Ice! Ice! Baby!
Jan. 16th, 2007 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threadwalkerThe short story, which went out in cell-text. A lucky few of you actually got these.
Jan 15, 2007: 0137: Text Message 1:
Arrive safe n Arnold @ 12:30am: F-ing 21F. Door lock busted n took 30 min 2 open cabin. Water wont cum on: spent 25 min w tools trying 2 turn on water main; either broke or no1 pay bill. Had 2 piss n woods. At least we have TP n electric blanket. Cabin also 21F. Hope skiing is good.
Jan 15, 2007: Text Message 2:
One recipient actually said “what happened?” and got this.
Got 2 cabin near Bear Valley. Dor lok stuk. Froz ass off B4 get in. Thot cops mite stop 2 gals 4 B&E cuz we wuz tak so long w/ flashlite. Water not cum on at main valv undr cabin. Frend hold lite. Stil no watr cum. Swering! No watr, no toilet, no shwer! Pis n wuds n went 2 bed!
Jan 15, 2007: Text Message 3:
Update: HPM* has 2 pee agin @3am. Discovr car lites on! Freez ass n fingers 2 find secret Swedsh code 2 turn off lites n lok door on Volvo. Lites off – dors unlock. Hope car starts.
Jan 15, 2007, 0800 Text Message 4:
Rite now all da way under blankets-hed under 2 cuz cold. I lissen 2 HPM snore! LOL gonna kik her awake in a sec 2 hed up 2 ski. Gonna have 2 freez but 2 pee n wuds agin. LOL. Funny trip. Glad 2 laf about it.
*HPM = Hot pink mama
The long story
“Hot Pink Mama” (HPM) and I pulled out Sunday night excited. The plan was to drive to Arnold, spend the night there, then ski at Bear Valley all day Monday, coming home Monday night. The weather forecast was cold and sunny, so we were looking forward to missing the blizzard conditions and lack of visibility we had on the slopes last year.
We pulled out at 9:30 pm, fueled ourselves up at Starbucks in Concord and fueled up the Volvo at the cheap gas station in Oakley. Whoop, whoop! Road Trip!!!!
The first warning that things might not go smoothly was when the car heater stopped making warm air in Angels camp. It was 30F outside and dropping. Brrrr! We decided it was not a big deal; we were only 40 min or so from Arnold and I was being very careful on the icy roads.
We did a cheer when we saw that we would not have to shovel out the driveway, which we’d forgotten about until we actually saw snow on the ground. We let out a huge sigh of relief and took this as a good sign. We are fools.
Whenever getting to the cabin, there are certain steps you follow to “open the place up”.
Step 1: open up the access panel that leads to the water main under the house. Lean into dark, spidery area and open water main and close drain valve. This is done because the water is shut off and the pipes are drained every time we leave to prevent the water from freezing in the pipes. We could not get the main valve to move more than an inch. Maybe less. HPM and I took turns holding flashlight and twisting valve. Grrr! No water!
So skip that step and come back to it with tools, right?
Step 2: turn on water heater. Well, there’s no water in it, so skip this step and come back later.
Step 3: Unlock cabin. Sounds easy enough and I had the keys. However, the door won’t open. We spend 30 minutes fiddling, jiggling, passing the flashlight back and forth and trying to get the freaking door open. It was 21 F outside and I was only in jeans and ski liner. Brrrr! It was so frustrating and cold, I exercised my ability to curse creatively. We assumed the neighbors would call the cops and they’d grab us for breaking and entering. Just as I started to suggest a hotel in town, the door latch caught and the cursed thing opened. We piled through the door, dumped bags, chose a bed to share, plugged in electric blanket, and turned on house furnace. All that in less than 2 minutes…
Step 4: Get tools and go back to Step 1. I get in crawl space under house armed with an assortment of wrenches and an antique vice-grip. I think the spiders were all dead, but their webs were all over. Yick. I crank, I pull, I twist, I fiddle, I tear up my hands. The valve handle pops off and I get some play in the stem, but never any water. How uncool is that? Did I mention we REALLY had to go to the bathroom? We’d been holding it with the cabin in mind and things were not looking very good. Nope, this was definitely BAD! I grew up camping rough style and have no qualms about dealing with this. Afterall, there’s tp and an electric blanket, so we’d survive.
I look at HPM and say, “Can you piss in the woods or do we need a hotel?”
HPM: “Where’s the toilette paper? I’ll be fine.”
So we lock up the panel, grab the tp, find likely trees and aim down hill. By the way, it’s now after 1 am, it’s 21 F out, and we’ve just bared our bottoms to some dam cold air.
Teeth chattering, we race back to cabin lock it up and discover furnace not doing such a great job. We can (a) heat the family room, where there’s no bed or sofa or handy sleeping bags and we’d have to make up some sort of sleeping thing or (b) forget heater and hide under electric blanket which is on and has been heating the bed. We go with (b) and turn off furnace (no point in heating uninsulated cabin). We layer up, dive under covers and burrow in. Three words: Electric blanket burrito!
Should we set an alarm clock and head up to slopes first thing? Hell no! We stay put until we are awake and ready to deal with the day. It’s been a long night.
Turns out that HPM had to pee again around 3am. She fought it for a while and then gave up, putting on boots and heading out to a new tree. That’s when she discovers we left the lights on in my car. A real trooper, she spends several minutes trying to get the lights off – fiddling with dash controls and interior light controls. She managed at one point to get the lights off, but when she closed the door, the interior lights popped on and all the doors automatically unlocked. Hahaha! In her shoes, I would have kicked me awake and told me to deal with it. I think the cold air was affecting her, though, and she battled through it, fingers and feet getting cold. Eventually she decoded the Swedish system of vehicle lights, but she never got the passenger door to stay locked. Looks like it’s really broken, too. Grrr!
I woke up around 8 am, which is just when HPM started to snore. It got so cold through the night, my face hurt and the pain woke me up. But I was toasty in burrow. Haha! Unfortunately, I had to go to the bathroom again and it is 30F-ish out. I stalled until HPM woke, which is when she told me about her 3 am foray into the woods and her comic battle with my car lights and door. We giggle and cross our fingers that the car starts.
Reality set in, we grabbed the tp and headed out for a new tree. Only now the sun was up and we are a stone’s throw from neighbors on all sides. Well, snickering, we try to be discreet, but there’s only so much you can do. We also realize we’ve managed to “mark” a ring of trees around the property. Hahahaha! Wonder what the neighborhood dogs will make of that?
One other “gee, wish I’d thought of that” was the water bottle we shared for face-washing and teeth-brushing… it was left out, so it was pretty darn cold, too. I wish we’d thought to stick it under blankets with us. That stung the face so bad it hurt. And, honestly, it was as screech fest when we got dressed. Gee, I wish I'd thought to put clothes somewhere in bed and near electric blanket, too. The cabin was colder than the surrounding woods and our fingers chilled up before we were done packing and pulling out.
Oh - and on the way home that evening, the heater in my car clicked on as we got below Angels camp. On my todo list: take car into shop. Grrr!
We wave good by to the cabin and go in search of hot food and then the ski lodge. At the ski lodge we bribe a young parking lot attendant to snap a picture of us. Cost: one bottle of water and one stick of cheese. hahaha!
Ski report:
The skiing was freaking awesome. It was 30F, windy and icy. It was fairly uncrowded and we rocketed down the slopes. 2 warm up runs on the front side and then we spent most of the day on the back-side where it was sunnier and the runs were longer. This turned out to be a wise move; on our last run to the lodge, where it was shaded, the run was essentially one long sheet of ice – that totally sucked. The back side was still icy, but not as cold and instead of one long sheet of ice, it was patches of ice. We probably started actually skiing around 1 pm and got over a dozen runs in before 3:30. Quitting time was 4pm – that’s when they stop the lifts.
Last year I had a hard time relaxing and just going fast. It looks like I got over this on Monday. Some sections of the slopes were iced up so much that I couldn’t turn very well unless I really dug my blades in. Since I couldn’t do my hard turns that I seem to love so much, I let it go. I pointed the skis down the slopes, tucked in and flew threw the ice “whooping” it up the whole way. LOL. HPM said she heard me whip by at one point. The rush was amazing. I was squatting, tucking and had my skis about 12 inches apart. Kept my joints loose and my shins tight, I was zipping down slopes tips-first whereas last year on the same slopes I couldn’t help breaking and turning and slowing myself.
There was one particular sharp turn I’d blast through, cutting diagonally down and across an icy slope (cutting out the sunny gentle “long way” down) and hitting the turn on the steep slope in the ice, digging in my edges and then shooting through – I had to hold my arms out to keep balance and I suddenly felt like Rocky the Flying Squirrel. LOL. The first time through, I knew I’d get really hurt if I didn’t peg it. But, with “I’m a Survivor” rolling through the back of my head, I pulled it off and whipped through the bottom shoot/trail and even caught a little air. Whoop!!! What a rush. I really really think the intense weight training I’ve been doing since early November made this possible or the story would be how I wrapped myself around a tree.
I followed HPM down a few times – she was very controlled and worked her turning system. We joked that I’m the speed-freak and she’s the control-freak. I tried to do her turns, which was the same thing I was doing last year, but it was too much work and wore me out. I just wanted to race to the bottom.
One kindly skier showed us Bear Boogie. It was wider and a LOT steeper than our other long run. It was awesome. On the first steep slope, I was practically skipping across the top of the icy snow – not much chance to slow because I didn’t have enough contact or friction with the ice to stop. But I didn’t freak or die. Whoop! It was such a rush; squat, tuck, and hang loose with the wind screaming past. On the first trip down, I stopped at the various turns. But once I’d done the run once, I just launched from the top of the run and hit it as fast as I could, blowing down to the lift. We got 15 or more runs in during a 3 hr period. Whoop!!!
HPM took that hill like a pro – working her turns in the face of ice and a very steep slope. Thank goodness she wore hot pink so I could pick her out.
I fell once – it was a combination of chunks of ice, a rock and iced moguls. Moguls just aren’t my thing and when you ice it up, throw in some obstacles and I have to plant a turn… well, I rolled with it, ended up on my back (skis in air because I don’t want to torque anything) and then stopped my slide and got up asap. And it didn’t shake me, which is super-cool. Usually I get spooked when I fall. HPM didn’t fall at all. Yay!
It was an awesome day of skiing. We celebrated our mastery of the slopes with a beer and got some kids to snap some shots of us full of post-ski glow. I think we were grinning the whole way home and laughing about what a weird trip it was. It was cold, it was icy and it was ubber cool!
Jan 15, 2007: 0137: Text Message 1:
Arrive safe n Arnold @ 12:30am: F-ing 21F. Door lock busted n took 30 min 2 open cabin. Water wont cum on: spent 25 min w tools trying 2 turn on water main; either broke or no1 pay bill. Had 2 piss n woods. At least we have TP n electric blanket. Cabin also 21F. Hope skiing is good.
Jan 15, 2007: Text Message 2:
One recipient actually said “what happened?” and got this.
Got 2 cabin near Bear Valley. Dor lok stuk. Froz ass off B4 get in. Thot cops mite stop 2 gals 4 B&E cuz we wuz tak so long w/ flashlite. Water not cum on at main valv undr cabin. Frend hold lite. Stil no watr cum. Swering! No watr, no toilet, no shwer! Pis n wuds n went 2 bed!
Jan 15, 2007: Text Message 3:
Update: HPM* has 2 pee agin @3am. Discovr car lites on! Freez ass n fingers 2 find secret Swedsh code 2 turn off lites n lok door on Volvo. Lites off – dors unlock. Hope car starts.
Jan 15, 2007, 0800 Text Message 4:
Rite now all da way under blankets-hed under 2 cuz cold. I lissen 2 HPM snore! LOL gonna kik her awake in a sec 2 hed up 2 ski. Gonna have 2 freez but 2 pee n wuds agin. LOL. Funny trip. Glad 2 laf about it.
*HPM = Hot pink mama
The long story
“Hot Pink Mama” (HPM) and I pulled out Sunday night excited. The plan was to drive to Arnold, spend the night there, then ski at Bear Valley all day Monday, coming home Monday night. The weather forecast was cold and sunny, so we were looking forward to missing the blizzard conditions and lack of visibility we had on the slopes last year.
We pulled out at 9:30 pm, fueled ourselves up at Starbucks in Concord and fueled up the Volvo at the cheap gas station in Oakley. Whoop, whoop! Road Trip!!!!
The first warning that things might not go smoothly was when the car heater stopped making warm air in Angels camp. It was 30F outside and dropping. Brrrr! We decided it was not a big deal; we were only 40 min or so from Arnold and I was being very careful on the icy roads.
We did a cheer when we saw that we would not have to shovel out the driveway, which we’d forgotten about until we actually saw snow on the ground. We let out a huge sigh of relief and took this as a good sign. We are fools.
Whenever getting to the cabin, there are certain steps you follow to “open the place up”.
Step 1: open up the access panel that leads to the water main under the house. Lean into dark, spidery area and open water main and close drain valve. This is done because the water is shut off and the pipes are drained every time we leave to prevent the water from freezing in the pipes. We could not get the main valve to move more than an inch. Maybe less. HPM and I took turns holding flashlight and twisting valve. Grrr! No water!
So skip that step and come back to it with tools, right?
Step 2: turn on water heater. Well, there’s no water in it, so skip this step and come back later.
Step 3: Unlock cabin. Sounds easy enough and I had the keys. However, the door won’t open. We spend 30 minutes fiddling, jiggling, passing the flashlight back and forth and trying to get the freaking door open. It was 21 F outside and I was only in jeans and ski liner. Brrrr! It was so frustrating and cold, I exercised my ability to curse creatively. We assumed the neighbors would call the cops and they’d grab us for breaking and entering. Just as I started to suggest a hotel in town, the door latch caught and the cursed thing opened. We piled through the door, dumped bags, chose a bed to share, plugged in electric blanket, and turned on house furnace. All that in less than 2 minutes…
Step 4: Get tools and go back to Step 1. I get in crawl space under house armed with an assortment of wrenches and an antique vice-grip. I think the spiders were all dead, but their webs were all over. Yick. I crank, I pull, I twist, I fiddle, I tear up my hands. The valve handle pops off and I get some play in the stem, but never any water. How uncool is that? Did I mention we REALLY had to go to the bathroom? We’d been holding it with the cabin in mind and things were not looking very good. Nope, this was definitely BAD! I grew up camping rough style and have no qualms about dealing with this. Afterall, there’s tp and an electric blanket, so we’d survive.
I look at HPM and say, “Can you piss in the woods or do we need a hotel?”
HPM: “Where’s the toilette paper? I’ll be fine.”
So we lock up the panel, grab the tp, find likely trees and aim down hill. By the way, it’s now after 1 am, it’s 21 F out, and we’ve just bared our bottoms to some dam cold air.
Teeth chattering, we race back to cabin lock it up and discover furnace not doing such a great job. We can (a) heat the family room, where there’s no bed or sofa or handy sleeping bags and we’d have to make up some sort of sleeping thing or (b) forget heater and hide under electric blanket which is on and has been heating the bed. We go with (b) and turn off furnace (no point in heating uninsulated cabin). We layer up, dive under covers and burrow in. Three words: Electric blanket burrito!
Should we set an alarm clock and head up to slopes first thing? Hell no! We stay put until we are awake and ready to deal with the day. It’s been a long night.
Turns out that HPM had to pee again around 3am. She fought it for a while and then gave up, putting on boots and heading out to a new tree. That’s when she discovers we left the lights on in my car. A real trooper, she spends several minutes trying to get the lights off – fiddling with dash controls and interior light controls. She managed at one point to get the lights off, but when she closed the door, the interior lights popped on and all the doors automatically unlocked. Hahaha! In her shoes, I would have kicked me awake and told me to deal with it. I think the cold air was affecting her, though, and she battled through it, fingers and feet getting cold. Eventually she decoded the Swedish system of vehicle lights, but she never got the passenger door to stay locked. Looks like it’s really broken, too. Grrr!
I woke up around 8 am, which is just when HPM started to snore. It got so cold through the night, my face hurt and the pain woke me up. But I was toasty in burrow. Haha! Unfortunately, I had to go to the bathroom again and it is 30F-ish out. I stalled until HPM woke, which is when she told me about her 3 am foray into the woods and her comic battle with my car lights and door. We giggle and cross our fingers that the car starts.
Reality set in, we grabbed the tp and headed out for a new tree. Only now the sun was up and we are a stone’s throw from neighbors on all sides. Well, snickering, we try to be discreet, but there’s only so much you can do. We also realize we’ve managed to “mark” a ring of trees around the property. Hahahaha! Wonder what the neighborhood dogs will make of that?
One other “gee, wish I’d thought of that” was the water bottle we shared for face-washing and teeth-brushing… it was left out, so it was pretty darn cold, too. I wish we’d thought to stick it under blankets with us. That stung the face so bad it hurt. And, honestly, it was as screech fest when we got dressed. Gee, I wish I'd thought to put clothes somewhere in bed and near electric blanket, too. The cabin was colder than the surrounding woods and our fingers chilled up before we were done packing and pulling out.
Oh - and on the way home that evening, the heater in my car clicked on as we got below Angels camp. On my todo list: take car into shop. Grrr!
We wave good by to the cabin and go in search of hot food and then the ski lodge. At the ski lodge we bribe a young parking lot attendant to snap a picture of us. Cost: one bottle of water and one stick of cheese. hahaha!
Ski report:
The skiing was freaking awesome. It was 30F, windy and icy. It was fairly uncrowded and we rocketed down the slopes. 2 warm up runs on the front side and then we spent most of the day on the back-side where it was sunnier and the runs were longer. This turned out to be a wise move; on our last run to the lodge, where it was shaded, the run was essentially one long sheet of ice – that totally sucked. The back side was still icy, but not as cold and instead of one long sheet of ice, it was patches of ice. We probably started actually skiing around 1 pm and got over a dozen runs in before 3:30. Quitting time was 4pm – that’s when they stop the lifts.
Last year I had a hard time relaxing and just going fast. It looks like I got over this on Monday. Some sections of the slopes were iced up so much that I couldn’t turn very well unless I really dug my blades in. Since I couldn’t do my hard turns that I seem to love so much, I let it go. I pointed the skis down the slopes, tucked in and flew threw the ice “whooping” it up the whole way. LOL. HPM said she heard me whip by at one point. The rush was amazing. I was squatting, tucking and had my skis about 12 inches apart. Kept my joints loose and my shins tight, I was zipping down slopes tips-first whereas last year on the same slopes I couldn’t help breaking and turning and slowing myself.
There was one particular sharp turn I’d blast through, cutting diagonally down and across an icy slope (cutting out the sunny gentle “long way” down) and hitting the turn on the steep slope in the ice, digging in my edges and then shooting through – I had to hold my arms out to keep balance and I suddenly felt like Rocky the Flying Squirrel. LOL. The first time through, I knew I’d get really hurt if I didn’t peg it. But, with “I’m a Survivor” rolling through the back of my head, I pulled it off and whipped through the bottom shoot/trail and even caught a little air. Whoop!!! What a rush. I really really think the intense weight training I’ve been doing since early November made this possible or the story would be how I wrapped myself around a tree.
I followed HPM down a few times – she was very controlled and worked her turning system. We joked that I’m the speed-freak and she’s the control-freak. I tried to do her turns, which was the same thing I was doing last year, but it was too much work and wore me out. I just wanted to race to the bottom.
One kindly skier showed us Bear Boogie. It was wider and a LOT steeper than our other long run. It was awesome. On the first steep slope, I was practically skipping across the top of the icy snow – not much chance to slow because I didn’t have enough contact or friction with the ice to stop. But I didn’t freak or die. Whoop! It was such a rush; squat, tuck, and hang loose with the wind screaming past. On the first trip down, I stopped at the various turns. But once I’d done the run once, I just launched from the top of the run and hit it as fast as I could, blowing down to the lift. We got 15 or more runs in during a 3 hr period. Whoop!!!
HPM took that hill like a pro – working her turns in the face of ice and a very steep slope. Thank goodness she wore hot pink so I could pick her out.
I fell once – it was a combination of chunks of ice, a rock and iced moguls. Moguls just aren’t my thing and when you ice it up, throw in some obstacles and I have to plant a turn… well, I rolled with it, ended up on my back (skis in air because I don’t want to torque anything) and then stopped my slide and got up asap. And it didn’t shake me, which is super-cool. Usually I get spooked when I fall. HPM didn’t fall at all. Yay!
It was an awesome day of skiing. We celebrated our mastery of the slopes with a beer and got some kids to snap some shots of us full of post-ski glow. I think we were grinning the whole way home and laughing about what a weird trip it was. It was cold, it was icy and it was ubber cool!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-16 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-20 04:43 pm (UTC)Part of what made it fun was that despite the hurdles and challenges of the trip, we just dealt with it and laughed. There was no whining or cranking about it. I think the trip would have gone sour if someone had started griping.
It will be hard to go back without some expectations of the same level of fun.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-20 07:51 pm (UTC)