Every October, Microsoft has a big auction for charity. Employees can put things up for other employees to bid on. Four years ago, I won a day of semi-professional ski photography. Jay and Andy came out and the three of us had a great skiing day with some amazing photos. I’ve continued to enjoy those pictures, and Bernard, the photographer, has continued to offer that auction item every year. So this past fall, I bid on it again and won.
We’ve had a hard time picking the “perfect” day. I wanted to combine a midweek date so there’s less traffic, some partial clearing so there is good light, and of course, fresh snow! Those three things aligned last Thursday so we took the day off and headed up to Stevens Pass since they had the most snow that day.
One of the main reasons I wanted to do this again was that I felt like I skied extremely poorly the last time we did this. Bernard was able to get some good shots every once in a while, but I pretty much fumbled through the whole thing. While I’m still FAR from an expert skier I felt much more in control this time. Maybe I’ll do it again in four more years after I have even more practice.
Lest I get too much of an ego about these pictures, I’ve included one in the upper right of this post that is fairly indicative of how I normally ski. The photos below are a few of my favorites but there are more in the photo gallery.
I definitely had my share of dumb moments throughout the day. The most obvious one was the time we spent about 20 minutes carefully traversing through some very tight trees to a secret untracked stash. Over the radio, Bernard described the route to me. Drop out of the trees, make a hard right, traverse under the cliff about 50 feet and then ski down the tree line. Got it. I dropped in out of the trees, turned right a bit late, tried to correct and ended up face first in the snow. By then I had lost too much speed and the rest of the run was wasted.
But all in all, I got a ton of pictures that I love. Thanks to Bernard for putting up with me and for giving me these wonderful photos!
We have a row of arbor vitae trees in the backyard. They provide a nice visual block between us and the neighbors, but during the recent snow storm, they took quite a beating. The tops of the trees were bent down so far that I could hit them with a broom!
Very shortly after buying the projector, I built a simple shelf mount for it. It was easier and cheaper than hanging it from the ceiling and the Epson 8350 has awesome lens shift so I was still able to get the picture in the right spot. However, the cables were left dangling down the wall. I finally got around to fixing that this past weekend.
As our snowstorm dragged on last week, the pantry started getting thin. Thankfully we’re only a half mile walk from the grocery store, but what fun is that? I decided to invent some dinner. Since they were calling the storm “snowmaggedon”, I decided to call this “snowmaghetti.” The picture is atrocious, but that’s kind of the point. It doesn’t matter what it looks like as long as it tastes good and you can use what you already have in the pantry. So here’s how I made it, but when you make this, you’re required to experiment!
I’ve been pestering TimS with a lot of questions now that I actually have a yard. His landscaping expertise has already come in very handy. We were discussing various ways to improve water runoff from my roof. It tends to drain back down into the crawlspace making extra work for the sump pump and the previous owners already had a little bit of an issue down there. I think I’ll probably end up installing one of these 
Remodeling
For the last couple years, I’ve been the property guy at church. Normally it’s just small tasks and general upkeep, but late last summer, I started a huge project. The church received a very large anonymous donation designated for remodeling the house that’s on the church property.
In the past, the house has been used as a place for our Pastor’s to live, a place for our teachers to live, and extra space for classes and events. It has been falling in to disrepair and that seems to have accelerated the last couple years since no one was living there.
I gathered a bunch of input from people who had lived there before and other congregation members, got bids from two contractors, and finally signed a contract. There’s way too much to cover here, but this is a small subset of the improvements we made:
I was responsible for drawing up the basic plans and work item list, but from that point I handed over the reigns. Our general contractor was Jim Lawrence of Lawrence Construction Company and I highly recommend him. We’ll hopefully be giving him a call in the future for some work on our house. He finished the project quickly and did a lot of the interior design himself which removed a lot of decisions from my plate.
It would be much better if we had more “before” pictures, but here’s comparison of the old kitchen and the old kitchen to give you a little taste of the scope of this project.