Group skiing at Seven Springs, PA, in early February was about as good as I remember it being. We were worried about conditions right up until the two week deadline for submitting the balance of payments due. Fortunately, old man winter kicked it into gear and dropped the temperatures, which was good for snow making, and a fair amount of freshies.
My nephew Ryan’s technique and confidence really improved. He was doing the black slopes with me and managing them quite well. I kicked butt…skiing better than I have since I started skiing again four or five years ago. I think I was near the top of the class for our group. Doogie, one of the regulars with whom we camp and ski, brought a GPS with him that we used to clock ourselves. I think I topped out at 43 MPH on one run. I need to get helmet this year methinks.
We had a few, what we termed “Man Ski” runs, when we just went all out down the mountain. I had a close call with one guy when we cut from one trail to another. One of us missed the predetermined cut and I got the back of my skis run over. Fortunately, I did not even notice it but the guy that did it and the folks on the lift above got quite a rush.
I understand that not as many people will be going this year due to funds. I think the economic downturn and housing market are starting to hit the common folks in the wallet. This is unfortunate.
From Seven Springs, I drove up to Toronto for four weeks of work. It was a nasty drive…not only longer than I thought it would be but I ran into whiteout conditions where heavy lake effect snow from Lake Erie to the west of me blocked the NY Thruway. They closed the road in either direction but I was already on it. I just followed the taillights in front of me and hoped they were on the road.
After that 40 minutes of cold, white hell, I got to immigration and got held up there because I did not have a letter of introduction explaining why I was coming to Canada to work for four weeks. After a bit of this and the drive up I was ready to just turn around and cross the bridge back to Buffalo, get a hotel, and watch the SuperBowl. Fortunately, or not, we worked out a deal to get me in. I faxed them a letter of introduction the next day. And I, even though the trip was longer than I expected, got into my room just in time for kickoff. Just don’t ask me who played.
Four weeks in Toronto was an exercise in “damn cold, snowy, and icy.” After the drive up Sunday, I got up on Monday morning for my first day in the office and it was -40 degrees, Celsius and Fahrenheit, with the wind chill. Nonetheless, I love the working with the crewin the office up there. I watched a few of them play in a charity indoor (of course in Toronto in February) volleyball tournament. I got a couple of hikes and cross-country ski treks in…skied once with a guy from the office.
There are some small hills there for downhill but they were…too small. I will be up there for work again on 3 January, so perhaps I’ll venture a couple of hours north of the city to find the good downhill action. It is a shame that Mont Tremblant is four or five hours away north of Montreal. If I were sharing the duties and coverage for Toronto, I would definitely venture there for a day or two.
I took a couple of comp days in March after I left Toronto en route Virginia to visit friends and ski in Vermont. I got an awesome day of downhill skiing in at Sugarbush where I had never skied before and a cold, invigorating day of cross-country skiing at Blueberry Hill Inn Cross Country Ski Center ski area up by Ripton.
Vermont got dumped on with about three feet of snow not long before I left Toronto so there were plenty of freshies to go around. Sugarbush got eight inches the night before I went there to ski. I almost didn’t make it over the top of the mountain on Route 17 to get there though. It was definitely touch and go…but well worth it.
I got some excellent skiing in to start then realized Sugarbush had two mountains and I was on the small one. I cut over to the bigger mountain on a shuttle to get some different trails in. With the eight inches of fresh snow and five inches that fell over the course of the day, I got quite a workout. Seven Springs doesn’t do much for powder practice.
The next day I was going to go to the Rikert Ski Touring Center, a cross-country ski area at Breadloaf. My friend’s daughter’s class was supposed to go there so I figured I’d help out. However, it was so cold that they didn’t go and the ski area wasn’t even open. Thankfully, I knew of Blueberry Hill, which was only about five miles away. I jammed over there, registered, got a map, and headed out. It was windy and very cold. Since cross-country skiing is a good work out I stayed pretty warm. I did get a bit of rawness on the face though. After going without falling in four or five days of downhill, I bit it twice going downhill on the cross-country skis.
Sadly, not long after visiting my friends in Vermont, I heard that their middle daughter, Adrienne, was killed in a freak tubing accident. She had gone with a college group from from Northeastern, where she was in her freshmen year, to a place in New Hampshire for a weekend of winter sports. Apparently she got out of control on the mountain, went off trail, and smashed into a tree. She died of massive internal injuries.
Adrienne was a very well respected scholar, athlete, and activist in high school and college. She was and will be missed greatly by her family, friends, and the community.
I took up kayaking this year, which I wish I had done years ago. It is a great way to get an upper body workout, get low down on the water, and observe wildlife. I have paddled on the Potomac at Point of Rocks and south of DC, the Shenandoah near Front Royal, Tidewater, Virginia, local lakes, and in Vermont. I may have to break down next year and buy a touring kayak. I really would like to do some touring where I can camp along the rivers and lake sides. Lake Champlain between New York and Vermont has a “Water Trail” that draws me like bee to nectar.
Our traditional group camping and Cornhole tournament took place as usual Memorial Day at Lucian’s Landing on the Shenandoah south of Front Royal. I misread the schedule for the Cornhole tournament so I ended up not being able to participate. I had told the guy that works for me that I would cover for him so he could enjoy the last evening and day of the three day weekend. Of course that was when the Cornhole tournament was scheduled….
The weather was gorgeous. The river was down a bit due to the dry year we had but I did get a good 12 mile paddle in with Buzz. We drove up to the Low Bridge, put in there and paddled back down to Lucian’s Landing. We had to get out a couple of times to get across some rocks but overall it was a great journey. One night we had a live band which would not have been my choice but it wasn’t too bad. Andy, who lives next to the Landing, managed to sing and play tambourine with the band so much that he severely bruised his thigh and was hurting for certain the next morning.
My grandmother Chase, who was 93, passed away the last Friday of July this year. It was very strange that I was sitting with my sister Julie and brother-in-law Ed talking about our summer vacation that was scheduled to start in eight day. My parents were flying in on Tuesday and we were discussing the concept of Grandma passing while Mom and Dad were here or while we were on vacation. About 45 minutes later, I got a call from her retirement community saying that she had passed away.
Needless to say we were all a little bit freaked out. Over the course of the weekend, we had to identify the body, collect her belongings, and finalize the funeral arrangements. We had the funeral on Wednesday, the day after my parents got in. To me the funeral was kind of creepy because it was just the family, which is hardly extended, in the vast expanse of the chapel at Truro. The service was good. We are all glad that grandma is in a better place. Her quality of life was minimal at best for the last couple of years.
Summer vacation, needless to say after Grandma’s passing, was a bit up and down. Death is most often sad but sometimes it is a relief. I think that we all realized that. I had rented a house for us for a week off the Little Choptank River near Easton, MD. It was Maryland “Eastern Shore” territory near the Chesapeake Bay. The house looked great in the photos on the web. It was expense but had a pool and a hot tub…I thought it would be worth it.
The property and location were great. The water, due to the drought, wasn’t really good for swimming so the pool was a benefit. Unfortunately, the pictures don’t always tell the whole story. The house was a motley combination of additions without central air. We were there of course for the hottest part of the summer. We managed to reach a reasonable state of coolness but, for the money, central air would have been nice.
We set up Reid, Jean, and the kids in the guest house. To start with we had to replace one of the air conditioners and remove the dead mouse Reid found. Additionally, the distribution and availability of kitchen gadgets, pots, pans, silverware, etc, was not the best. Bottom line to me was that it seemed that the house had not been rented for quite some time if at all. Oddly, I got a call sometime during the week from someone who said they were our “landlord” and the person was not the individual from whom I rented the place.
As I said, it was damn hot. Julie, mom, and grandma went out during the hottest part of the day, in the Pilot whose AC was failing. I was sitting around the house later in the afternoon with grandma, who got up to use the bathroom. She slowed down considerably as she went across the room. I asked her if she was okay…she replied that she felt dizzy so I threw a chair behind her and got her sitting down.
She did look dizzy and might have been going into shock. Shortly thereafter, grandma started vomiting blood. She and I were in the house alone, I was holding onto her to keep her sitting up, and trying to get the attention of my sister who was visible through the window in the backyard. I finally got Julie’s attention. She came in, was quite freaked out, but had the poise to get on the phone to 911.
By the time the EMT’s got there about 15 minutes later, grandma might have lost a pint of blood. She was doing better, sitting up with a bowl in her lap, and joking with us and the EMT’s. They took her to the hospital in Easton, MD, and then later up to University Hospital in Baltimore. This happened on a Wednesday. In about 48 hours, by Friday, she had been in and out of two hospitals and was well enough again to ride fours hours back up to her home in northern NJ with my uncle Cliff. I met them all in Baltimore when Grandma was checked out, picked up Mom and Dad, and drove them back down to my sister Julie’s.
Our traditional group camping and Cornhole tournament took place as usual Labor Day at Lucian’s Landing on the Shenandoah south of Front Royal. Ed and I didn’t make it down for the first night but Julie, Ryan and the Koenigers did so they staked out some territory for me in the area we have recently been claiming. This time their was no band and I knew the Cornhole tournament had been scheduled earlier in the weekend, which was a blessing for me.
Unfortunately, however, the Cornhole competition has gotten out of control and has lost it’s thrill for me. The fact that I never seem to get any better hasn’t helped. The pairing for teams now is random so you could wind up with a master or a loser. That is the fairest way to do it of course but it makes for a lot of uncertainty. I think my partner and I got taken out in the first round which was fine with me because I could just relax. We started at one and the tournament didn’t finish until dark.
I got a bit of paddling in. We hung out in chairs in the river drinking beer, BBQ’d like crazy, and general did what we do and had great fun doing it. It i always fun to see the gang.
Sadly, my grandmother has had repeated incidents of the bleeding since August. She has been in and out of the hospital and diagnosed with non-alcoholic Cirrhosis of the liver. The malfunctioning liver apparently leads to blood pooling in blood vessels in the digestive tract as well as to the weakening of the vessels walls. This eventually leads to vomiting blood or blood in the stool.
Accordingly, the doctors decided to try to put a stent in one of the larger blood vessels connected to the liver. They had never tried to do this on anyone older than 70. The procedure is done through the cartoid artery if I remember correctly. The medical group had a hard enough time even getting an IV in Grandma. Apparently getting into the carotid artery (I think, it was in her neck) was even more difficult. The first time they put her under they could not do it. Then they had to wait a few days for her to recover from that before they tried again.
The procedure was successful the second time. I am not really sure that the stent was supposed to do. I think it took the liver out of the picture so the blood would not pool in the digestive tract vessels. Of course taking the liver out of the picture meant that the toxins it normally processes would accumulate in the body. Grandma was a mess really. In and out of the hospital and the operating room, she was tired, water bloated, and depressed.
A few weeks later the stent was determined to be 50% blocked, grandma was fighting a urinary tract infection, unable to keep food down and feeling as bad as ever. At that point after much discussion with the doctor and my mom and uncle, grandma asked that she be taken off of healing care and be given only comfort care in accordance with her wishes listed her living will. She felt that she had lived a full life and wanted to end it in dignity.
Grandma was put on hospice care. She was still living in the skilled nursing care section of her retirement community. She was taken off all the antibiotics she taking and, ironically, she is eating well, keeping her food down, and funnier than ever. So now she is off hospice… Odd, to me, was that while grandma was on hospice care, she couldn’t get physical therapy which, as her condition improved, she really needed.
So she is now doing better than anybody expected after all that she has been through. My mom has been with her (at her retirement home) since early October (if I remember correctly) except for a brief trip down to Centreville to celebrate an early Christmas with us last weekend. Dad came down also. He has been with Mom and Grandma in Jersey for a good part of the time, as has been my uncle, though they took brief trips back to Wales and Alaska, respectively.
Grandma wants to go down to the main dining room for dinner on Christmas which is awesome. I am just about half her age and don’t have a quarter of her courage. I’d be sitting in my room demanding spiked egg nog and sedatives.
Since summer vacation was less relaxing than I had hoped, I 1squeezed in a week to hike and kayak in Vermont in October. I stopped in Avoca, PA, to see my Navy buddy, Terry Boone, on the way up. It had been years since I had seen him and he was still in Las Vegas at the time. We got back into the groove right away. His story is almost the classic 50’s American dream but that story is best told another day. Nonetheless, if you want a taste of classic America, a far cry from the modern cities and suburbs, head to some place like Avoca and hang out for a day or two. Remember the “Deer Hunter…”
In Vermont, my plan was to visit with my friend Mike Livingston and friends the Devinos for a couple of days and then camp in state parks. Little did I know until it was too late that the very day after I got to Vermont, all the state parks closed for the season. The Devinos led me to believe that I might be able to use the parks but that they would not be staffed and have a minimum of amenities available. I’ll have to investigate that for the future.
For more details on the road trip, please visit my website and follow the link to my Fall 2007 Road Trip.
Plans for my last trip of the year unfolded unexpectedly while on the road home from my Vermont trip. I had stopped in Jersey for the night to see my Mom and Grandmother. About halfway through Pennsylvania the next day, my friend Russ Smith called me to say he had tickets for The Cult at the Wiltern Theater in LA. He offered me some of his millions of frequent-flyer miles to get out there. I thought about it for a day and decided to go for it even though it was vacation time I had not planned to burn.
Russ got me a flight out on a Tuesday. The Friday night before that we got a call from Mom saying that Grandma was going on hospice care and we couldn’t be sure how long she might last. My sister Julie, her son Ryan, and I decided to head up the next day to see Grandma. As noted above, Grandma wasn’t looking too good but has since then improved significantly. Needless to say, that trip, with one day of work in between my trip to LA, made for a pretty hectic time.
The trip to LA was good. We saw The Cult who we had wanted to see for years. They have a new album out but played a lot of their old stuff and really rocked out. We were about 30 feet from the stage in the quite compact club. I screamed like a teenage girl, lost my voice for two days and my hearing for one. The next day we took the ferry out to Catalina Island where we just browsed around, drank, and ate well. The island at that time of year is practically deserted. Apparently, it is packed in the summertime. I would have enjoyed a happy medium between the two but…ya takes what ya get. I’ll get some photos up in my web site soon.
Twas all in all quite an eventful and adventurous year.