One of my lifelong goal has been to drive an RV, and it looks like this may finally be happening. After planning our trip to Alaska for months, I’ve come to the conclusion that renting an RV for the entire trip and using it as our transportation and lodging is not only a cheap way to travel but also could be amazingly fun. I’ve received some cheap quotes from ABC Motorhomes and will likely put down a deposit in the next day or so. We are still trying to decide between the smallest (21 foot) and the next step up (24 foot); layouts can be viewed here. I can’t wait to get out on the open road!

Less than three weeks after I pretty much said that our snowboard season was over and we’ve added another day to our count. Saturday afternoon we headed up to Arapahoe Basin, taking our count up to 16 or 17 days for the season. We hit the slopes for a couple of hours, doing somewhere around five runs, before heading down to “the beach” for some food, drinks, cornhole, etc. One of the guys on my recent hut trip was having a party for his engineering association and invited us to come along for the fun. I had intentions of taking pictures of the beach party, but forgot the batteries for the camera. Next time we head up, I’ll be sure to be better prepared. I heard that they are shooting to stay open until June 7th.

Earlier in the week I printed off some coupons for a free meal of the new Kentucky Grilled Chicken. After a couple of intense racquetball matches last night, Kim and I stopped by the local KFC and tried to redeem the coupons. We were quickly told that the coupons were no longer being accepted due to overwhelming demand. It turns out that at some point Oprah put a copy of the coupon up for download on her site, which I’m pretty sure was against the original terms of the coupon. So instead of not accepting coupons with this particular barcode on it, they’ve stopped taking the coupon altogether. They are now giving out forms to mail in with your original coupon, and then they will send you a new voucher at a later date. Way to ruin it for everyone, Oprah!

Spring is in the air, and I’m loving every minute of it. In addition to all of the running outside, long bike rides, and other outdoor fitness activities, I really enjoy getting in the yard and doing some landscaping. On Sunday, I added some new shrubs to our back fence area, a spot where grass refuses to grow, which I’m very happy about. I also mowed the lawn for the first time, put down some fertilizer, and tested out the sprinkler system. I found an outside leak that I hope to fix this weekend, and then we’ll be fully ready for summer. We even kicked on the swamp cooler fan last night for the first time. It was over 80 degrees upstairs at 10 o’clock, so we had to get some cooler air inside for bed time.

I’ve also been trying to take myself off of my daily dose of Claritin-D. I was hoping that maybe I’m outgrowing my allergies, but have resulted to taking a couple doses of Claritin without the decongestant. I’m also looking at more natural ways to reduce the effects from season allergies. I’ve been reading up on different herbs but haven’t taken that plunge. I feel alright most of the time, but recently I’ve been struggling with a cold that I just can’t kick. Perhaps some racquetball tonight will knock it out of my system, the run yesterday didn’t help.

Speaking of Pig Flu, there’s been lots of talk about Pig-Fest recently. Have no fear, the party will not be affected in any way. We have had a date picked for a long time (August 8th), but I’ve been putting off talking about it until I found the time to create a good theme/logo for it. However, I’ve been so busy that I still haven’t found the time. So maybe someone out there will help us in deciding on a theme and/or designing a logo. A couple of ideas that we’ve had:

• First was some sort of theme involving the 16th anniversary of the party, something along the lines of sweet sixteen perhaps. Someone came up with this slogan: 1600 beers. 160 pounds of pig. 16 bags of charcoal. 1 Sweet Pig-Fest 16.
• And our second and final idea is to incorporate something to do with the recent swine flu outbreak and general reactions from people. Maybe we could have a pig with one of those masks covering it’s nose and mouth. Or perhaps we could come up with something to assure everyone that our pig is not infected with the flu. I’m still brainstorming on this, but those are my thoughts so far.

Good news is that we are having the party again, and once again our friend MER will be back to provide evening entertainment. We just need some help in the creativity department this year. Invites will go out soon and I promise the website will be updated.

Yesterday O.A.R. launched a brand new website where fans can buy and download live concert recordings. Obviously they are not the first band to do so, as other bands such as Dave Matthews Band and Phish have had very successful websites doing the same thing. Regardless I was happy to see this site go live with 40+ high quality recordings, especially for shows that weren’t recorded by any fans. Over time, additional shows from the back-catalog will be added, and you can be sure that new shows will be added as they happen.

For a limited time, everyone who goes to LiveOAR.com and registers for the website will receive a free download of the bands first ever performance at Red Rocks back in 2007. I tried recording this show myself, but the powerful wind that night completely ruined my tape, not to mention blowing my stand over and knocking everything to the ground. I’m surprised at how clean this new tape came out, and I’ve already listed to it a few times through. It’s well worth the few minutes it takes to sign up.

Friday night, Kim and I ventured up to the five points neighborhood of Denver to check out Ryan Montbleau and co. at Quixote’s True Blue. I’ve been a longtime fan of Montbleau’s music, but had never actually seen him perform live. He started off the evening playing a few acoustic numbers by himself. I could tell right away that this was going to be a good show, as did the rather large gathering of fans near the stage. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what kind of crowd would be in attendance, but was pleasantly surprised to find a large group who were obviously more familiar with his material than I.

After the acoustic opening, the other four members of the band took the stage and played a great set. I was curious how the big studio sounds of some of their studio tracks would sound, but was wowed to find that the viola player accomplishes all sorts of sounds with the use of various effect pedals. And their organist adds another dimension to the live sound, so they can definitely pull it off. Throw in the bass and drums and you have a very tight sounding band. They decided to split their performance into two long sets, and though we could only stick around for the first set, I was very impressed.

I finally got around to watching the second season final of Chuck last night. And all I kept thinking is how is it possible that this series is still in jeopardy of being canceled. It is easily my favorite one hour show currently on TV, and there are many others that would agree with me. In fact, the show won top honors in USA Today’s Save Our Shows poll. There is even a twitter account dedicated to the cause. Zach Levi, the star of the show, is now saying, “the chances are good that we’ll come back.” The decision is to be made Monday.

Since picking up some new shoes a couple of weeks ago, I’ve run with them three times on a treadmill at the gym. The pain behind my knee that I had the first time hasn’t returned and I’ve really been enjoying the shoes. I did get some pain under my right arch on the third run, but this occurred this past Monday after the long hike over the weekend. So I’m pretty much sold on the shoes, and I even took them for their first outside run today. The weather has been pretty nice lately and I figured a nice run at lunch today was just as good as any other time. Besides, Kim injured her ankle playing volleyball last night and probably won’t be running again until next week.

So I mapped out a nice 5K route around the business park. It’s a bit hilly, including one hill section that I did twice, but it wasn’t too bad. I managed to finish my course in just over 25 minutes and with no pain. It was fairly enjoyable, so hopefully I decide to run the route again sometime soon.

One of the fellow engineers on our hut trip just emailed over these screenshots from his GPS unit that was used throughout the hike. I found the data to be really interesting and therefore wanted to share it for all of the nerds out there. This first screenshot is an overview of our hikes. The yellow line is the trail that we followed on our way down, also known as the correct trail. The white line is the path we carved on our way up to the hut after missing a turn, becoming lost, and trying to find our way to the hut. You will notice that we obviously started on the correct trail, split off for awhile, and then eventually found the trail again to complete the hike.

What is even more interesting are these elevation profiles for both hikes. You will notice that both start off the same, but the hike up quickly becomes extremely steep when we lost the trail. We ended up hiking much higher than we would have if we followed the planned trail. After peaking at around 10,600 feet, we went back down to around 10,000 and then finally back up to the hut at 11,000+ feet. The profile for the hike down doesn’t have nearly the same amount of elevation change and is much more consistent. Here are both screenshots, with the hike up first.

I definitely need to get one of these devices. I tried using a watch that I bought from woot.com that uses a pressure sensor to estimate altitude, but it somehow reset itself at some point in the hike. And besides I wouldn’t have been able to download any data to my computer anyway.

Update: I put together an overlay of both of the hikes, so you can easily see the extreme differences between the two: