Spring has sprung

As today is the first day of spring, it was only fitting that it was nice.  Since I had the day off I went for a run in the am and ride in the pm. Nice little cruise up to Ruth's and back. Some wheel sucker from porcupine sat on for the ride, until I turned off to come home. Strange how some people will ride any pace, change gears to go slower and NEVER come around for a pull. Timid? just followers? or maybe stalking tendancies? Anyway, I had a nice easy ride in the beautiful wasatch. It will be short lived for the shorts, but hopefully not more than a week, until it is warm again. After a swim and long ride tomorrow, maybe Dairy Queen? Yum!!!

Snow, glorious snow!!

Wow, what lame arses we have been. No updates since Feb 23? Must be getting too busy with other stuff. Anyway, have had some good ski days in the last couple weeks. A perfect day at Alta with old friends from Boston this weekend. Had a great time touring around the mountain in the bright blue powderbird day. Good snow to be found everywhere.

Lots of visitors coming in the next week. Bea is here now, with Bill and Jane arriving on Thursday. Should be a great time with all of them here. Not sure what the plan is for things to do, but I'm sure we'll figure out something.

Will try to update this week, again!!

Dinner at the Yurt

Last Saturday, Rich and I headed up to Solitude to have dinner at the Yurt. For those of you who are not familiar, a yurt is a Mongolian structure, historically, in which the Mongolian people lived in as their homes. A few fun facts about the yurts are that the door is always facing south to preserve heat, the tables are typically always in a circle around the center to create community (which is why they try to copy that will long family style tables at our yurt), the doors are always made smaller so that invaders might hit their heads and the Mongolians can defend themselves.

For us... nothing so extreme.. we were treated with utmost care and welcomed warmly. We hiked in about a half mile, an easy hike, we had the option of walking or xcskiing. We chose to walk and just enjoy. When we got to the yurt - all 27 of us!!- we made our way around the tables and sat with our new friends. We had 12 at our table and greatly enjoyed everyone's company. We were about half and half - locals and "out of staters". Our meal was superb: 5 courses. The first was a hearty white bean and beef soup with awesome warm bread. The second was seared scallops with carmalized onion on some type of greens. The next course was a salad: greens, cranberries, walnuts, green apple and goat cheese, the main dish was port tenderloin in some kind of demiglaze with shreaded brussel sprouts and potatoes, and then the dessert was a chocolate torte with rum soaked strawberries.... YUM. Everyone brought their own wine, and that made for a very festive occasion! :-)

Rained out

Well our plans to visit California and see Mitchel and Kamala were foiled due to forecasted torential rain. Didn't really think that going to ride and run, with pouring down rain would be all that fun. So we stayed home. Maybe Lance will ride next year too!! Maybe Paris again? We did get alot done though! Finished the downstairs bathroom finally!! The top is concrete, made in the basement. On a Kraft made cabinet. Basin sink. Gives some modern touch to the downstairs.

We also went to Farmington Bay to see the Eagles. We got a nice surprise with a whole flock of pelicans in the water, close to the shore. We stayed and took a few pics. Then home to train some. Ski day tommorrow, no mater what. Big storm tonight and tomorrow means fresh powder day all day!! See our friends, Andy & Rhonda's page for a good utah powder day!!

Where Have I been?

Man, I can't believe it has been 3 weeks since we updated this thing. Talk about losers? Been busy I guess. What have we been doing? Catching up. Skied once or twice, ran alot, swam alot, put on alot of lotion!!!! Chlorine is just killing us this year. Us. you say? Yes Karen has gotten the triathlon bug and has planned to do the BAM tri this June. She has been swimming diligently, learning a new sport and doing well. She can already swim the distance, now we just need to work on speed and CALMNESS in the open water! She will do great.
Got a new color in the corner of the Kitchen...... Granny Smith Green!! and Chalkboard black. No really we put up chalkboard paint in the corner, looks cool. Sorry, you'll have to wait for me ot take pics. Concrete countertop part II is almost done. Need to wax and hope to get in next week.

We leave this friday to go to California for the Tour of California. Just happens to end in Santa Cruz, stage 2, where we will go to stay with Mitchel, Kamala and Cozmo and Ezra. SHould be a blast. Hope to make it over the Sierras Saturday am and hit some warm sun, sea level riding and running. I can't wait. Pics when we return. Lance Pics, Floyd pics, Tyler pics, maybe one of Karen and Tom Boonen?
rk

BASH

That would be "Battle at Soldier Hollow". Last weekend, Rich and I raced the BASH winter triathlon. It was a 3 mile run, 3 mile bike and 3 mile ski. The weather was cccccccooold!! 9 degrees at race start! brrr. Of course, one warms up once you get going, but it was very chilly waiting to begin and took half a run lap for fingers to thaw out! The course was fun - not too demanding on the run and bike and we both enjoyed this a lot. Rich rode the bike course on his single speed with is amazing. I did well on the run and made up a lot of time on the bike, as most athletes are likely roadies and skate skiers and not true mountain bikers. The time spent in MI and in Moab riding in the sand was very beneficial to us for riding in the snow. Of course, all the time I made up on the bike I lost on the ski as that is not my strength at all. The ski course was more challenging as it had a killer hill to climb right in the beginning. We had to do that twice. Rich is a great skier and had the third fastest ski time overall - that's great! Actually, Rich kicked butt in the whole race, too. He finished first in his age group and 4th overall! He did so well that he got invited to the World Champion Winter Tri event in Austria.... Hmmmmmmm..... I, of course, did not get invited to Austria! haha. I finished 41 out of 60 overall.

A Big Moon, and stuff.

Well, it's been a pretty uneventful couple of weeks since our last post. Rich is working diligently on the concrete countertop for the bathroom cabinet but it's giving him grief, and he may have to start over again. We knew it would be a process, for sure.

Kathy and I went to the movie Slumdog Millionaire, which was AMAZING... I recommend everyone go to see this movie! Click here to learn more about it. On Thursday, Kathy had her birthday (on the 8th), I took her to the BodyWorlds, http://theleonardo.org/bodyworlds/index.php, exhibit before it left town, where we met up with some friends, and then we went to the Bayou, http://www.utahbayou.com/, for dinner and drinks - about a dozen of us, very fun! The Bayou is an excellent place to chill and hang out, if you're ever in SLC... the best beer menu in town and great jazz music Thursday - Saturday. Happy Birthday to all by January friends and family: Pat, Lori, Bea, Kathy and John.

Friday, Rich and I went to his work holiday party (a little after the fact) which was nice, and Saturday, I did an awesome skate ski with Rhonda while Rich did his own skating and swimming elsewhere. Rhonda and I went up to Solitude and did 15 km on perfect snow on a perfect blue bird day. It was great! Saturday night Rich and headed to the west side of the valley to get a good view of the BIG moon that was rising that evening. Apparently this is the largest and brightest moon in 2009. It was gorgeous as it came over the mountains.

Sunday, a disappointment - we had planned on skiing and meeting Jen and Stu up at Alta, but Jen called just as we were loading our stuff and said the weather and turned bad, she wasnt going to ski into Alta from Snowbird afterall, and Stu had hurt his back so he was out of the picture. We decided to scrap the day and go next weekend, hopefully not having to bear wind gusts of up to 80mph, little visibility and wet, sleety snow... I guess that means back to cleaning the house and going for a run!