Skiing in Girdwood - Foiled Again!

We apparently have the worst luck when it comes to the weather down in Girdwood. It seems like each time we plan a Ski Weekend, it ends up raining! But we have fun, regardless of the weather – so I guess it’s okay.

This time we stayed at The Ski Inn, a place I’ve always been interested in. Their website calls it a Boutique Inn: it’s very quaint, almost like a hostel in that the people staying there are all very friendly. The owner was there working on little fix-ups, so we got to chat with him for a while. Their common area has the coffee/tea corner with a good-sized fridge full of breakfast items. There’s lots of comfortable seating with an electronic fireplace for ambiance.

Our room was upstairs and offered a view of the ski slopes, so theoretically I could have “watched” him ski that day. It was a very small room, but we made it work. We have refined our packing to where we have pretty much everything we need: one tote with all my crafting stuff, one tote with everything we might need to watch movies (including a DVD player, a monitor, speakers, and pretty much every kind of cable there is), and one tote with all his ski gear.

Since we had no kitchen this time, we went out for dinner each night. My favorite place is, of course, Chair Five where he got his pizza and I had a Caesar Salad.

Cancer Screening

I had to have a Colonoscopy the other day; not the greatest experience in my life, to be sure – but I have to be honest and say that it really wasn’t all that bad, either. For the most part, I wasn’t even there. Just go in, go to sleep, wake up a couple hours later, and go home.

Of course, the prep is the bad part. That starts the day before and involves a lot of quality time on the toilet. My doctor gave me a list of various laxatives to buy and a schedule to follow outlining exactly how to prep for the procedure. I weighed myself in the morning, then again that night after enduring the prep – and found that I lost 5 pounds that day!

The really bad part was the fasting. I have plenty of reserves, of course, so my body was not starving by any means. I really wasn’t even that hungry. But going without my regular scheduled feedings is apparently a major trigger for my migraines – I had a SCREAMING headache that whole day.

The instructions for prep say that you should not eat any solid foods that whole entire day – so you’re thinking “ok, 24 hours without food = I can do that.” but what it really means is that your last meal is dinner the night BEFOR the prep day – and your next meal isn’t until they finish the procedure the day AFTER the prep day. So, figure my last food intake was on Monday at 9:00 PM and the next food intake wasn’t until Wednesday at 2:00 PM = that means I went on a 35 hour fast!

So, yeah. My head hurt. A lot. And I wasn’t allowed to take any medication for it, either. By the time I got to the surgical center, I’d say my pain was somewhere around a 9 or a 10.

The procedure itself was a success, they tell me. They found and removed two pollyps, wich the labs later called Pre-Cancerous. The nurses and doctors were all very friendly and made sure I understood what was going on. My arm was farily cooperative: they only had to poke me twice to find a vein good enough for the IV. I now have a LOVELY bruise, with multiple colors ranging from yellow to green to purple to black, where they tried and failed the first time.

Snownado!

Some of you may not have heard yet – but Palmer got hit by a huge windstorm a few days ago. We had three solid days of winds gusting up to 91 mph with windchill factors reaching 45 below. Power is still out in places, and the destruction of property is overwhelming 

Thankfully, our house was minimally impacted. We lost our fence: Bryan found parts of it 4 houses down the block! We lost a bunch of tree branches: some are still hanging onto their trees by mere splinters, but most are scattered around the yard. Our roof is in pieces all over the place, but thankfully it’s not a structural issue – just roofing tiles. We did lose a strip of fascia covering, but I think that’s easy enough to repair.

Our biggest loss is Bryan's grille. He has an XL Big Green Egg that he uses almost every night, and just loves that thing. We thought it would be safe, because the darned thing weighs a ton at least (okay, maybe not a ton – but it does weigh a whole lot) but the winds just threw the thing off our back deck. Sadly, I believe it’s broken beyond repair, and will cost well over 1k to replace.

This has to be one of the worst storms I’ve ever experienced. Three whole days of hurricane force winds, blowing constantly 24/7. We barely got any sleep the whole time, there was just too much noise. It was quite cold, too – we had a fire going the whole time but ran out of firewood by the last day so had to switch over to our gas stove instead.

The cats did really well, despite the frightening noises. Naldo wanted to be held the whole time (highly unusual for her) but Viktor seemed to be energized by it. He ran at full speed all over the house the whole time!