It Snooooooowed...

This last weekend I went to Yosemite to ski to Glacier Point with some old MDT friends and stay in the lodge for two nights. As you can tell by the pictures it snowed. Driving in at zero dark thirty on Friday I think I was the second car over Highway 120 through the park to the valley. It was snowing and about six inches of snow was on the road and no plow in sight. Needless to say the WRX with all wheel drive did great. We all meet at 9:00 at the Cross Country shop at Badger pass. By 9:30 everyone was ready to go and it was snowing very hard. Our guide Rick said it normally would take about 5 hours to ski the 10.25 miles to Glacier Point. Boy was he wrong. The last three people came in about 6:15 pm. Or almost 9 hours. In the summer Glacier Point is a zoo. Lots of people looking at the view of Half Dome and down into the valley. As you can see we had it to ourselves just 8 people, most of Saturday. Saturday morning was clear and cold when I got up. Only one other person got up as early as me. Rick our guide said he usually gets up and breaks a trail to the overlook but Kathy and I beat him to it. He did warn us that to not to get too close to the edge since he usually marked the line of death as he called it. In the winter there is a cornice on the point. As he told us go to far and the next stop is Curry village. But once we snow shoed out there you could see a faint line where the snow settled by the stone wall that in the summer is jammed with people.

Food was good and the other group that came up Saturday was nice so we had 17 in the lodge for Saturday. It snowed all night and when we got up Rick and the other guide were not sure we could get out. Highway 41 and the road to Badger pass were closed due to snow. But around 8:30 he got a call that they were going to groom the road to Glacier and that 41 was going to open in a couple of hours. So, off we went. Once the trail was groomed we had some perfect skiing until the storm filled in the track. A couple of us just put our heads down and pushed hard. Only 4 1/2 hours to ski out. Only to find the car buried up to the door handles with snow. About 1 1/4 hours later it was dug out with some help from a park ranger, a couple of guys from the ski area, and the snow cat with its nice big blade to move snow. We even got the other peoples cars dug out who were still on the trail. Hopefully I can stay in good shape etc so in 10 to 12 years I can do a Grandpa and Granddaughter trip. Time will tell.

The falls will be great come spring. I am headed back with WB on Mar 26 for some camping. Guests welcome.

Photos and Computers

I try and write on my Blog once a week but it seems to work out to once a month. Anyway this year I decided to organize my photos. I finally completed loading all the photo CD's I had into Photoshop. I now have almost 6,000 picutres on my hard drive. And they are all backed up on an external drive. WB was nice enough to let me use the dinning room table to short out the boxes of photos, negatives etc that I have. Still not sure how best to arange and store everything. This does not include 20 plus years of taking slides that are in slide boxes and those round trays for showing. That will be another day.

On to computers. Over Christmas I know three families who got new I-Macs for presents. Including Mr and Mrs H. Now that it has been a couple of months I have had a chance to use Mrs H's I-Mac and talk with the other users. It has been and interesting conversation. I think everyone including myself was taken in by the adds that I-Mac's are easy to use. But when I ask they all start with there is a learning curve. But once you learn it is nice. And than they say except for example the key board could be better (three comments), internet browser, loading drivers. For me I noticed there are no slots for your camera memory cards. A feature I really wanted.

So, is it really better? This weekend I went Sking with a couple who were one of the three. The Husband said yes some learning but great, the wife said Ok but a little hard to get used to. And when she commented that Turbo Tax did not work as well as on a Windows system I think that made up my mind that I will stick with Microsoft. I use Turbo Tax and it's brother Quciken. And if Turbo Tax does not work well Quicken will be a problem I fear. Plus being a really cheap guy I had a hard time coughing up an extra $500 to $700 to get a smaller hard drive and less memory the two things you really need these days. So it is off to Costco to look at a machine that is rated one of the top five by by cnet.com. And it has TV included.

Stay tuned a new machine is not in the budget for another month. Which is when I need to buy Quicken 2008, since they no longer will support Quicken 2005 and I will not beable to download to that old program. Something I do every week.