Deep Powder Snowboarding

So I finally got up to the mountain for a day of snowboarding. This is Willamette Pass Ski Area. It had snowed about 12 per day for the 4 days leading up to this so there was an incredible amount of fresh powder. I don't think I've ever boarded on so much. I forgot how exhausting it is. I went alone so I don't know any of the people in the pictures.

This is from the top of the main lift. I don't know which lake that is. Waldo maybe? It was an incredible view from up there.
Same place, different direction. I just sort of spun in a circle taking pictures.

As you can see I was the first person down this run. That is 8 to 15 inches of powder depending on where you fall.


Ok all the rest of these are from the peak. Side note: I am sitting in the coffeehouse in Eugene right now and, I shit you not, the radio is for some reason playing "The Yellow Rose of Texas". The old one. Wierd.

Willamette Pass was an interesting resort. The main lodge looks like many a ski lodge except for that it is so poorly designed, in my opinion, that at least 2/3 to 3/4 of the space is wasted. It has a wrap around deck that, whenever they get snow, they have to close it off to protect people from snow falling off the roof of the lodge. This begs the question, "Aren't snow days the times you need the decks open most?" Then, of course, there's the fact that the lodge could be 3 stories and if fact looks like it is from the outside. Instead, it's one monstrous room where you sit down, lean back, look at the ceiling 40 to 50 feet away and wonder "why?". Also the food sucked. This is a thing I've never understood about resorts in general. Why would you get people all the way out to your place, charge extortionate prices, and then serve crap or at the very least mediocrity? Why? Why would you want people to go home saying "well the skiing was good but everything else was painful. I spent a months worth of money but the only bit that didn't suck was the skiing. I guess it was so they could build a monstrous empty space and then spend a fortune heating it to the extent that they don't have enough money left over to buy good quality food much less prepare it in such a way that it doesn't insult the people who they just charged three to five times it's value." At the same time in an office somewhere I imagine the resort manager is thinking "maybe they won't notice. Maybe our really really big room will distract them and they'll dazedly eat their food and before they regain total clarity it will be gone and they'll think "well it must have been worth all that money cause I ate it all without realizing it". Maybe" Well this is not the case. The food is expensive and mediocre as is generally the case. The beer was good though.

And the boarding was great! Come visit! I'll take you! We'll take our own food! We'll marvel at the monstrosity that is their lodge from a distance since we can't sit on the deck cause it might kill us! We'll drink the good beer! We'll laugh at the people eating the bad food! It'll be wonderful!

Until next time. Get them pigs off the porch!

Food and Bed!

So this was lunch yesterday. The pizza place across the street from me does pizza by the slice, as I'm sure I've told everyone by now. It is always super good AND they have local beer on tap. Since we've been here they've done either a local beer tasting or a local wine tasting every Friday. Tomorrow is wine. That is the red ale, can't remember the brewer. It was good. Pepp and mush pizza obviously.
This was dinner. There is a fresh fish market about 3 blocks from our house (I feel like this is my reward for driving all day for the past 2+ years) and on Wednesdays you can get a salmon burger and a microbrew for $8. Ninkasi brewery is a few blocks further from here and they were there doing a tasting on their new spring beer. Also super good. Tartar sauce needs horseradish though.
This was dessert. Sweet Life Bakery. 2 blocks from our house. Coconut cream pie. Mandi would live here if she could. I like the coffee though. The desserts, even though I usually only have a bite or two, are pretty great. For sweet lovers this place is worth the trip to Oregon by itself. Even on a Wednesday night the line was 20 people deep. On weekends it is often out the door.
This was the absolute best part of the day. We finally got a bed to sleep on and this morning I can tell you it was worth the wait. We don't have anything else, but we do have a bed! That's all for today. There is no spoon.

The Drive

So these pictures uploaded in the opposite order for some reason and I'm too lazy to redo it so here are the five pictures we got of our drive. I thought we'd taken more but I can't find them. This one and the one below are from a ski area near Lake Tahoe. That's a frozen lake that I'm pretty sure Mandi walked out onto to get the pictures.
Or maybe she was standing on a bridge. There's no way to tell.
This was hands down the best burrito/chile relleno/margarita I've ever had. It was at a restaurant named Quince in a town called Jerome that Dusty took us to between Sedona and Prescott I'm pretty sure. The burrito I ordered was wild mushroom and other stuff. Unbelievable. The thing Mandi and Dusty got was a chile relleno IN a burrito with green chile sauce all over it. MIND BLOWING. The margarita had some fancy stuff in it that I forget but is was amazing too. We also got a dip sampler that had guacamole and three different kinds of salsa in increasing heats. The hotest was ghost chile. It was definitely a food coma situation but it was unreal. I think my camera ran out of memory after this but the town is a old mining town that it built up on a cliffside. It looks like the kind of thing you'd see in Greece or something. It's become an art colony and it's super cool. Mom if you ever do this drive you should definitely stop here. It's right up your alley. I think i even saw some really cool B&Bs while we were walking around. Mandi also bought a neat little tea mug from a local potter while we were there.
This is at a roadside stop right outside of Flagstaff. We had just driven through a few hours of snow and rain and it was starting to clear off as we descended out of the mountains. By the time we got to Haley and Dusty's it wasn't even very cold anymore.
And then there's Frontier. In my opinion on of the best and only reasons to visit Albuquerque. It is the town of my birth, but there are few things about it I like. One the that that do well, however, is food. If you know the right places you can get some amazing food. Frontier has some of the best sweet rolls in the world and they make a mean huevos rancheros or breakfast burrito. Where else is there a pot of green chile sauce in the dining room where you can put as much of it as you want on your own food. I really need to learn to make green chile sauce. It's on my list of things to do. That's it for today. This is the second post of the day so don't miss the one down below. Hopefully I'll have some good pics of snowboarding after Friday so I can do a post on Willamette Pass. That's pronounced like you would dammit for those of us from the south. They make fun of you otherwise. Remember, Willdammit. Willamette. I still pronounce it wrong every day.

The Forest and the Donuts!

So on friday instead of going snowboarding my neighbor, Shawn, took me to see one of his friends who is the caretaker for a dam and a park a little upriver. There is also a fish hatchery there and walking across the bridge you can look down and see all these salmon. Apparently this time of year is when there is the least amount of them. There were also some fish in there that were over 100 years old and bigger than I am. I'm really looking forward to going fishing.
This is a picture of the river near that same dam. The bottom is all rocky so it's super clear and it's just really beautiful. Apparently a lot of rafting and kayaking goes on a little further upstream.
These are our neighbors chickens. They gave us some eggs one of the first days we were here. Mandi can't wait to get her own.
I couldn't get any pictures of our cats on the leash but Ward sent me this picture it's pretty much exactly how Mandi's leash plan worked out. I'm not gonna say I told you so, but......
This is a picture of the road we drove down before hiking down to take that river picture. I just can't get over having so much forrest around me all the time. I love it.
There are two different, so far, donut places we've been to since we got here. These are from Dizzy Dean's which is your normal style donut shop. There's another one called Voodoo Donuts and they've been on food network shows and whatnot. Theirs are pretty exotic but still as cheap as normal donuts. I'll get some pictures of the later. Both places are super good and I'm thrilled to finally be able to get good donuts again.

Turkeys!!

There is a flock(?) of turkeys that hangs out in my neighborhood!

Beautiful Weather

So everyone tells me that this is the time of year for their bad weather. Aside from a few rainy days it's been like this. This is from my front porch yesterday. It's pretty rough.

In the last post I mentioned that our neighbor, Steve, was a super nice guy. Well Jeff, in fact, is also a super nice guy. Steve may not exist. There's just no way we can know.

It took Mandi all of a week to reach the limit of her patience in sitting on the floor.
AND SO!!!!!!We are the proud owners of a new table and chairs. Guess how much cussing was involved in the assembly process. Luckily we made it through and our one piece of furniture is...
...covered with kitties and crap. But as you can see they are adjusting well and starting to relax. It helps, I think, that they have so many windows to look out of. Artemis started doing a strange thing where she'll sit in the corner staring at a wall, or so it seemed. After awhile though we finally figured out what she was doing.



















That's a heating vent up in the ceiling that sends a column of warm air down to the floor. She found the super warm places to doze.

I was talking to my neighbor yesterday and he told me one of the local ski areas does two for one lift tickets on Fridays so tomorrow I think he and I are going to go hit the mountain. It's called Willamette Pass Resort and it's the smaller of the three closest places. I'm pretty excited about that.

We found out a couple days ago that our moving truck isn't going to be able to get here until the end of the month after all. Luckily, one of Mandi's co-workers loaned us an inflatable mattress so at least we don't have to sleep on the floor anymore. Our new bed should be getting here sometime next week. I'm looking forward to that because my neck is killing me.

So that's my story for today. Until next time...

A New Home

So this is our new home. We've been living here for about a week and we like it a lot. It's in a really great neighborhood. We're within walking distance to almost anything we want to do, not including Mandi's work, and our neighbors are super nice too. There is a modified garage attached to our house where a guy named Steve and his son Josh live. Steve's a really nice guy and he runs a pest control company. Next door to us in a house much larger than ours is a girl named Nadia who seems to be about our age. She is a professor at the local community college and is working on her doctorate. She owns that house and has a roommate that lives with her who's name I can't remember because it's kinda wierd. She's a really nice girl though and she's got a great sleeve tattoo. Nadia also has a converted garage and there's a guy named Shawn living there. So far everyone is super friendly.


As you can see in the pictures, we've got a really big front porch. The local homeless also notice these things and the first night we were in the house we woke up to people stomping around on the front porch. Apparently they were using it as a place to sleep while it was still for rent. This is not something you want to find out at 1am in a strange town. We've since learned to leave our porch light on overnight. They don't seem to be interested in sleeping on our porch anymore. However, we do have one recurring guest on our porch. Her name is Masala and she is a very sweet tabby who used to live in our house. She now splits her time between our place and Nadia's. We've become fast friends.

This picture is of our living room. I was going to wait untill we had our stuff here to do this post but Luke assures me that before and after posts are a better idea. So there you have it. Empty living room.

To the right is our dining room. I especially like the built in cabinet. The window looks out onto Nadia's house.





To the left is our kitchen. That door leads into the utility room where our thrift store washer and drier are. The thrift store and flea market are my new favorite things. I'll tell you about the flea market in a bit.


To the right is the master bedroom. Notice our luxurious sleeping arrangements. My neck is not pleased with me for this. Luckily, our stuff should be arriving Thursday or so and in another week our new KING SIZE BED will be arriving. Very excited. Also poor.





I made Shiloh a box. She is pleased.


This is our dinner at Toshi's Ramen. Best japanese noodles I've ever had, which isn't saying much, but I'm assured that they are some of the best.





This is the first Vietamese place I've been to in years as Ward can attest. It was awesome. We have been to many other restaurants since arriving here but for some reason I only ended up with pictures of the two Asian places. There have been brew pubs, steak joints (Kobe NY strip!), bakeries, breakfast cafes, coffee houses, and pizza parlors. Ah, the pizza. There is a pizza shop across the street from my house. Pizza by the slice, local beer on tap, wine tasting last Friday, beer tasting this Friday, very seriously thinking about trying to get a job there. Otherwise I might go broke. It makes me so happy.

While we were driving up the 101 we stopped at a town just outside the Redwood Forrest. The seafood restaurant we ate at that night had a number of these carvings on the wall. They are done out of old growth redwood and we decided to buy one. It's pretty sweet.

So I've mentioned to some of you that the fairgrounds are only a few blocks from our house. It seems that there are events there almost every weekend and this past weekend it was the flea market/RV show. We went to the flea market and it was a blast. I bought an old Saltine Cracker tin, a glazed cast iron pot and pan set, Mandi got a pretty ceramic bowl and a pair of old bronze lamps. We spent $30. It happens every couple of weeks apparently. I'm thinking flea market vendor could be another job prospect for me.

So that's it for today. Now that I've got our internet going and Mandi's off to work I'm going to try to do these posts more often. Maybe shorter ones too. Anyway stay tuned! There's lots more Oregon Trails to come!