Feb/091
Mid Season Business
It occurred to me the other day that we're already half-way through the ski season. This is about the time that seasonaires start to suffer a touch of mid-season blues. The young 'uns who work in the bars and chalets have all been working, skiing and partying hard and you can see in their eyes that they're tired and flagging - knowing that they're only halfway through and they're dreaming of the beach.
Not me. I'm a lucky git and I'm only working on my own stuff this winter having put all client-work to one side until the Spring. At the start of the winter I wrote a long list of the things I need to work on once the Spring comes round, thinking that I'd just simply ski all winter. As it turns out now that I live up here in Le Tour and I'm not spending as many evenings drinking in bars I've had more time on my hands than I thought. As it turns out, I've already ticked off most of that list so I'll be going into the Spring with both guns blazing. It's amazing how much you can get done when you're not constantly managing your clients' various demands.
Feb/090
Warm again
Our week of being cold ended yesterday with the delivery of 2000 litres of heating oil. The 80 Litres of ordinary car diesel we chucked in the tank gave us enough fuel to heat the water, so the week wasn't a total hardship, but having to wear full ski gear inside all the time got old very quickly.
Now that we've got the hang of the heating system properly we won't be making that mistake again. The current tank full should last through until November, at which time I'll top up the tank again for next winter before the snow arrives again.
Feb/091
Doing something annoying and stupid
Yesterday I was down the valley at Carrefour nice and early. I had a busy day in front of me. I decided to give the van a clean at the jet wash. It never stays clean for long in the snow, but it's good to wash the dirt and salt off now and again.
So I cleared out the mess of tissues and fag packets in the door pocket and failed to notice as I shut the door that I'd locked the driver's side. There it was. All doors locked, keys in the ignition and even worse, my iPhone sitting on the front seat. The spare key was on my girlfriend's keyring, 40km away and the number to call her on my phone. Merde. How stupid and annoying.
Suddenly stripped of my 21st century toy - my portable brain-replacement - my iPhone, I was helpless. To find the number I needed the Internet, to call it I needed a phone and that's all before I had to explain to my lovely girlfriend that due to my blunder she'd have to take a few hours out of her busy day to come and rescue me.
I did have a notebook and a pen with me. A low-tech solution to a high tech problem is often the best approach and luckily at some point I'd jotted down a number for one of the ski instructors my girlfriend works with. So with a 5 Euro phonecard and a short struggle to re-learn how to use a public payphone, I was back on the grid.
I made a few calls and retired to to the coffee shop to wait for the cavalry which was arriving directly.
Feb/090
Cartoon from the Guardian
How exactly DO two nuclear submarines apparently come to collide in the middle of a stormy Atlantic one dark night? Maneuvers?
Feb/091
The Heating Crisis
We're in crisis mode here in the mountains this weekend. We ran out of heating oil. It was partly our own fault for not knowing how to use the boiler efficiently, but quand meme , I was still a little bit surprised by the oil delivery company's refusal to deliver before the 20th Feb. That's nearly a week away and we've got no hot water and a house rapidly falling to the ambient temperature of below freezing. Handily, ski clothes work just as well indoors as they do out of them.
Apparently if we'd owned young children, the oil company would have considered it an emergency and come sooner. So as we sit here blowing on our hands, typing this post, we do feel somewhat discriminated against for our choice not to contribute to over-population.
But every one's been very helpful and nice to be fair. We've borrowed 80 litres of Jerry cans from a mate, and apparently we can buy industrial grade diesel in bulk at one of the garages in town, so we'll hopefully at least have enough fuel to run the hot water till the truck comes and delivers the 2000 litres we ordered next Friday.
And before next Friday we'll have to dig a path from the road through the 6 foot deep snow in our garden so the geezer can get the hose up to the pipe to fill our oil tank. Sarah's made a start already & I reckon a good couple of hours of work should do the trick. And it'll certainly help keep us warm.
No where did I put my gym membership card? I feel the need for a sauna.
Feb/091
Tia and the Telemarks
After our visitors left at the weekend I had quite a few things on my to-do list. First was the cat. She had to go to the vet to get her rabies booster which is the last stage of getting her little kitty passport sorted out. She hates getting stuffed in her cat box and hates being in the van even more than that. Getting a rabies jab isn't high on her fun list either. But that's it now. She's fully micro chipped and inoculated and she could legally travel to England without the need for quarantine.
But as it turns out, she's staying with me for ever. I've discussed it with her first family, and the kids are happy with the arrangement except for their demand for a new Nintendo DS game as payment (they're only kids I guess). That and the fact that they're getting a new kitten and a dog to compensate. So Tia is mine now. I'm even going to get the details on her micro chip changed to me.
Next was sorting out my telemarking kit. It's a goal of mine to start telemark skiing this winter. It's thought by many to be the purest form of skiing, and also the most difficult. It's like normal (alpine) skiing with 2 important differences.
Firstly the heel is not fixed to the ski. This leads to what's called the telemark position, with the skis spread out and one knee dropped toward the snow. Secondly the skis do not release from your boots if you fall.
So I've sorted out my kit. I bought some second hand boots and bindings from a mate. I mounted the bindings on a pair of old Dynastar skis I was given for free last year. The boot liners needed re-molding to my feet and I needed to by a pair of knee protectors to stop me breaking my knee if the ski hits something at speed while the knee is dropped. In total I set myself up with all the kit for EUR 200. Not bad eh?
Now I've got to learn how to do it. I thought about getting a lesson to get started but then yesterday I found this website www.telemarktips.com. There are a few beginner videos on there which I reckon would be what the instructor would progress through so hell - I'm just going to get out there and learn it myself having watched all the videos.
By the end of this season I'd like to be able to do this:
Learn to Telemark in Powder from Chris D on Vimeo.
Feb/090
Enough Already. There's work to do
Skiing got ditched in favor of keeping warm today. It's very cold up here in the mountains in the winter. -15C at the top of Grande Montets yesterday. That's finger numbingly cold. Not really the time of year for ski touring.
Today was more productively spent making this film. Mark had a journalist from a prestigious UK broadsheet on his course last week, and there's a chance this film or a part of it at least will make it onto the newspaper's website.
Intermediate All Mountain Ski Course 30th Jan 2009 from Chris D on Vimeo.
Now that I've got a Vimeo PLUS account I can upload full High Definition movies to the Internet. That's about 10 MB per minute of film, so it's better than having to pay for the hosting myself.
(The science bit: Because HDTV requires so much more data than normal PAL resolution TV (from the olden days of cathode ray tubes), engineers devised a way to broadcast TV signals as compressed digital information rather than directly over analog waves. They defined two video formats for HDTV called 720p and 1080i, which refer to the number of horizontal lines used to produce the image. It allows broadcast of super-sharp high definition moving images which look great on modern flat screen Televisions.)
In short, I can share large movie files with other people by uploading them to vimeo, which also produces a handy viewing page for my client.
Feb/091
Bigger Better Faster Further More
It's snowing again. More powder, more skiing, more winter. Make hay while the sun shines has always been a favorite fable of mine and tomorrow is yet another powder day for us.
Today was also a powder day. It's snowing hard. Chains are going on cars and people are holing up for the snow that's in the post. Skiers are quietly slipping off to bed early without drinking too much. Being on the first benne on the GM at 8am would be special. But have you got the dedication to be there?
Whatever happens, that first bin/benne will be full. And I probably won't be far behind.
Feb/090
More ski touring
The four of us carried on a great week of skiing with a ski tour from Flegere to Vallorcine. That's about 20km by road. Even on skis taking a more direct route we probably covered around 14km over the 4 hours before stopping for lunch at the Buet hotel & taking the Vallorcine bubble back over to Le Tour and skiing home.
I've been trying to use my iPhone's GPS to track our ski tours, with some success. Unfortunately the device ran out of batteries half way through this tour, but you can clearly see our route on the following GPS track mapped onto Google maps right up until the point where the power ran out.
View Larger Map
It was another lovely day out in the mountains.