Pow Pow City

Ocean's 11 isn't too bad. It's overly talky, as most Soderburgh films are, however, it's excellently paced and pretty well acted. But I'm not here to talk about decade old movies playing on HBO at 1:30 on a weekday afternoon.

Mammoth Mountain was the place to be this past weekend as the Roxy Chicken Jam descended on Northern California! Ria and I left Friday morning and had a very uneventful drive. The weather was beautiful the whole way up after they got 24" of snow the day before. But they'd done a great job of clearing the roads, so we found it curious that chains were required for the last couple of miles. I have video of our reaction, but I don't like my voice in it. Is that really how I sound? Kinda Travis Pestrana-ish? Ugh. Maybe that's why I'm into writing now. Anyway, we were annoyed. We decided to take them off when we stopped at the leasing office. Rebels! 


After settling in, we took the shuttle up to Main Lodge for an apres ski event, which for us was apres drive. I've been in town less than an hour, and I'm already getting free beer. My mood was buoyant. We even made a flip book!

After dinner and a few more drinks, we decided to call it a night knowing that we wanted to make an early start in the morning. We woke to our housemates who'd arrived over night and to snow that wouldn't stop falling all day. 


I don't have pictures or video, but imagine the funnest glade runs possible, add some more snow, subtract the Eskimo women draped in Caribou skins, and that's what it was like. Visibility was poor on most of the open runs, especially right off the chairs. In fact the top wasn't even open, so it wasn't a perfect day. The peeps who stayed for Sunday and Monday and hell, the rest of the week got that. (Miss Crunk can show you how much snow there was.) But the tree runs on the lower half of the mountain off Chair 8 were really really good. If I'm only going to get one day in this season, which appears to be the case, that was a great day to have.
 
Ok, time to wrap up. I know reading about someone else's good time can be annoying. That night, one of our group, I won't say who, but their company had an event in town, "made a commitment to party" and by the end of the night, I was faded, just water skiing in her wake. We were very very tempted to ride on Sunday, but the pain of leaving powder behind was tempered somewhat by our discovery of Dick's Smoke Wagon in Big Pine. Just outstanding. Next season there will be multiple Mammoth invasions.

I have no idea what to write about

I really don't. But I've had a few fractions of ideas so as I do sometimes, I'm just gonna go and see what happens.

I'm addicted to the NCAA tournament. Or maybe just to the idea of the tournament. I can't imagine not filling out a bracket. I think I've been doing it since the 5th grade or something and I can't remember a year when I wasn't in a pool.  As a kid I  was so goddamn excited looking at fresh bracket in the sports section on Monday morning after the selections were announced. As with a lot of sports-related things a lot of the romance, goes back to my youth, to my dad, to a simpler time. That sounds cliche, but it's true. 

Watching these games reminds me of being in high school and talking to friends about the first round upsets in between classes. It reminds me of St. Patrick's Day 2000 when I got drunk in the dorms while watching games and ended up breaking my hand. I think a lot of people feel the way I do, whatever their method for hearkening back to the good old days. Who doesn't love a good heark? 

The 2000 Tournament. Trust me.

Now, as the title of this blog tells you, I'm only 30 so it's not as if I'm a jaded old man (although I'm looking REALLY forward to that). The tourney gives me the opportunities to make new memories. Will they be as sweet as the ones from my carefree college days? No. Of course not. At least not my freshman year. But I guess I have to look at things through a different prism or something. Maybe 10 years from now I can write about how in 2011 my fiancee kicked the fucking shit out of me even though I'd spent hours pouring over advanced basketball metrics and she made her picks while eating breakfast as I called out the match-ups. Maybe in 10 years I'll find this hilarious, but right now on the afternoon of 3/18/11, losing by four games, I'm pissed.


Didn't mean to write that much about hoops. That's how it goes though...Here's something else I think is interesting. It could be a topic for my other, health/fitness related blog, but I feel like writing about it here. Obviously, I'm an attractive enough guy. Obviously. I did ok with the ladies over the years (yes, that was past tense) and I still catch them checking me out from time to time. But what if I was a woman with a proportional fitness level? How would a man see me? Oh God, that sounded gay didn't it! HA! But think about it, aren't women held to a higher standard? Like, I'm not at all embarrassed when I'm at the pool, for example. I've been working out, and I look ok. But if I were a chick at the pool, in my heart of hearts, I would probably look like this:

Decent, not great. This girl's body certainly is not unattractive, but no one would mistake her for Irina Shayk. Is this making any sense at all? By the way, I typed "average girl in bikini" into Google and turns out there's an Average Girls in Bikinis page on Facebook! Don't believe me? Boom.

So ladies, I feel your pain. I'm trying to hold myself to the high standard that your gender has set. Oh advertising and the media set that standard? Whatever.