Hannah and the school play

It is kind of odd that our house is next door to the condo we own. We are renting the condo out to a very nice family. Their daughter Hannah is wonderful and has adopted our dog Jasper to be part of their family.

I took some photographs for Sally (mom) the other day to use with their Christmas cards. Seriously, how cute is this girl?



Yesterday I joined Monty (dad) and Sally to see Hannah's school play at the Soaring Wings Montessori School. It was a mix of Christmas and Hanukkah stories, each done by a different grade. This is the full gathering at the end of the play. It was quite an accomplishment getting so many kids to sit mostly still.



Hannah's grade did a piece from the Nutcracker. She's the second from the right.



... and getting ready to do a ballet jump with help from a toy soldier behind her.



In addition to Hannah, I got to see one of my favorites: little munchkins who can walk, but are too young to really have any idea of what is going and why they are in front of all these people.

Some laugh and play.



Many cry and need some extra love and attention.



Whether they are crying or not, they all just seem to be a bit bewildered.



I can't remember this teacher's name, but if I had a child, this is who I would want teaching him or her. She had her class dancing and having a blast, except for the tiny little girl in white. She actually laid down and curled up in a ball, simply overwhelmed by her surroundings.



The teacher just swept her up and kept on dancing. If you can't have fun in this woman's class, you need to seek help.



So, if Hannah can adopt Jasper as the borrowed family pet, Julie and I can adopt Hannah as our borrowed daughter.

A visit from the Kahn's

Our long time friends the Kahn's are back in the U.S. visiting friends and family. Hannah and Carol stayed with us for two days. When Bruce and Carol arrived, they stayed with friends in the house they used to rent.

Bruce, Hannah and Hilary met us over at PCMR for a gorgeous day of skiing. It was mostly a groomer day, but we had fresh snow from the day before and the very cold night might the snow pack wonderful. That's Jupiter Peak in the background, but no one was motivated for a hike up just to get some chopped up leftovers.



The whole Kahn family was having to make a serious adjustment. Now that they have moved to Northern Australia, they are coming from zero feet above sea level, in a near equatorial environment. By the way, it is summer there. Here we have 7000+ feet above sea level (this picture was from over 9,000), near zero temps, and no humidity.

Julie was getting in the spirit for Sundance (still a month off), by dressing all in black. Actually, that is just her warmest outfit and I think it was 4 or 5 degrees when we first started skiing.



I hope to get some more skiing in with Bruce and the family. They are calling for some pretty healthy snowfall between now and Christmas, and I love using my new Powder Pigs (monster-sized skis).

Two little oddities

Today the high in Salt Lake City was 55. Today the highest temperature anywhere in Florida, including places like Key West and Miami, was 52. That doesn't seem right.

Here in Utah, a truck carrying a piece of heavy equipment traveled along Interstate 15, heading under an overpass. Well, almost. The big front end loader being hauled hit the overpass and did some damage to everything involved. Why is this interesting? The overpass was already scheduled to be torn down this weekend. Can you ask for better timing?

Steve's culinary recommendation

Next time you are at Costco, buy a block of Manchego cheese. Serve pieces with Black Pepper Triscuits. Yumm! Most people haven't had Manchego. It is available in the grocery stores but it tends to be very expensive. Like all things at Costco, they sell slabs for cheap.

It is definitely our favorite snacking cheese.

A new and interesting blog

Tim Huntley was one of the four founders of our company, Ganymede Software. He and his family have shown up a number of times in my blog with his farm out near Chapel Hill. Quite the change from the computer world.

Tim has recently started a blog discussing one of his big passions: growing and eating healthy food. Time has built a great base of knowledge on sustainable farming, bee keeping, and making foods from scratch (like a wonderful replacement for store-bought catchup).

Take some time and visit his blog here.

Full time in Park City

Well, today was the big day. We have officially closed on our house in Raleigh and we no longer have an abode in North Carolina. It was on the market for 18 months and we were going to pull it off when we finally ended up with an offer we could live with.

Our Duxford adventure started about 18 years ago. The house took a bit of imagination at this point. It mostly looked like huge pine trees. One lesson we learned over the years: cut down more trees than you think around the house. Hurricanes and ice storms taught us the dangers of having big trees close to buildings.



It got got a little easier to picture as we went along. Our house was a slight modification to one we had seen at Parade of Homes.



And this was the finished work, until 10+ years later, when we did a major remodel.



One of the rooms I will miss is the home theater. It was a lot of fun for sporting events and movies were awesome.



But of the individual rooms, I think I will miss the screen porch the most. God knows why it took us so long to move from a deck to something much nicer. Wish we did this a decade earlier.



Julie made the insides so pretty, which I worked out in the yard. It was a never ending project, but it had developed into something attractive, as long as you don't mind the complete lack of grass.



With all these nice thoughts, why would we sell it? Part of it is the expense of having a house you can't easily rent, but only live in a few weeks out of the year.

But there is also the nonstop maintenance on a 18 year old house. Not only do you have to deal with appliances and HVAC failing, you get to cope with hurricanes. Fran was our biggie, knocking down over 100 big trees in our yard alone.



And there is always the occasional ice storm. An ice storm in a pine forest is quite exciting, bringing huge limbs down, each weighing many thousands of pounds.



As I have said before, I will miss the house, but mostly I will miss our neighbors and friends. We will certainly come back to see them, but not staying at the house will always seem odd, even many years from now.

Aside form all the emotion, it sure is nice to get that money wired into our account.

An excellent example of visualizing data

Bard Grace, a friend from Ganymede Software and NetIQ days, posted this on Facebook. I thought the story itself was interesting, but mostly I was impressed with how clearly they were able to explain some very complex data.

It's better if you watch it in full screen.

Click here to watch it.

Some new skis

In Park City, most people tend to have a quiver of skis, a different ski for different conditions. If you have more than one pair, you often get a pair of All-Mountain skis, and then a pair of Powder skis. Powder skis are fatter and tend to float better in the deep Utah fluff. After those two, there are lots of other choices: rock (for thin snow), race, telemark, AT, park (for tricks), cross country (both classic and skate), ...

My Rossignol B3 powder skis were six years old and fairly well beaten. It was time for a new pair. Julie got a good deal on a pair I was lusting after when she went to her Team Night at Deer Valley.

If you have skied over the past few years, it is hard not to notice how much wider skis have gotten. These are my new powder pigs, with my hiking boot for comparison.



A different way to see the size is to set my racing skis (yes, I have 3 pairs in my quiver) on top of the powder skis. You'll notice that the race skis are about half the width of the powder skis. These things are big!



Now I just need to get the bindings pulled off my B3s and put on these Rossignal S7's and wait for a big storm of fluffy snow. Hurry!!

Why? Because he can.

In an almost empty parking lot, why pull your car or truck up onto the 5 foot high pile of snow? Because you paid thousands of dollars for those monster tires and the suspension that has you bouncing down the road.



It did provide some a nice laugh in the middle of an otherwise tedious day. Thanks Mr. Jeep Guy.

Our little gift

Every year we put up a Christmas tree. And every year the first gift that appears is Cosette, who just can't stand us not having any presents.



We still have work to do on the tree. A bunch of our Christmas ornaments just arrived on the trailer. Now where are they.....?