Back Again
Well, I'm officially one of those people that doesn't update their blog for a month at a time. If I were clever I'd claim I was boycotting national blog month or something like that but I'm not.
How not clever am I? I got up this morning (yay for 6am on a Saturday) to discover that my computer had rebooted to update Firefox and that I, in a totally unexplainable hella insanely stupid moment, had not saved anything of the work I'd done on my communications paper.
Now it's not like I'd written anything difficult. Mostly just sourced some quotes with the intention of putting it all together today, but it was like two or three hours worth of work. Gone...like an idiot.
So yeah, not clever. The good news is that, like most second attempts at things, I can go a little faster since I basically know where everything I want is. I suppose that whole last sentence could have been a very nice double entendre (not a single entendre...those are purely for Jeffy) but it's early and I have a lot of work to do today.
Ok, if you're still reading this then you deserve a prize. It's been a while since I've written about (or done for that matter) something interesting but last Saturday I went snowboarding for the first time. It was fun, it was hard, and I damn near broke my fool neck.
So here's the story. The furlak and I head off at 6am (Why can't he have afternoon hobbies?!?) to catch the bus out to Sunshine. Ok let's skip ahead to the interesting bits shall we...
1) I had no helmet (my head is too big for protective gear) It would later be a point of contention between myself and the big F as to whether my wearing a helmet would have exacerbated my injury.
2) I was wearing lots of nice warm clothes. which would have been more useful if I could have kept my shirts tucked into my pants (I got ski pants!) but with all the falling I was doing I ended up getting snow down my pants anyway. It wasn't too bad I really didn't notice til I was done.
3) I was not wearing any other protective gear (wrist brace, butt pad <---seriously, wish I had one!) at all.
So right off the bat I fall down alot. I don't know how many of you have heard the "Ben's first skiing story" but, unlike then, I did not put on my gear and then slide into the rental hut and fall down. Nor did I go up a chairlift without any instruction. I did however fall down about 17 times my first run just getting to the top of the hill and trying to start to slide down the hill.
See here's the thing, and other boarders may agree or disagree, in snowboarding you strap a slick board to your feet and then try to stand up on it....on snow. Furlak kept helpfully reminding me to "crouch like you're squatting down onto a toilet" which is fine and handy and true except I have never tried to go to the bathroom with what is essentially an expensive crazy carpet strapped to my feet. This is where the butt pad would have been nice as the process until you learn the magic balance point is mostly.
1) Start off sitting on butt with board strapped to feet
2) Plant feet and try to lever up to a standing position fairly quickly (great abs workout btw)
3) Feel rage and despair as feet go shooting out from under you for the 15th time in a row and you fall on your ass
4) Try again
Eventually I ended up trying to rocket up like a jack in the box. This does not work.
What does work, and I am not making this up, is to get up while sliding down the hill. See the vectors involved make it easier to stay up since you can actually shift your balance without just pitching over again.
So I finally get up and am slowly plowing the hill (the ever so elegant term for sliding down the hill on the back of your board very slowly and very lamely. And I fall backwards, and I land on my left hand pretty hard jarring my wrist...and I remember this conversation at the bottom of the hill.
Furlak: "Here, you should take my wristguards. The most common initial injury for new boarders is falling backwards, landing hard on their wrists, and breaking them."
Bne: "I'm a big dumbass who doesn't listen to the wisdom of kind friends who have experience in this area"
Ok, that's not exactly what I said, I think it was more "I've been skiing for years and I took gymnastics and I know how to fall and I don't need them".
So there I am, lying in the snow (again) and my wrist hurts like hell and all I can think is "If I broke my wrist on my first run, I'll never hear the end of it". But no, thank the patron saint of fools for me cause I was ok.
So I complete my first run. I slide alot and fall alot and generally am learning to trust my edges and Furlak promises that soon I will be "carving" the mountain (which sounds like a lot of work, and I don't have the proper carving sets for that sort of thing) instead of "plowing the mountain" (which sounds kinda like a euphemism). As you can see the lingo really improves with skill level.
So I go again. And this time I'm doing waaaay better. I'm slicing (ok I made that term up) back and forth and not really falling that much. Furlak is following along behind to keep an eye on me (yay for Furalk, best rooomate ever) and he gets to witness what happens next. Pardon me if this doesn't translate to text well. Anyone who has boarded should be fine but I'll try to explain for the uninitiated.
On your snowboard you have two edges. The heel edge, which is shockingly the one your heels are on, and the toe edge...which I won't explain. You always ride on the back edge of your board (so heel edge if you are facing down the mountain and then toe edge when you "carve" and change direction) since if you ride the forward edge gravity ensure that you fall down. The physics are fairly basic and uncompromising.
So I'm bananaing (going back and forth on my heel edge only) down the hill. And I'm doing pretty well and feeling pretty good and putting in a decent (though controlled...I learned my lesson about the joys of speed and injury with skiing) clip when my toe edge catches. So I faceplant....sorta. See as I'm pitching forward something happens. This is to say that I have no idea why but my board hops a little and now instead of just doing the tripwire face plant I'm doing the ass over teakettle forward flip. And fortunately, as I like to mention to anyone who will listen, I did do about 6 years of gymnastics so as I land on my head (yes, literally my feet went shooting up in the air) I tuck my head in and snap my legs forward like I'm doing a front handspring. Except my hands aren't involved so I guess I did a front "headspring" and land flat on my back in a nice puff of snow.
So I'm lying there, testing my extremities and also laughing pretty hard cause that *had* to look awesome and I hear Furlak yelling so I give him the thumbs up. Regrettably there is no video of the event (though I like to think someone has it on their vacation video and that I'm a hit overseas) but there is a blurry pic of me giving him the thumbs up. My neck was stiff for like three days.
The debate about the helmet centers around if it had caught in the snow and stopped me from tucking my head. I will be getting a helmet before I go again though (I may be dumb sometimes but I prefer not to be stupid. There's a difference!).
In other news I've been going to the gym about 3-4 times a week. Stress is good for me in some ways since I work it off. That being said I have to cut back because I over lifted (going from 30 to 50lbs on the incline press free weights. I don't want anyone thinking I'm huge or anything) and gave my shoulder an nice pull. And then have been reaggravating it fairly regulary since. I went two days and then reinjured it, then went 5 days without excercising and it still got sore after the workout so I'm going to a purely abs/legs and cardio routine til after finals. Which sucks since I hate cardio. And finals are hella stressy for me.
School is good. I actually got ahead this week. I was getting stress headaches again (actually woke up at 2am with a near migraine experience) so I took three days off from video games and buckled down and got ahead (except for the lost comms stuff I mentioned off the start) which was nice.
Oh, and I gave up coca-cola last Monday. I just got tired of having trouble sleeping, and sleeping poorly. I've been getting to bed around 10-11 and sleeping pretty well so I might make that permanent. Well, to be honest, I'll probably drink it now and again (with pizza for instance) but I think it is no longer going to be a daily thing for me. Which is kind of the end of an era really.
I know, I thought the world would end as well.
Anyway, time for me to try to recreate my comms work. Then into the lab quickly so I can get back in time for the afternoon Ottawa game (hence being up so damn early). Oh, before I forget, I'm coming home for the xmas thing. For the first time in a long time I'm not working so I expect to be back around the 17-20th (haven't sorted a few things at school for next term yet) and staying til who knows. This marks the first New Years in almost 15 years where I'm not working. Wow...15 years...that sucks. And I'm planning on being drunk somewhere with as many people I like as possible. So where y'all gonna be?
How not clever am I? I got up this morning (yay for 6am on a Saturday) to discover that my computer had rebooted to update Firefox and that I, in a totally unexplainable hella insanely stupid moment, had not saved anything of the work I'd done on my communications paper.
Now it's not like I'd written anything difficult. Mostly just sourced some quotes with the intention of putting it all together today, but it was like two or three hours worth of work. Gone...like an idiot.
So yeah, not clever. The good news is that, like most second attempts at things, I can go a little faster since I basically know where everything I want is. I suppose that whole last sentence could have been a very nice double entendre (not a single entendre...those are purely for Jeffy) but it's early and I have a lot of work to do today.
Ok, if you're still reading this then you deserve a prize. It's been a while since I've written about (or done for that matter) something interesting but last Saturday I went snowboarding for the first time. It was fun, it was hard, and I damn near broke my fool neck.
So here's the story. The furlak and I head off at 6am (Why can't he have afternoon hobbies?!?) to catch the bus out to Sunshine. Ok let's skip ahead to the interesting bits shall we...
1) I had no helmet (my head is too big for protective gear) It would later be a point of contention between myself and the big F as to whether my wearing a helmet would have exacerbated my injury.
2) I was wearing lots of nice warm clothes. which would have been more useful if I could have kept my shirts tucked into my pants (I got ski pants!) but with all the falling I was doing I ended up getting snow down my pants anyway. It wasn't too bad I really didn't notice til I was done.
3) I was not wearing any other protective gear (wrist brace, butt pad <---seriously, wish I had one!) at all.
So right off the bat I fall down alot. I don't know how many of you have heard the "Ben's first skiing story" but, unlike then, I did not put on my gear and then slide into the rental hut and fall down. Nor did I go up a chairlift without any instruction. I did however fall down about 17 times my first run just getting to the top of the hill and trying to start to slide down the hill.
See here's the thing, and other boarders may agree or disagree, in snowboarding you strap a slick board to your feet and then try to stand up on it....on snow. Furlak kept helpfully reminding me to "crouch like you're squatting down onto a toilet" which is fine and handy and true except I have never tried to go to the bathroom with what is essentially an expensive crazy carpet strapped to my feet. This is where the butt pad would have been nice as the process until you learn the magic balance point is mostly.
1) Start off sitting on butt with board strapped to feet
2) Plant feet and try to lever up to a standing position fairly quickly (great abs workout btw)
3) Feel rage and despair as feet go shooting out from under you for the 15th time in a row and you fall on your ass
4) Try again
Eventually I ended up trying to rocket up like a jack in the box. This does not work.
What does work, and I am not making this up, is to get up while sliding down the hill. See the vectors involved make it easier to stay up since you can actually shift your balance without just pitching over again.
So I finally get up and am slowly plowing the hill (the ever so elegant term for sliding down the hill on the back of your board very slowly and very lamely. And I fall backwards, and I land on my left hand pretty hard jarring my wrist...and I remember this conversation at the bottom of the hill.
Furlak: "Here, you should take my wristguards. The most common initial injury for new boarders is falling backwards, landing hard on their wrists, and breaking them."
Bne: "I'm a big dumbass who doesn't listen to the wisdom of kind friends who have experience in this area"
Ok, that's not exactly what I said, I think it was more "I've been skiing for years and I took gymnastics and I know how to fall and I don't need them".
So there I am, lying in the snow (again) and my wrist hurts like hell and all I can think is "If I broke my wrist on my first run, I'll never hear the end of it". But no, thank the patron saint of fools for me cause I was ok.
So I complete my first run. I slide alot and fall alot and generally am learning to trust my edges and Furlak promises that soon I will be "carving" the mountain (which sounds like a lot of work, and I don't have the proper carving sets for that sort of thing) instead of "plowing the mountain" (which sounds kinda like a euphemism). As you can see the lingo really improves with skill level.
So I go again. And this time I'm doing waaaay better. I'm slicing (ok I made that term up) back and forth and not really falling that much. Furlak is following along behind to keep an eye on me (yay for Furalk, best rooomate ever) and he gets to witness what happens next. Pardon me if this doesn't translate to text well. Anyone who has boarded should be fine but I'll try to explain for the uninitiated.
On your snowboard you have two edges. The heel edge, which is shockingly the one your heels are on, and the toe edge...which I won't explain. You always ride on the back edge of your board (so heel edge if you are facing down the mountain and then toe edge when you "carve" and change direction) since if you ride the forward edge gravity ensure that you fall down. The physics are fairly basic and uncompromising.
So I'm bananaing (going back and forth on my heel edge only) down the hill. And I'm doing pretty well and feeling pretty good and putting in a decent (though controlled...I learned my lesson about the joys of speed and injury with skiing) clip when my toe edge catches. So I faceplant....sorta. See as I'm pitching forward something happens. This is to say that I have no idea why but my board hops a little and now instead of just doing the tripwire face plant I'm doing the ass over teakettle forward flip. And fortunately, as I like to mention to anyone who will listen, I did do about 6 years of gymnastics so as I land on my head (yes, literally my feet went shooting up in the air) I tuck my head in and snap my legs forward like I'm doing a front handspring. Except my hands aren't involved so I guess I did a front "headspring" and land flat on my back in a nice puff of snow.
So I'm lying there, testing my extremities and also laughing pretty hard cause that *had* to look awesome and I hear Furlak yelling so I give him the thumbs up. Regrettably there is no video of the event (though I like to think someone has it on their vacation video and that I'm a hit overseas) but there is a blurry pic of me giving him the thumbs up. My neck was stiff for like three days.
The debate about the helmet centers around if it had caught in the snow and stopped me from tucking my head. I will be getting a helmet before I go again though (I may be dumb sometimes but I prefer not to be stupid. There's a difference!).
In other news I've been going to the gym about 3-4 times a week. Stress is good for me in some ways since I work it off. That being said I have to cut back because I over lifted (going from 30 to 50lbs on the incline press free weights. I don't want anyone thinking I'm huge or anything) and gave my shoulder an nice pull. And then have been reaggravating it fairly regulary since. I went two days and then reinjured it, then went 5 days without excercising and it still got sore after the workout so I'm going to a purely abs/legs and cardio routine til after finals. Which sucks since I hate cardio. And finals are hella stressy for me.
School is good. I actually got ahead this week. I was getting stress headaches again (actually woke up at 2am with a near migraine experience) so I took three days off from video games and buckled down and got ahead (except for the lost comms stuff I mentioned off the start) which was nice.
Oh, and I gave up coca-cola last Monday. I just got tired of having trouble sleeping, and sleeping poorly. I've been getting to bed around 10-11 and sleeping pretty well so I might make that permanent. Well, to be honest, I'll probably drink it now and again (with pizza for instance) but I think it is no longer going to be a daily thing for me. Which is kind of the end of an era really.
I know, I thought the world would end as well.
Anyway, time for me to try to recreate my comms work. Then into the lab quickly so I can get back in time for the afternoon Ottawa game (hence being up so damn early). Oh, before I forget, I'm coming home for the xmas thing. For the first time in a long time I'm not working so I expect to be back around the 17-20th (haven't sorted a few things at school for next term yet) and staying til who knows. This marks the first New Years in almost 15 years where I'm not working. Wow...15 years...that sucks. And I'm planning on being drunk somewhere with as many people I like as possible. So where y'all gonna be?
posted by Bne | 5:58 AM
5 Comments:
Actual phone conversation with Bne, crica 2003:
Bne: Should I bring over some coke?
me: Ummm, we've got two two litres, we should be fine.
Bne: Only two? I'll stop at Sev on my way.
The coca-cola thing is kind of shocking me. I'm not sure whether I'll recover... but still, I'm glad about this new healthy bne thing that you've got going on.
The snowboarding story almost made me pee.
I'll be in DC on New Year's.
Hopefully, there will be drinking and merriment somewhere in this neck of the woods.
We will be in the Greater Metro Lumsden area. Or possibly Stateside, doing some ass-planting of our own on the side of a mountain.
Ben. I want to go snowboarding with you and Furlak. Let's make this a thing that we do, instead of a thing we B.S. about. Next time you're gonna go, let me know a couple weeks in advance, and I'll rip down for the weekend.
T.
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