I'm back from my snowboarding trip to Whistler. It was awesome. Whistler is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to - up there near the top of the list with the Himalayas, Lake Tahoe and Mt. Rainier. You'll notice that all of these are mountainous areas - forgive my predilection towards heights and snow.
As some might remember, I had broken my foot sometime in January of this year while... snowboarding. So this was going to be my first trip after my foot had healed somewhat and I was rather trepidated.
The first day on the slopes was horrible - the conditions were really bad, it had rained the previous night and so the "snow" was really a solid sheet of ice. Snowboarding on ice is not fun - it is hard to find an edge and every fall, even a small controlled one, really hurts. As you might guess, this did not do wonders for my confidence and I quit for the day after a couple of runs.
That night however, it snowed. Granted, it was not a lot. But there was fresh snow on the slopes and that was all that mattered. We were off again the next day and this time it was much better. I felt that I had regressed quite a bit. Stuff that I could do on my snowboard without any problems in January I just couldn't do at Whistler. I was not able to link my turns. Let me explain - when you're a beginner, linking turns is perhaps akin to doing parallel turns in skiing. Once you get that down, you're good to go down lots of hard slopes because you can always stay in control and still go down at a decent clip. Naturally, this is a very important skill. I had been working on this last season and by early January, I was linking turns just fine on the intermediate blue slopes. Now I could not link turns even on simple greens. Quite a regression.
Luckily, your body (and mind) don't forget things you've learnt quite that easily. On Sunday, we all seperated out to go off on our own - which was great because there was no more pressure of being the "slowest" one. I decided to force myself to start linking turns again - and it turns out to have been not quite so bad. I was doing it in no time. I fell, no doubt, and it hurt, since the snow wasn't quite that good - but it felt good to be challenging myself and it felt good that I was not breaking bones every time I fell.
I came away from Whistler with this: I'm still afraid - but just a little bit less. I am happy.
I am going to Whistler-Blackcomb over Thanksgiving holiday and the excitement sure is building up. Kristin is my Whistler guide by proxy, considering she has been there quite a few times. Just for fun, we were looking at Whistler's trail maps. Wow. They have this really cool section in their maps that's called "Compare Acreage". If all their marketing data were to be believed, Whistler has a total of 8000 acres of skiiable land - compared to Squaw Valley's (Lake Tahoe, CA) 4000. Wow and double wow.
A bunch of us here also have ski passes to Snoqualmie, a local ski area that's really close to Seattle. They don't even mention their total acreage, but after adding it all up (their areas are broken into 4 parts), it looks like their acreage is somewhere between 600 and 1000. Whistler is quite literally almost 10 times its size. This will be the biggest ski resort I have been to in my life, ever! Ooh am I excited...
I finally finished Halo 2 last night. It was awesome. Very good gameplay, great graphics and an exceptionally tight and engaging story. The only disappointment was the ending which thoroughly sucked. The reason it sucked so bad was because there is this cool cutscene and then you fully expect to be thrown into battle and instead the credits start rolling and you're thinking "WTF?". Other than that minor problem, the game was great.
I have not played Halo 2 online (except in the beta) and I'm torn between getting an Xbox Live account (no, they're not free for us) and not. Reason: its a huge timesink. I play a lot of video games already and between Warcraft multiplayer and other random single player games (such as Halo), I have no time left for a lot of other things. So I will probably hold off on getting the Live account for a while. Then again, with Halo 2, you get a complimentary 2 month subscription to Live. Grr.
I thought it was interesting to note that Halo generated more revenue in its opening week than any movie ever. Ever.
Random thought of the day:
A movie is like a special cased video game where you don't really care about playing and so just leave it to the computer to "play" the perfect game. On the other hand, if you really want to play, you can jump right in. Or if you want to play certain parts. Something like that.
My TV has channel issues. It has a broken tuner. I suspect its a broken capacitor or coil; not very sure about it. Basically when the component is cool, it tunes well to all channels, as soon as it warms up, it untunes. So far I had been using this TV to watch DVDs and play XBOX (the TV can remained tuned to video indefinitely).
My friend Vincent loaned me his TV, which is approximately the same size and has a working tuner. Fan-tastic! so I spent the past half hour watching TV. Reminded me of why I hate it so much. First - there are the ads. About 20% of the time is taken up by ads. Grr. No wonder people need Tivos and other such devices. Then, of course, the quality of the shows. Watched something or the other on the WB. Ugh. Horrid. No, thanks. I give up TV (again). Except perhaps news.