They Say It’s Gonna Snow Soon

Yes, that’s right. They are saying that La Nina is dying, and a new weather pattern is happening starting the middle of February.

I hope so. But they’re also saying that it may be too late to save our winter.

Ethel’s making the best of what we have –

My legs are tired. And that’s weird, because I haven’t lifted with my legs since last Friday, when I tore the hamstring. I had physical therapy today, and I wasn’t impressed. I don’t know if what they’re doing is really going to help. It doesn’t seem to be impacting my hamstring at all. But, then, I’m not a physical therapist. I’m just a patient, but I’m not very patient.

I saw an ad for Line skis today, and the guy was coming off a cliff, straight down onto what looked like a cliff landing. And I realized that I will never ski like that. And now that I’m 67, the word “never” is getting a lot more immediate. It’s like I feel the door of my life closing – and the room on this side is a lot smaller.

It doesn’t help that much to live in a retirement town. The people that I talk to generally talk about the stuff that they used to do – and how they don’t do it any more. There’s a lady who does the water aerobics at the pool. I just happened to run across her yesterday in the base village at Wolf Creek – she was there with her husband. She says that she’s 82, and that she doesn’t ski any more – which is a shame, because after age 80 you can ski free there. She says that her knees won’t let her ski.

Now, she does the water aerobics with the other older ladies, and then she puts on sneakers and basically jogs slowly in the pool for a half hour or so. She’s out there, doing what she can – but aware of what she can’t. And I see that happening to me. I see what I am doing – but I also see what I’m not doing, or what I can’t do any more. And it does feel like doors closing.

I’ve been doing bench press now for a couple of weeks, and I see that it’s not improving. I’m not getting stronger. Usually, that happens right off the bat.My body just doesn’t respond the way that it used to respond. And now I feel tired. But, there’s nothing else for it but to keep trying.

Speaking of trying – had my second piano lesson with Miz Kathy yesterday. She’s got me doing simple stuff, because she wants me to sight read – not just notes, but tempos and rhythm, too. So, I’m doing that. It’s really simple stuff, too. But I’m going to follow instructions – because, once again, what choice do I have?

The pipers are getting ready for St. Patrick’s Day, but I have pretty much given up on my chanter. It’s just one more thing that I’m not good at.

I sure hope that that new weather system kicks in. Living in the San Juan Mountains, in January, with brown grass, can really color one’s perception of the whole word.

The Year

Well, it looks like we have our plan for the year – well, mostly.

We finish out the ski season here, and in late March, I go to the outback of British Columbia to do heli skiing with CMH – Canadian Mountain Helicopters – at the Galena lodge.

At the end of May, I have the Iron Horse bicycle event, riding from Durango to Silverton. We’ve been planning on doing the trek through Nepal to Everest Base Camp in the fall – that hasn’t been nailed down yet, though.

And now, we’re going to meet a friend in Wyoming in July, to climb Devil’s Tower.

(this is a stock photo, off the Internet. Since we haven’t done it yet, we don’t have any photographs).

We visited Devil’s Tower back in 2020, when we were doing our COVID walkabout. Looking at it then, I knew that I wanted to climb it, but Ethel hadn’t show any interest. But our friend Grant in Kalispell was interested, and for some reason he finally has stated that he’s ready, so – let’s do it!

We won’t be doing this on our own – we’ll be using a guide. There’s no way that I would attempt to climb an 867 foot tower without having somebody along who knows which way to go 🙂 It’s surprisingly reasonable getting a guide – they’ll even give us a refresher on big-wall climbing in the package. (I haven’t done a multipitch climb since 2004 or so, when my friend Todd and I climbed the West Slabs of the North Face of Mount Olympus in Salt Lake).

So – go heli skiing, ride over two mountain passes between Durango and Silverton, climb Devil’s Tower, and hike 80 miles round trip to Everest Base Camp. That sounds like a pretty good year.

Had physical therapy today. The hamstring is a Grade 1 – or low Grade 2 – longitudinal tear; it’s not as bad as I was afraid it was. So I should be able to recover in plenty of time. I am riding, and I’m lifting with my upper body and swimming, so I won’t get completely out of shape. Which is a good thing, given the year that we’ve got planned.

Still no snow here, and nothing in the forecast. But I’m going skiing tomorrow anyway.

Trainer Road has….Improved

I’ve been using TrainerRoad since 2014. I use it to control the intensity of my workouts on my bike, while riding on my Wahoo Kickr trainer. Every month, the charge gets deducted from my credit card.

Now they’ve “improved”.

Why can’t folks leave stuff alone? I never asked TrainerRoad to change. I certainly didn’t want an AI to take over my training. I just wanted to keep doing what I’ve been doing.

But this last week, we were getting ready to go upstairs for our ride, and Ethel said “Huh – what’s with TrainerRoad? It’s….it won’t let me pick my workout.” And, sure enough, the entire interface had changed. It wanted us to ask AI what to do, and do what the AI said, and never mind our silly notions that we knew what we were supposed to do.

Worse than that – TR suddenly told us that we needed to lower our FTPs – that’s the rating of our functional power, sort of the magic number that one uses to determine training load and intensity. It wanted me to drop mine from 180 to 149, and was suggesting something similar to Ethel.

And, when we finally found the path to where the workouts that we were planning on doing, TR explained to us that those workouts were too hard, and that we were going to FAIL – don’t do them! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson! …never mind that we’d already been doing these workouts for weeks.

And there’s absolutely nothing that we can do about it. I emailed ’em, and they said “Oh, well. Too bad. Reckon you folks have to live with our changes.”

So now I’m wondering what my options are. I know that I can use Zwift for workouts, but I don’t think that they have anything like as many workouts as TrainerRoad. And I can build my own workouts in Zwift, as well, but TR works better for that sort of thing. But something sort of sticks in my craw when I think about continuing to use an app that continued to take my money while suddenly stopping the functionality and ease of use that I’ve come to rely upon for the last decade.

Well, in other news – we’ve been hunkered down here in southwest Colorado, getting ready for the amazingly awesome snowstorm that was coming. And it never really happened. We got about three inches here in town. The megadump that the mountain was supposed to get turned into 8 inches the first night, then 4 more over the next day.

This snow drought is the worst on record. They keep saying that, and it keeps being true. Last year was bad; this year is just terrible.

Went to church today, back at St. Patrick’s. I’ve decided that I can go there, for now, since God hasn’t given me any other direction. I don’t like the things that are happening, but apparently that doesn’t matter – or, at least, it only matters to me. So, I’ll shut up and live with it – until and unless it gets worse.

Oh – the worst news: on Friday, while doing squats, I tore my left hamstring. I saw the doc the next day, and she said that it was a longitudinal tear. I got a referral for physical therapy. After two days of rest and ice and Ibu, it’s not hurting. But I won’t be doing any leg lifting at all – which includes deadlift – for quite some time, and I don’t know what that’s going to mean for my Heli Ski trip in March, or my IronHorse in late May.

Okay. I’ll shut up now.

Where Does It Stop?

Apparently, nowhere.

A few years ago, it became fashionable to make everything gender-neutral – or “non-binary”, which is not the same thing, but is definitely a related concept.

I like the fact that I haven’t been asked for “my pronouns” here in Pagosa Springs, but today the
otorhinolaryngologist(ear, nose and throat doc) over in fashionable, left-leaning Durango had me fill out a form where I was supposed to tell them my identified gender(I didn’t).

But the Episcopal Church seems to be doing an “experiment” in which we’ve gone whole-hog on the idea of a Gender Neutral God.

Now, I’m not going to discuss the existence of divine genitalia. But this has just gone stupid. When Jesus talked about the Father, He definitely used male pronouns. So the only Biblical evidence that we have is that God identifies as male, to whatever extent He identifies.

And, all through our Book of Common Prayer, He is referred to as Him.

So what’s happening is that we’re having the services, not out of the BCP, but out of the church bulletin – taking the stuff out of the BCP and editing it to make it politically correct. So, the Book of Common Prayer is no longer used in common; we’re not all saying the same prayers. Whatever the local parish wants to do, with respect to this issue, seems to be all right.

So, while we’ve moved away from the Book of Common Prayer, we’re also injecting other stuff – instead of the old-fashioned Nicene Creed, sometimes we get the Canadian Creed or the New Zealand Creed. And the Prayers for the People might come from absolutely anything at all. Anything.

Now, as far as I know, absolutely no new information has been given, by revelation or inspiration, involving God’s gender, at any time at all. But we’re all doing this now. This means that this change to a gender-neutral deity is being driven by a social agenda.

So now, instead of letting our theology define our social and moral values, we’re letting a social agenda define our liturgy.

That just sounds….dumb. I mean, dumb. And dishonest. And I really don’t like it – because one of the things that I have always loved the most about our services is the liturgy. I like being able to numb out and say the Nicene Creed without having to read the bulletin to find out what we might be saying this week. I like knowing that this is an Episcopal Church, and so I absolutely belong here.

But these days, I feel like a Republican at Whole Foods in our church services – allowed there, but with every cue telling me that maybe I’d be more comfortable somewhere else.

So, this last Sunday, instead of going to our church, I went to the local Anglican church. The Anglican Communion broke away from the American Episcopal church about twenty years ago. At this service, there was absolutely no weirdness , at all. None. Those stupid, backward folks even used “thee” and “thou”.

And, in talking to the folks there, I found out that every single one of them had gone through the same thing – many of them left the Episcopal church way back when we decided that gay bishops were all right. And it seems that that church is really growing, so the migration is still happening.

Ethel has dug in at St Patrick’s tighter than an Alabama tick. She’s now the treasurer. She says that she’s still comfortable with this stuff – although, when it started happening in Montana, she was completely against it. And she was against it when the AA General Service Conference did away with “men and women” and replaced it with “people” in the AA Preamble.

But nowaways, she’s just fine with this stuff. I reckon she has changed and grown.

But I reckon I’m a curmudgeon. And I don’t like it when God changes – or when we start acting like God has changed.

Amen.

Some Really Good Stuff

We’ve kept going on those 700-800 movies that we have on disk upstairs, with Ethel bringing them down two disks at a time. I keep saying “Hey, this is good! Why haven’t we watched it?”

Some of the stuff isn’t just good. It’s really, really good.

For instance, the other night, she surprised me with “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”.

This is only about 45 minutes long. It was produced very quickly by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy and Firefly, and I think that they put it together in a couple of weeks in a garage or something, and put it on the Internet, for free, back in 2008.

And it’s amazingly, ridiculously, stupidly good. I mean, really. Now, like everything in the world, it’s not for everybody, but if you’re the type who likes this stuff, then you’ll really, really, REALLY love it. It’s about a villain who is trying to become a real supervillain, so that he gets invited to join the Evil League of Evil – and his crush on a girl at the laundromat, and his struggles against his nemesis, Captain Hammer, a superhero.

If that sounds campy and farcical, it is. You bet. And it’s delightful. And it’s a sing-along blog, so there is plenty of music – really good music.

We’ve been watching a bunch of good stuff. But last night, Ethel put “Vanilla Sky” in the DVD player. This is a Tom Cruise science fiction film. It is not for folks with a short attention span – it requires thought and concentration. It is, in some ways, the opposite of Dr. Horrible. But it gets me, every time. While Dr Horrible is a huge hit that everybody loves, Vanilla Sky is very polarizing – folks either love it, or they just don’t get what all the fuss is about. But it always leaves me sitting in my chair saying “Wow”.

I don’t know what today’s movie is going to be. But I’ll get up in a bit and go in there and find out.

I haven’t skied since Friday, because the snow was firm, and getting firmer. And there’s really nothing at all in the forecast. This drought has now reached record stages – a record low snowpack. And last year wasn’t great, so this is two years in a row.

However, Texas, apparently, doesn’t have the Weather Channel, because they’ve come up for MLK weekend, even though conditions are poor. Arizonans seem to be suffering from the same lack of information. Or maybe they just don’t care.

I’m just over nine weeks out from my heli-ski trip. But I’m starting to think that my legs will be able to handle it. I’ll keep training and hope for the best.

Sixty Seven

Today is my belly button birthday (as we say in AA) – the day that my legal age changes. I am now the same age that my father was when he died in his sleep. Sixty seven years old.

I still managed to do my Sweet Spot ride this morning, and then hit the bumps on Thumper up at the ski hill.

But the Sweet Spot ride wasn’t the length or intensity that I used to do, and when I hit the bumps these days, it seems like they hit back, as well.

Ethel is gone today – she’s got service commitments out the wazoo. I’m leaving a little early to meet a pigeon at the evening meeting – time to go over pages 84-88 with him. I think Step 10 won’t go easy with this fellow, as he’s not the most phone-philic type. But my job is to make myself available to help him work the Steps “out of this volume”, as it says on page 96, so I’m going to do that. Then we have the 5:30 meeting, and perhaps we’ll go out to eat “for my birthday” 🙂

Sometime this summer, I hit a crack in the running path here in Pagosa Lakes, and something about the way that I got jerked around really hurt my right hamstring right at the insertion point. I decided last week that, since it hasn’t healed, I would ask my doc for a referral to physical therapy. Well, it’s a week later, and today it felt like maybe I’ve zinged my right rotator cuff – again? – and then, during my last ski run, my right knee started complaining. So, yes, I reckon I’ll go to physical therapy.

I’m moving my Wednesday workout to Friday. I realized that I’m lifting hard on Monday and Wednesday, and then have five days off until the next time. So I’m moving Wednesday to Friday, so that I can have three days, and then two days, in between. I hope that that helps with this fatigue.

I haven’t started piano lessons yet – I’m not sure that my teacher is really all in. She is always going to contact me, but never actually doing it. It’s possible that she might not be really excited about teaching me. I’m not the nicest person in the world – or perhaps I should say “likeable”. I like folks, but they don’t seem to like me as much as I like them. It may be that my self-centeredness just bores people. I know that it bores me.

Sixty seven years old. I didn’t expect to be who I am, where I am, doing what I’m doing the way that I’m doing it at this age. I expected to be wise, fit, and probably living under the lift at Big Sky. Instead I have a lot of medical appointments in my calendar, and I’m tired – always tired.

Of course, it’s possible that being sixty seven years old just feels tired, no matter what.

In Training

Well, now that I know where and when I’m going heli skiing, I had to get busy making sure that I would be in shape for it. So I’ve skied six out of the last eight days. I think that’s why I haven’t posted a diary entry for four days.

Here’s the view from the top of the Bonanza chair, looking out over the back side of the mountain, across the San Juans.

I’m tired, yeah, but not as tired as I would have expected. My resting heart rate is going down (I came off of a GLP-1 about ten days ago) and I’m not doing yoga. On my lift and swim days, that’s all I do, but on bike days, I go ahead and ski. The legs need to know that they’re going to have to do the work.

I’m not sure how long this will last. But I’m willing.

I feel like I’m starting to “ski” – no, I don’t have the form I had when I was doing 100 days in a row in Whitefish, but at least I don’t look like a tourist from Toledo. And I may never again be able to ski like that, even for five minutes. But time on boards is the most important thing that I can do right now.

I’m also thinking about adding some stuff. We’ve been doing Spanish in Duolingo since we moved to Panama, almost four years ago. But we still can’t speak Spanish. Well, there’s a “conversational Spanish” group that meets at our church on Monday afternoons. I’m going to try to talk Ethel into going. She can be intransigent.

I’m also wondering if we don’t want to go back to choir practice. That’s just “wondering”.

I turn 67 this week. That’s the age that Dad was when he died. Since Mom didn’t want an autopsy, we don’t know exactly what killed him, so I don’t know how much danger I’m in. I don’t feel like I’m about to die, but I’m definitely feeling my age – at least, I think I am. It’s kind of hard to know, since I’ve never been this old before.

I do have medical stuff coming up. I have the MRI biopsy for my prostate, the followup with the doctor who did my AFib ablation, a meeting with a doctor about getting the Inspire implant so I can get rid of my CPAP, a followup with my pulmonologist, and my annual checkup. Sheesh. I remember when I started getting annual physicals – at that time, that was all that I had as far as seeing doctors was concerned, except for various and sundry injuries resulting from my rather active lifestyle.

Okay, now I’m going back into the living room. Ethel is in there, lying down, because her back is out. Now, my back isn’t out, but the lying down part sounds pretty good. Maybe I’m more tired than I think I am.

Pagosaversary

Yesterday we celebrated one year in Pagosa Springs. It was our Pagosaversary!

And, as it happens, I joined the local gym the day that we arrived, so I just had to pay my annual dues. It comes out to less than $40/month for the two of us, for a full gym and lap pool a half a mile away. I think that’s a good value.

So we’ve lived here for a year. And we still really like it – well, okay, not having any snow in my yard is weird. But we went skiing yesterday, and most of the Texans have left, and Wolf Creek is a really nice place to call your home mountain.

After skiing with Ethel for a while yesterday, she took off to take Juneau snowshoeing, and I did big bumps laps on the Alberta chair. After that, I told her to go ahead and book my trip. So I’m going to Kelowna, British Columbia, the last week of March, to spend five days climbing into helicopters and skiing down big mountains.

We live in remote southwest Colorado, And Kelowna is a sizable city in the middle of BC. And there is no convenient way to get from here to there. So I’m losing a day on either side of the trip to travel. But, again, I suppose it’s worth it. I’m only doing this once. Might as well go big or go home.

This doesn’t affect our travel plans – such as they are – for the Everest Base Camp trek this fall, but Ethel has been shanghied^H^H^H^H^H^H asked to take on the treasurer position at our church, and the budget cycle is in September and October. So that may put the kibosh on trekking in Nepal. Yes, there’s the spring trekking season, but that’s when the farmers in the valleys are burning their fields, and they say that the smoke can get really bad. So we’ll figure it out.

We also want to go to Europe for a while. She wants to see where I spent two years sitting on an M1 Abrams tank keeping the Russians out of Paris, and the beaches at Normandy, and I want to actually jump on trains and just travel around Europe for a while. But I don’t know when we’ll do that. There is only so much time – and there’s only so much money. I have to let our financial advisors refill the tanks after we spend all this money 🙂

Pagosaversary. Funny, we never noted our first year anywhere else. The longest we’ve spent in one home was seven years – that was the first Park City – and the longest that we’ve spent in a single area was eight years – that was Anthem and New River, in Arizona. I’d like to make it here longer than that.

As long as it snows 🙂

A Small Town – But Not My Small Town

There are, of course, some very nice things about living in Pagosa Springs. For instance, last week, when I left the gym, I forgot to lock my locker.

Of course, everything was fine. Nothing was taken, and nobody even bothered to lock it for me 🙂 We don’t worry about such stuff very much here in Archuleta County.

Yes, it’s a small town. And it’s a small town in Southwest Colorado, which – except for the current drought, I really like. (Today it snowed all morning, but it’s been so warm that it just kept melting as it hit). While we’re close to Durango, it doesn’t “lean left”, as folks say. Nobody here has asked me for my pronouns.

But this morning, I had a bit of song lyric stuck in my head as I was getting ready to go to the gym. And it occurred to me that it is entirely possible that nobody in Pagosa Springs had ever heard the song. It’s the old Ray Stevens chestnut, “Jeremiah Peabody‘s Polyunsaturated Quick-Dissolving Fast-Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills.” (Woah yeah).

I was careful not to sing this song while doing my lifting and core routine – however, the gym speakers did play Alanis Morrisette’s “All I Really Want”. I actually have a copy of “Jagged Little Pill”. I hope that she got some therapy, eventually.

But that’s a heck of a juxtaposition, ain’t it? Ray Stevens and the Queen of Angst.

The workout went okay – I was weaker on my pushups and pull-ups than I was last week, but I was a little bit faster on the swim. I wonder if skiing yesterday had any effect. I’m going to have to find a way to ski and also work out. When I look back at my last 100 day year – that’s the winter of 2019-2020 – I see that my working out was hit or miss until the last week of February, when I managed to stick to the plan, while skiing every day, although that all went to heck on the middle of March, when they closed the ski hill and the gym on successive days.

Of course, I was six years younger then.

I haven’t yet booked my heli ski trip. I’m concerned about several things – but, mainly, I doubt my own ability to ski the way that I would need to ski, and keep skiing, to take advantage of that opportunity, Yesterday’s 11,000 feet wore me out. For the aforementioned 100 consecutive days of skiing, back in 19-20, I averaged over 12,000 feet per day – and those 12,000 feet were steeps, bumps and trees, in powder.

That was the year that I was SUPPOSED to go heliskiing in Alaska. I was supposed to go at the end of March. But the day before I left, Alaska closed the doors – something about a global pandemic or something.

Now I’m wondering if I missed my chance.

Winterless

Here’s the tram at Jay Peak, in Vermont.

We’re not there. I’ve tried to get Ethel to go there, but she won’t. She’s so mean and selfish.

Here’s a post from this time last year. I’m not showing you what my back yard looks like now, because it looks exactly like this. Winter just ain’t happening. It’s happening in Vermont, but not in Colorado. Now, I admit, I’m as surprised about this as anyone is. Southwest Colorado has always been a pretty good bet for great skiing and great weather. But not last year, and not this year.

We came to Pagosa for five or six weeks in the winter of 23/24, and the skiing was great – or, at least, that’s the way that I remember it, and that seems to be what this diary says. Right now, here in Pagosa Springs, we’re not wild about the skiing – I went today, and it was better than (say) North Carolina, but there was a lot of, shall we say, firmly packed powder.

But one thing that Southwest Colorado has that Jay Peak will never have – Texans. Lots and lots of Texans. I thought that they would have gone home by now. I was wrong. Now, there are nothing like the throngs of Texans that we had the last two weeks, but there are still plenty, and they fill up the parking lot and the lift lines….and the restaurants, and the stores, and they are all driving all day long everywhere.

Okay, let’s tell the truth and shame the Devil. We won’t be going to Jay Peak, Vermont. We’re going to stay right here. And right here is a whole lot better than (say) Alabama. And who knows? Eventually the Texans will leave, and maybe it’ll start snowing.

But it’s a nice fantasy. Besides, in Newport, VT, I could buy the house I have here for about 200K less. Whups – I forgot. I was going to stop thinking about that.