Lost in Transportation

Well, so much for the powder day that the entire town of Fernie was looking forward to. Sure, we had 20+ cm before I finished eating my burritos. Obviously, we didn't have Chinese last night - Chinese people who own restaurants in Fernie don't work Mondays. I told Kara (the token Canadian and token woman flatmate) that it was because Monday was the Confucian holy day. I'm not sure if she believed me or not. I'm pretty good at straight-facing statements like that but she has been living with Tim and I for a while.

Anyway, I woke up at 3am today. No, I wasn't making sure I got up to the hill early, my friend Dan was arriving from Calgary and I had to be awake to let him in (or at least dozing on the couch, rather than comatose downstairs). Or rather, Dan was supposed to be arriving from Calgary. Instead, the highway was closed between Elkford (the next town east of here) and Fernie, and he phoned at about 4:30am to let me know this.

That surely boded well for an epic powder day today, didn't it?

Well, no.

By the time Dan arrived at the Fernie "bus station", and the inhabitants of Chateaux Richard began to wake up, the nasty horrible evil rain had come and ruined all the snow.

It was like the Grinch stole Christmas, and didn't have a change of heart.

Today didn't totally suck, but it was definately not the best. The snow was super-heavy, and very sticky. Untouched snow was generally very slow indeed (at one point I stalled while my board was pointing straight down the hill). To make things more "interesting", the parts of the run without good snow coverage were relatively fast.

Still, I landed some 180s today - I've got frontside ones off small hits kind of dialed now. That's snowboarder talk meaning that I can go over a small bump and spin around in the air - bringing my back (right) leg forward so I spin half way round anti-clockwise and land with my right leg as the new front leg.

Meh, it sounds so much cooler to call it a frontside one.

So yeah, today didn't suck, it was even fun at times.

What did suck was dropping my board in at the repair shop. I took a core shot (that's when a rock or tree stump or something simmilar leaps out and takes a big chunk out out of the base of your board / skis and you can actually see the wooden "core" - hence the name) at Castle on Saturday. This has the potential to do serious damage to the board (moisture gets in and your board becomes an expensive gooey mess) as well as making for a rougher ride.

So anyway, the guy there convinces me to get a full base tune (it wasn't hard, since the base of my board looks like it went a couple rounds with a bad tempered cat armed with a knife). $45 later (sorry, $40 plus tax - stupid Canamerican system) and my battered board is accepted into the secret chamber of repair.

I don't think I've made any tax jokes on this blog, so I'll fire out a couple of my favourites.

One for flatmate Tim - "I'm not 30, I'm 29 plus tax"
One for Santa Claus - "I'm only 195 pounds... plus tax"

By the way, did anyone else see Bill Gates on Jeopardy tonight? It might have been a repeat, but I could swear that "Brandon" (or whatever his name was) owned a large chunk of Microsoft - he made it three wins in a row, so he's pretty smart. In Jeopardy, the contestants get a clue and have to provide the question - for example The clue is "The opening lines of this play are "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York"" the question/answer is "What is Richard III?"

So why do I say smart, rather than just knowledgeable? Well, after a certain base level of knowledge (admittedly quite high), it is more beneficial to be able to puzzle things out rather than know more random facts. I regularly puzzle out five or six answers (nearly 10% of the clues) that I have no real idea about.

Anyway, Jeopardy has something of a cult following in our house - basically I brutally crush Tim almost every time. Yes Tim, I do. Kara tolerates it, and uses the opportunity to tease Tim about losing to me (we're both trivia geeks) and Edouard feeds his virtual pig