Dec/081
Avoiding Punter Rage
I'm keeping my punter rage in check today by staying in doors. The snow gods are smiling and it's been dumping all day with a bluebird (a blue-sky powder day) forecast for New Years day.
Tomorrow's skiing could be just epic on the Grande Montets & I'm going to be there before everyone else.
Should I venture out into Chamonix? Or even Argentiere this evening? To drink too much booze amongst rowdy punters in rammed bars? Hell. No. I think maybe an evening in, with a decent dinner, good wine & a great film on the wide-screen. A nod to the New Year at midnight and then up early for the best day's skiing so far on the first day of what I hope will be the best 2009 there's ever been.
Whatever way you choose to celebrate the New Year, you have the best wishes of Quit Your Day Job, Go on I Dare You.
Dec/080
Teeing up 2009
Christmas dinner went deliciously well. Everyone had a great time, drank too much & enjoyed the goose. I thought all that cooking would put me off the kitchen for a while, but it seems not. I'm just enjoying having a kitchen so much, I'm making all kinds of things. I haven't eaten out for weeks.
Now it's those weird few days between Christmas and New Year which I quite like. I like that you never know what day of the week it is or whether the shops are open or anything. It gives me the chance to think things through and make a plan for what I'd like to achieve in the coming year. Most of November and December were taken up by moving house and getting everything set up for Christmas etc, and now it's time to get back to work. It's proving hard after such a long break, but I'm feeling a little antsy about not getting stuff done, so getting my head down and getting back into some work is a priority for my peace of mind.
Ski-wise It's the busiest week of the year for the Chamonix Valley, with punters swarming the place. But I'm a step ahead of them. I'm up early and on the Le Tour telecabine before everyone shows up. I boot it around the Domaine de Blame for a couple of hours and ski back home for breakfast by the time the queues have built up too much.
The weather is incredibly cold. -12 C that early in the mornings. With no new snow for a week or two and some periods of high wind, the ski conditions are a little boiler-plate but It's a good chance to make friends with my new Voelkl Mantras, though. They're a proper handful - a full 10cm longer than my previous longest skis, but now I'm starting to show them who is boss, they're rapidly becoming my favourite pair of skis.
Dec/080
Chris cooks Christmas
Inspired by the boy Hugh F-W, I'm cooking Christmas for 6-8 of my friends this year. An epic shopping trip to Carrefour in Sallanches on one of the busiest days of the year wasn't the most fun, but later in the day I picked up the goose from the artisan butcher in Chamonix. Analltogether more civilised experience. Sitting on my kitchen table, the goose looks like a big bastard and to be honest it scares me a little. It doesn't scare the cat, though. She got so excited I had to lock her in the bedroom while to calm down while I dealt with the goose.
The first job was to take off it's legs and cure them for 24 hours or so in a mixture of salt & pepper, garlic, bay and thyme. Later the legs will be slowly cooked in goose fat to make a traditional French confit.
The crown of the goose is going to be filled with a chestnut stuffing and roasted on Christmas day, along with the potatoes done with goose fat, the usual veg and a proper goose-stock based gravy.
The first course is a soup. Cream of Jerusalem Artichoke with a parsley and chestnut pesto dabbed through it (thanks Hugh). I was a bit worried about finding the Artichoke things here in France. Mostly because I had no idea what I was looking for, never having heard of them before. Turns out it's quite a popular vegetable here in France. They call it topinambour. Who knew?
And for desert it's a poached pear tart with vanilla ice-cream. Washed down with what will probably be a good chunk of the 24 bottles of wine I got from my mate the other day (he runs a chalet and has a nose for putting delicious wine on his punter's table at very little cost to himself), I'm hoping Christmas dinner is going to go down well.
It's certainly the most adventurous meal I've ever attempted. Starting preparing a meal several days before serving feels a little strange, but hopefully everything will come together without stress on Christmas evening and I'll be able to enjoy eating it as much as I'll enjoy making it.
Dec/080
Just unplug the damn phone
I haven't posted recently, mainly because my interweb connection has been down for a few days. I was starting to get quite annoyed about not having it. Annoyed enough even to be on the verge of calling up Orange and giving them some grief. Then this morning I discovered what the problem was. I'd plugged a phone into a wall socket to check the line a while ago and the cat had knocked it off the side, leaving it off the hook. It connected immediately as soon as I unplugged the damn phone. Duh.
Not having interweb was the main reason for my lack of posts, but the other reason was tat I had my first house guest staying with me. My very good friend, Phil flew back from the UK with me last week and we've been out skiing for a few days. We had a great mix of different kinds of skiing: Knee deep powder on GM, some ski touring in Les Contamines and even a taste of 'if you fall, you die skiing' off the very top 'Arp' bubble in Courmayeur.
I've got a couple of busy days coming up in the run up to the 25th. I've got quite a few people coming over for Christmas dinner in a few days time and I need to pick up the goose & do some shopping for that. Also Sarah comes back on Wednesday and moves into her brand new house (which she's never seen before). I'm actually feeling quite excited about Christmas now, which is unusual for me.
Dec/080
Discipline & routine
You know when your alarm goes off in the morning and you have no choice but to haul yourself out of bed? Well, you could hit snooze a couple of times, but really you just have to get on with things. Get up, get dressed and make your way to your job and start the day. It’s your routine. Every day you have to get there roughly on time because if you don’t you’ll be fired sooner or later. In return though, you don’t need to worry too much about money. Oh sure you’ll feel like you don’t have enough of it from time to time, we all do.. but in return for being disciplined about your routine and turning up at your job every day you get paid every month, you know how much you’ll be paid and you don’t need to worry.
Working as a freelancer from home like I’m doing, you don’t have that. When my alarm goes off, I COULD stay in bed. If I get bored during the day I can just wander off and no one will care. On the other hand, no one is obliged to pay me and every month there are still bills to pay. Work is still work. It’s when you have to do something that if you were really free to choose, you wouldn’t do it. You must do it to get paid. That needs discipline and routine.
Imposing discipline and routine on my life is difficult but important. I have a pathological fear of routine and I try to break it every chance I get. I wrongly think routine will depress me, but the truth is that the lack of it is even more dangerous. Discipline I struggle with too. I still have remnants of that dumb teenage attitude ‘No one tells me what to do’. Including myself it seems.
I’m getting better at it. Slowly. And although it’s a difficult part of one’s personality to address, discipline and routine are definitely useful things to be good at.
Dec/082
River Cottage HQ
My short trip to River Cottage HQ in Dorset was well worth the effort. Even if the flights and hundreds of miles of driving on either end made my carbon footprint more of a carbon Jackboot over the last 48 hours.
The event was called Hugh Cooks Christmas and was essentially a 2 hour cooking demonstration by Hugh of some of the River Cottage Christmas dishes, followed by a 5 course dinner comprising all the food that had been demoed. Delicious it was too. The demonstration was as fun and instructive as any cooking demonstration I can imagine. But then again, I've never seen a cooking demonstration before.
I met some great people over the course of the evening. A very eclectic bunch of young & old, foodies & gourmets. I was sitting next to pro cricketer Geraint Jones at dinner. Top geezer he is. He keeps pigs & filled me in with a load more detail about the whole process of raising, butchering and making sausages etc.
And the highlight of the whole evening was getting to meet Hugh himself. He's a genuine hero of mine. He and Stephen Fry are right at the top of the list (although for different reasons). I like Hugh's style, his way with his audience and most of all his ethics and the direction that I've seen the River Cottage brand and TV programme develop over the years I've been watching.
So what did I say when I met him face to face? I said....
"Dude. You're totally my hero, man."
It made him chuckle at least & I suppose that was my intention.
Dec/084
Meeting a hero
I'm a bit over excited this morning. I'm on my way to Devon to meet a hero of mine, Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall. I'm going to River Cottage HQ for dinner & a demo of Hugh cooking christmas (a brilliant christmas present from my girlfriend).
Tapping this post into my iphone at Geneva airport isn't ideal so I'm going to leave it here & think about what I'm going to say to the geezer this evening.
Dec/080
A quiet Sunday
Yesterday was a beautifully sunny day, perfect for the opening of the Le Tour ski area - the lift I can walk to from my house. I was due to take some photos for AMP in the afternoon, but realised I'd forgotten my camera. No problem. I skied home at lunch time, had a bit of pasta, picked up my camera and was back skiing an hour later. I think I'll be spending a lot of time skiing in Le Tour this year.
Not today though. The foehn wind has been blowing a hoolie all day & it's arctic. So I stayed at home, did some house work, listened to the the archers omnibus & nursed my cold. A nice quiet Sunday.
Dec/080
Skiing Video Feedback
As part of the All Mountain Performance courses we're doing, AMP offers Video Feedback of client's skiing as a teaching tool. Basically, the instructor shoots some film of the group over the course of the day and in the evenings everyone meets up in the bar to watch it. Mark goes through and analyses the groups' skiing with a view to giving everyone something to think about for next time.
It works really well. It's very useful as a teaching tool, and watching yourself ski on video in the bar at the end of the day over a beer brings everyone together and rounds off the day nicely. I've used the resulting footage in a quite a few of my films from last year, but now I'm trying to do something different.
I want to make a film which sums up what video feedback is and how good it is by filming a client during the process. They are sitting watching themselves skiing while my camera is focused on their reaction and Mark's analysis of their skiing. I think that to put all this together into a short film of around 2 minutes should give a prospective client a comprehensive idea of what the video feedback is, developing the feature from something cool that clients are fairly surprised about to a Unique Selling Point that will drive more clients to come on the courses in the first place.
Anyhoo - that's the idea, and this short film is the proof of concept. I'm just trying out the idea to see if it's going to work. This stars Monique, one of the business owners who came on our taster weekend last Sunday. I think the concept is proven but what do you think? Does it give an idea of the feedback session? Does it look useful to you?
Mon's Video Feedback for All Mountain Performance from Chris D on Vimeo.
Dec/080
Just epic
Of course.... I wouldn't be freediving right now. I'd rather be skiing. As a start to the season, there's really only one word to sum it up.
I helped Mark and Simon out on their course over the weekend. Things were a bit snowy, but we managed to get a decent photo of the new instructors jackets.
But Sunday was the day. The sun shone, and we skied beautifully deep powder all day. OK, so there were still quite a lot of rocks, but here's a bit of the video feedback All Mountain performance are doing thise season.
Chris Dorward, Simon Halliwell Video Feedback 7th Dec 2008 from Chris D on Vimeo.
What I'd like to do next is cut some of this footage with the footage from the actual feedback session in the bar later that day.
It was an epic start. But there were casualties. A friend of mine snowboarded into a rock with his knee and broke his patella in 5 places.