Jasper's best friend

This stunning young lady is Hannah. Her parents are renting our condo and they came over for dinner the other night. Hannah got dressed up for the occasion with some stick-on earrings.



She's as cute and friendly as she can get and she just loves Jasper. It's great to have such nice people right next door!

Update: here is a picture Hannah's mom, Sally, just sent from her iPhone. Hannah has on her stylish biking helmet.

Local guests

Our friends the Benson's are on a nice vacation. Meanwhile, some squatters came in to take over. As best we could tell, it is a mom and a little one. They tried to be very uncooperative by waiting until I was there with my camera to walk over and sit down in the shade. I understand that for a hot day, but it was only 30 and there was a stiff breeze.

They seem to have a pretty shaggy looking coat right now. Perhaps it is the transition from winter fur to summer.



It took me about 30-45 minutes of slowly creeping closer. They never seemed terribly worried about me and I always had a mapped out plan to run for my life.

Quite the lovely pair.



I think Junior told mom a joke. Looks that way...



I've seen dogs scratch behind their ears, but it is quite something to see with a young moose.



They were mostly pruning back Bill's lovely lawn. It is tough to do when you are tall and awkward though. I like this adaptation. Something half way between standing up and laying down. It seemed to work quite well.



I'm going to have to get better at judging males vs females and ages. Everything I have found on the web says that to age a moose, you should look closely at its teeth. I am guessing this applies to a hunter who has killed the moose, because I can't see anyone snuggling up close enough to check a moose's molars.

Exercise is hard

I have been trying to get in the habit of going to my CrossFit workouts three times a week. I am enjoying it, but most workouts kick my butt. Here was today's, with some notes.

• 100 Double Unders (jump rope, spinning two revolutions per jump)
  
• 10 Burpee Box Jumps (stand, down to the floor in a plank at the bottom of a pushup, back to standing, jump up on a 24" box, jump down, repeat)
  
• 20 Ring Push ups (instead of hands on the floor, your hands are on gymnastic rings lowered down to a few inches off the floor)
  
• 30 Wall Ball (hold a 20 lb medicine ball at your chest, go into a deep squat, rise quickly and push the ball up against the wall, over a 10' line. Catch and repeat)
  
• 40 Power Cleans (take a barbell with 95 lbs, from the floor, lift it quickly up to your chest, as though you are about to do a press. Repeat)
  
• 30 Wall Ball
• 20 Ring Push ups
• 10 Burpee Box Jumps
• 100 Double Unders

This is how the workout is prescribed. If you have to back off things, that is allowed. The workout is timed, and you are trying to finish as quickly as possible.

I was able to do most things, but I used 75 pounds instead of 95 and I haven't mastered double unders, so I had to replace each with 300 normal jump ropes.

I can't tell you how tiring this is. Everything but the double unders uses your triceps. Mine were melting by the end. I just keep telling myself "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

Snow in the Cottonwood Canyons

We have had some annoying April/May snows the past few days, but it is melting off in the afternoons almost as fast as it comes down. However, this week has been the perfect example of the difference between the snow at Park City and the snow over in Little Cottonwood Canyon, about 5 miles away.



In the last four days, Snowbird has had 7 feet of snow. They have been getting the lake effect snows of the Great Salt Lake, just like you hear about with NY and the Great Lakes. Snowbird's peaks are about 3500 feet higher than where we live, which has made an important temperature difference. The moist air gets pushed up the canyon, rising from 4,000 feet to 10,000+ feet. The temperature drop forces all the moisture out as snow.

Great for the water supply. Great for the only ski resort still open. And mostly great that we didn't have anything like that on our side of the Wasatch range.

Stop the ski season damn it!

Park City cracks me up. On one hand, everyone is tired of winter and wants to move on. Hiking and biking, not skiing and snowshoeing. On the other hand, it keeps snowing, so everyone gets bored and hits the snow again.

Because I am a long ways off with a little camera, this may be hard to see. In the middle of the picture is a ski run with some big jumps, all made of snow. In the middle of the jumps, you can see dirt. This is because PCMR wants to keep kids from coming over to the closed resort, hiking up, and skiing or boarding down. So, they actually plow out all the snow in between jumps.



Meanwhile, I was driving past Deer Valley and looked up the hill. I thought I saw skiers coming down so I pulled over. By the time I stopped the truck and took this picture, the sledders (not skiers) had gone down behind the trees.



It turns out that eight or ten adults (no kids) had hiked up 1200 feet of vertical (the Carpenter Lift for those who know DV) just to sled down one time. That's either serious dedication, boredom, or both.



Their sleds were little high-tech adult toys. Click here to buy one at Amazon.


Oh well, perhaps spring will grace us with its presence again sometime soon.

Just how liberal can you get?

Living in Utah, you get used to state politics that are about as right-wing as it gets. When it comes to animals, it is more about hunting and ranching than any version of animal rights.

However, we live in Park City, which tends to be a little island of liberal thought. We are very kind to animals. Everyone has a pet or six. And to minimize traffic and pollution, we have an outstanding bus system, and it is always free.

This seemed to take it a bit too far though. Jasper and I were driving along when we saw two Mallards waiting at the local bus stop. Where do we draw the line?

Golf Monday, snow the rest of the week

What can I say? It looked like spring was here a few days ago. Three inches so far and the snow is pounding. We won't see 50 again until Monday. It would be kind of pretty if it didn't piss everyone off this time of year.

The weather was gorgeous yesterday, sunny and 60. Out here that means short sleeves. Yeah! We went over to Midway to squeeze in a round of golf before the weather turned.

This is Doug Drexler, a fellow Wednesday host at PCMR.



And Bill Benson, close friend.



The course was in surprisingly great shape. This is an inexpensive, public course that has just come out from under the snow. The Park City course hasn't opened yet.



We all stank up the course at about the same level. It wasn't pretty but it was a lot of fun.

Trying to break mud season

A cute little creature, but a pain in the butt. This is a vole and for whatever reason, the voles had a great year. The spent the winter tunneling around under the snow, eating lots of grass.



This is what it looks like when the snow melts. Little bastards were everywhere! I think we need a LOT more fox.



This looks like yet another blurry iPhone picture. It is actually an iPhone picture of a very blurry cloud. It was as though the normal clouds got smudged with an eraser.



Meanwhile, up on the top of the hill behind our house, the snow melt leaves a high altitude marsh. Lots of little plants are starting to pop up.



But you just can't stop the people who desperately need something to do now that the ski season has ended. Hop on the mountain bike and start riding. If you look closely, you can see how hard it is to ride in a straight line when the ground is this soft. They really should wait another month or so to avoid damaging the trails.

It's about damn time

Remember these? Floppy disks that held a whopping 1.4 Megabytes? I have single photos in uncompressed RAW format that are ten times that big. And yet, Sony sold 12 million of these last year.



If you want them, buy them soon though. In March of next year, Sony will stop producing them.

When you can get 8G flash drives that hold 5,000 times as much data, for about $15, I wonder who bought those 12,000,000 floppies.