Telling it like it is

6350 vertical feet today. A couple of hours whilst Paula was doing nordic skiing again. The snow was perfect for me again today and I managed to do Blue Spruce - the run off the front side of Apex. I've got two days left on my season pass - I think I'll use another one tomorrow morning because the snow is so damn good right now. Took Paula's camera with me today so I finally managed to get some pictures from the lifts and runs. Took this on Moonbeam...

Wow. 6 inches of fresh powder in the valley overnight and this morning, everyone has completely forgotten how to drive. I mean after all, it's been three days since it snowed. Utah drivers are bad. Abysmally bad. Almost as bad as drivers in England. But this morning they were driving like complete cocks. Driving at full-tilt on compacted snow, then when they got to roads that were actually clear, slowing down to 2mph. It took me 20 minutes to drive 3 fucking miles! The roads are clear! They've been plowed, gritted and salted, and everyone's doing 2 fucking miles an hour! You know - for a town where people are so religiously inclined, they don't have a lot of faith in their ability to drive. It's Mormons On Ice this morning - an all new Utah spectacular. One day only. Must see. So the assessment of today's drivers on the freshly-plowed roads:

Why would anyone use DHL? They're useless. Years ago, we had a company problem where DHL "lost" a couple of large pieces of equipment. Six weeks ago, they "lost" a shipment due to me then "found" it a week later in the warehouse. Yesterday the delivered a shipment due to me to someone else in a totally different part of the city with an address not even remotely close to ours. In physical location or actual street number. DHL are a bloody menace. They're not running a courier company, they're running a joke.

My 32Gb of MP3s are on random play today and Baila Bolero just popped out. I had a total 80's flashback to when I saw Fun Fun live at the Locomotion in Zoetermeer back in 1986. Shit. 21 years ago. I guess this means I'm getting old then.

The much-promised storm has arrived with a vengeance this morning. When I got in around 7:15 it was overcast and the roads were dry. Now we're in blizzard conditions - huge snowflakes throwing themselves out of the sky at a furious rate. The parking lot is a war zone of rear-wheel-drive cars that can't get up the slopes. The footpaths are snowing up quicker than they can clear them and Foothill drive came to a stop about 20 minutes ago and hasn't moved since. We're getting hammered down here so I suspect the ski resorts are collecting snow in feet, not inches. The two images below are from my webcam. Notice the rocks in the left image have been buried in the right one. Those rocks are about a foot high.

Back in the good ole' days before the internets (the series of tubes), when JANET ruled and remembering the unique numerical ID of a remote computer required the memory of an elephant, people used to hop on and off the usenet groups dropping inflamatory comments here and there. Initially, the newsgroups took them seriously but eventually we all realised that these characters were trolls - as in they trolled the newsgroups looking to drop comments simply for the purpose of starting an argument (a flamewar, no less; Fark.com is still full of them even today) So now I have my very own troll. I thought it was a spambot at first so I changed my blog to require verification for the comments and it didn't stop. It turns out some woman keeps spamming this blog with strange comments. Once the verification ruled out a spambot, I'd assumed it was a bloke but as my wife pointed out yesterday, the comment-leaver's name is a woman's name. So everyone give a warm 'hello' ...