. I typically run Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Outlook, a browser, Explorer, Window Media Player and or Flash or Powerpoint all at once.
       My one year old AMD 1.7 with 512 RAM can handle that no problem, but this old dinosaur of a laptop chokes. I love the 1400 pixel monitor on the laptop...but that's about all. To bad you can't rebuild these laptops. To replace it would cost at least $1700. So, I'm looking at $3000 in toys.
        One could argue that the laptop is a business necessity. In fact I was at the clinic today meeting with the client and showing her my progress on the laptop. I had Photoshop, explorer and Dreamweaver going at the same time with my fingers crossed under the table, hoping that it wouldn't crash. The good Doctor only scheduled thirty minutes for the meeting, and this beater takes that long to recover from a crash.
       I need to start painting again. When I have a good still life going out in the garage I forget about toys. Trouble is Clint has taken over the garage with his Kayak kit. The family is all home for the holidays and it's hard to concentrate with them all running around. What was I thinking when I put my home office in the living room by the front door?!!
        I've been getting a few Christmas cards from old friends and a few relatives. Why do the people I like the most all have to live so far away? Looking at their pictures and reading their letters inspired me to fire up Illustrator and create a 3 panel brochure. I had some trouble with the "gripper margin" but decided only another printer would notice. I could have made the 3 panel brochure measure 10 inches, and simply trimmed off the gripper on both sides. Or there might have been a way to load the paper into my Epson 825 with the gripper at the same end on both sides...but then I would have had to work upside down in Illustrator...or would I?
        I got tired of messing with it, and used up a bunch of ink along the way. After all that, everybody hated what I wrote about them. I offered to let the little whiners write their own sections, but they walked away in a huff. I rewrote it again, and it's better, but I don't want to pour anymore ink into reprinting them...maybe I'll post it for my next entry. Merry Christmas if I don't write before then.

12-18-03
Added the new Flash journal archives menu today. I've been working on a freelance project since school got out, but ran out of work until the customer gets back to me. I kind of felt like a ship without an anchor and was casting around for something to occupy my time. It's odd how I've become such a teaching machine.
        Like a robot programmed to vacuum floors whenever it has a free minute from making widgets, I automatically assumed my spare time should be filled with a learning project that would make me a better teacher. Never mind that I'm a free man until school starts up in January, I still felt I should have my nose on the grindstone. Talk about a over zealous work ethic!
       I guess I've lost the ability to relax. As I write these words I'm listening to a cassette tape recorded on my 30th birthday back in 1984. In the home recording I'm playing my old Martin and my neck harp, doing a poor imitation of Bob Dylan. The instrumentals are better. Even Bob has a better voice than mine. Thirty is such a young age. Didn't seem like it then, but, jeez, I was making some terrible judgment calls back then.
     I'm talking about my career of course. I was firmly stuck in printing then, with another 15 years to go before realizing I wasn't cut out for the business. I'm still not sure what to think about teaching. After two years I'm making almost as much as I used to make in printing, but I seem to work all the time, including when I am home.
       There's always something new and scary to learn, but I used to feel the same way about the hard printing jobs. I'm officially on vacation. I should drive to California and paint in the sunshine. There's a dream. I enjoy helping Clint with his kayak. We're gluing the wire laced seams together now. We picked the boat up to turn it over and were surprised to feel how solid it felt. There's no cracking and creaking noises now. The thwarts are holding all the planks together and making it feel like a solid unit.
        Lisa has a new friend. I'm not quite ready for my little girl to have a "boyfriend", but there it is. Both Sue and I had our friends when we were that age. There's always something new with kids. Just when you get used to how things are, everything changes. I'm thinking I'll go for a bike ride, the sun is out and I feel fairly strong despite this cough. Perhaps I'll ride across the narrows and take some pictures of the new bridge construction.

12-15-03
Clint and I have been building a kayak together. He bought the kit from Pygmy boats in Port Townsend last summer and has been working on it in his spare time as a senior project in high school. Progress has been excruciatingly slow due to his tendency to go bmx riding in his spare time instead of working on the kayak. Sue has helped him a lot, but I've avoided it due to the constant homework of my teaching job.
       Most of the fall was involved with gluing the strips of plywood together to make planks long enough for the 22 foot boat. The planks come in a 8 foot cardboard box...22 foot boat...you get the idea. Last weekend he began lacing the planks together and all of a sudden what had previously been just a bunch of flimsy plywood strips on a table in the garage began to look like a beautiful kayak.
       We realized, with a shock, that this was a pretty cool project and poured about 9 hours of labor into it over the weekend. He's a very conscientious worker and has my tendencies toward perfectionism. Because of this we make a good team, working our way from end to end on the boat, measuring, lacing, drilling and generally marveling at the incredible boat rising off the table.
       When he bought the boat last summer, I thought it the height of idiocy. He's never been one to spend long periods of time on tedious projects, and I figured he wouldn't start now. However, he's proved me wrong and I see now that he just never had a project interesting enough to engage his mind.

12-13-03
School is out for winter break. I've not written in a while due to the flu, which went down into my chest and triggered my asthma. I've been dragging myself around: wrapping up the grading, working on a couple freelance projects and whining to whoever well listen. I tried to walk up the hills in the North End yesterday and had to stop for rest breaks every 5 minutes. I must have looked like an eighty year old man. The second hill was easier, still, I walked in slow motion.
       I've been obsessing about a new digital camera. I don't need one, can't afford one, yet still I love to waste hours of time reading about them in magazines and online. The Canon Digital Rebel is my latest object of lust. It's about $1400 when you include tax, the card and an extended warranty from a reputable local store. There is no way I can swing that on my budget; end of story.
       That much money would pay for about half of what the van well soon be costing me when one of the primary drive train elements dies. I guess boys like their toys, but I need to face reality. I have a couple projects that well keep me busy for a while during the break. Then I can prepare for my upcoming classes, and maybe go skiing a couple times...assuming I cough up all this congestion and get my lungs back.

12-5-03
Three teaching days left in the quarter before the 3 week winter break. I have some of the finals for my Thursday drawing class. I stayed late tonight (Friday) to try and take pictures with the new school Nikon 5700. I got the software loaded up, but 90 minutes wasn't enough time to figure out how to take quality copy photos. Copy work (shooting artwork on white paper) is very touchy work, even with a good tripod, easel and lights. Add a new prosumer digital camera to the mix with a 100 page manual...it was a frustrating ninety minutes.
      Oh, it took pictures, they just weren't sharp. I finally gave up and brought the artwork home. I have a three year old 1.3 megapixel dinosaur that shoots better than the Nikon. Or, perhaps it is just that I understand it.
       My attitude is the pitts right now. I haven't had a decent nights sleep since I got the flu 8 days ago. The last 6 nights I've had to take Nyquil to sleep, and that robs you of your dreams and leads to this gut wrenching irritability. I hate myself when I am like this, but there is no escape. I'm too sick to work off the tension with exercise, and to sleep I need more Nyquil. It's a catch 22 until the Prednisone fixes my lungs. Life's a bitch, then you get sick. At least I was calm with the students.

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