Gone Skiing.

Many of you have noticed I haven’t updated the site in several days… that is because I’m on vacation. Once a year I visit my parents, who have had the remarkable foresight to retire to a ski resort. Yeah… tough life but I gotta admire their smarts for that! So we bring the grandkids and test the limits of my long-gone lateral meniscus on the slopes.

It seems that 4 straight days of fixed-heel skiing is all my knee can take anymore. I left the telemark skis at home this year to lighten our luggage load, and I’m paying for it now. The on/off alpine/telemark shift helps me last the whole week, but relentless fixed-heel skiing wears me down. I realize to many people this is completely counter-intuitive, but Telemark turns are much easier on my bad knee than fixed heel alpine skiing is. In alpine boots, every shock is transmitted into my knee as bone-to-bone contact. On tele’s impacts are transmitted through a bent knee… so it is far less stressful.

Of course, my toes are happier, as my tectonic shift from leather (Asolo Snowpines!) to plastic tele boots a few years ago leads to a yearly loss of a toenail or two. The suffering we do for fun! I still haven’t fallen for the overly Alpine, up to the knee Tele boots… and have a barely-over-the-ankle Garmont “touring boot” for my freeheeling pinhead ski style. I also have tele skis that are 200cm long… some Wolf Cold Smokes. I guess I’m a throwback to my 80’s tele retro beginnings. I still have my snowpines and 205cm Karhu XCDextremes in the garage at home.

The week started on old snow and sunshine and I was happy to not have the teles, and pin-skiing on hard snow is no fun really. But the powder arrived yesterday and I stare longingly at the free-heelers and banged my knee up so bad I had to take today off.

Back on the slopes tomorrow and I suspect you won’t see another word here until sometime next week.

Tough life, but somebody has to live it.

(oh, and I had to fix my parent’s wireless network… ugh.)

A footnote: I skiied a few days ago for half a day without poles. I found it a liberating experience! I tend to be a lazy, hip/foot focussed skier anyway due to my bad knee, and as such the poles become sort of useless. Telemarking for 20-some years has given me great balance and edge control (all alpine skiers should spend time on teles, or even snowboards, to truly learn edges and balance. I snowboarded for a few years back in the 80s.) so I can shift edge to edge without much upper-body fuss. I don’t do much serious mogul skiing anymore as the loss of all shock-absorption properties in my right knee make it excruciating. I can do it, I just can’t function for days afterwards! As such, I have found poles to be sort of plastic and metal appendixes… useless extra stuff hanging off the end of useful bits.

It was great fun to ski without them. I may continue to do so.

Nyquist Capital: Chinese Irrational Exuberance

Nyquist Capital
t’s a good (but paradoxical) thing when Communists start buying stock.

This is one of the blogs I read (via RSS) on a regular basis. Nyquist capital’s blog follows some industries I am involved with (namely Colocation facilities) and it was their insightful takes on a some industry news last year that caught my eye. Their occasional succinct but useful commentaries like this one keep me coming back.

Fix It Again…

The scene: In Nova Scotia, right about here on the 2001 Forza Mille. Sherman & Scott Wolff experienced an Italian flavored “failure to proceed” moment. I don’t recall the nature of their problem, but I do recall they were in an odd pair of vehicles: The one pictured above, and a eight-cylinder pre-war Packard.

The “name that car” photo above is way too easy, but hey, my little green British roadster from earlier in the week remains anonymous so maybe my readers NEED a dead giveaway. 😉

VW hopes to find oldest-running VW diesel in U.S. – Autoblog

Officially Official: VW unveils Jetta TDI in D.C. and hopes to find oldest-running VW diesel in U.S.

Volkswagen is searching for the oldest running Diesel VW in America. My very first car was a 1980 VW Rabbit Diesel. I loved that car. It carried me all over the American West during my college years (’81-’85)… many climbing and skiing roadtrips. I went to college in Lubbock, Texas and spent virtually every 3-day or longer weekend or holiday break in Colorado (Estes Park and Boulder being the favored locales), or New Mexico (Taos mostly… staying at the Abominable Snowmansion Hostel in Arroyo Seca!)

It was never a very fast car. I got a speeding ticket once (a federal offence… long story, some other time, I promise) where I was clocked at 74 MPH on flat ground and was astonished it could go that fast. 0-60 was clocked in minutes, not seconds. But these were the 55 days, so we couldn’t go 60 anyway. Patience was the virtue the car taught me. Passing required plenty of forethought and a lot of good timing. I learned aerodynamics too as I frequently drafted off of big 18-wheelers, both for passing assistance and just dealing with headwinds. Truckers seemed OK with it so long as I let them know I was back there.

It taught me frugality as well, since it faithfully carried me from Lubbock to Boulder (575 miles) for under $10.

My only mechanical issue with the car was an alternator bolt that slipped out while I was underway in a remote New Mexico highway. I walked up and down that road for hours looking for the bolt, and never could find it. I rigged up a climbing chock to wedge the alternator housing off the engine and keep the belt under tension and limped the 70 or so miles into the next town to a NAPA. This was a very small town, in a very remote place, and even though my car was built in Pennsylvania (yes, VW was the first “import” to have a factory in the USA) they didn’t carry any metric fasteners and I had to make do with an SAE bolt and a shim. The shim rattled out at some point later down the road and the bolt wobbled just enough to enlarge the softer metal of the “bracket”… which on a VW Diesel of that vintage was cast into the block of the engine. Needless to say it became a persistent issue as I kept having to put larger and larger bolts in. I eventually found a machine shop (somewhere in rural Montana IIRC) with a guy willing to drill both the alternator and the block to a metric size and properly fit a bolt in there. I doubt that car is still running on the original engine.

I traded it in on a Mk2 Golf GTI in early ’87. The old rabbit had well over 120,000 miles on it. I should dig up my old photos of it and post a Roger Los style obituary for it.