Whistler Weekend - Wahoo!

My dear Mom reminded me that it had been awhile since I posted an update. Although I have been keeping this blog for over 5 years now, I still forget to write in it often. How long does it take to establish a habit, anyway?

So! We went to Whistler this past weekend! Months ago, Julie told me that they were planning a trip to Whistler in March. We had a long list of reasons why we couldn't commit at the time. As the trip got closer, our friend, Jill, offered to take care of Malcolm so Tony and I could snowboard. And then, we found out that we could still cross the boarder with just a birth certificate for Mal (this changes in June). And THEN, the currency exchange rate has been fantastic and Whistler's been running great deals on lodging to boost business. I just couldn't let the opportunity to snowboard pass us up and convinced Tony that it would be a good idea for us to make the trip. He was nervous about how Mal would do in the car and with being away from us for several hours.

Our drive up on Friday took a looooong time. Our plan was for me to pack everything up and leave the house by 3 PM and then pick up Tony from work. It was hard for me to get everything done and take care of Mal and meet the deadline. We left the house by 3:30 and picked Tony up by 4. Traffic up was terrible through Everett (always is) and then we met a friend of ours for dinner in Bellingham. We then had an hour wait at the border. Ugh. We didn't roll into Whistler until 11:30 PM. Due to the late arrival, we didn't leave our condo until well after our intended time. Lots of boring reasons why we were delayed. Short story: we only boarded for 3 hours on Saturday. Lots of fun and the snow was great. Saturday night, we had dinner with the whole group (10 of us) excluding the babes and Julie's mom who was taking care of the kids.

On Sunday, Jill and her clan headed out in the morning. My wonderful husband stayed behind to take care of Malcolm so I could snowboard with Julie & Fes. It was another bluebird day with soft snow. We headed down from the mountain around 1:30. We took off for Seattle around 3 PM. Tony gets extra super husband points for having lots of patience with a grumpy baby who slept poorly the night before and really wanted his mommy.

It was really great to get out to the mountains. I sure do miss snowboarding. Strangely enough, I'm not sore at all. I guess the time I put in at the gym paid off!

*Hack*Hack*Hack*

This cough will be the death of me. I'm coughing so much that it has given me a headache. I didn't wake up as often last night, but did wake up too early this morning and also woke up Malcolm. I feel worse for keeping him up. He's taking a long nap right now and is having no problem sleeping through the current hacking.

The plan is to go snowboarding this weekend. I will only go if I am 100% better. We have been getting a good amount of snow in the mountains and I would LOVE to board this weekend, but cannot risk getting sick again and passing it on to Malcolm.

Our friend, Kait, gave birth to Kailyn Elise yesterday morning. Congratulations to Kait and her family! She was able to have a water birth at home with no complications. I wish I could go help her out, but they live in Minnesota.

Another goal: take more quality pictures!

Whew!

I've been reluctant to post anything until it was finalized: Tony got a job! Here's the story: he had a phone interview and in-person interview for a Quality Assurance Analyst position at Classmates.com before the Thanksgiving holiday. That Wednesday, they told him they would be offering him the job and sending him the official offer on Monday. Our friends, Cathy and Eric, both work at the company and worked hard at getting him the interview and had a big influence on the hiring manager's decision. Tony hasn't done QA in about 7 years, so his experience is rusty.

He also had a phone interview the Wednesday before the holiday with a small, Microsoft-owned company doing PHP & MySQL Web Development which is what he's been going for this whole time. The phone interview went better than he expected because he honestly didn't believe he was fully qualified for the position. His face-to-face interview with the company was this past Monday. He was upfront with them from the beginning regarding the job offer with Classmates. The interview went really well and they presented him with a job offer on Tuesday morning.

Imagine that - after 3.5 months of job hunting, he gets two job offers. He accepted the Web Development job and started on Friday. The compensation is what he was looking for and the location is just a 15 minute bus ride from our house so we won't need to get a second car. The Classmates job was south of the city and would have been an hour and a half bus ride each way. His first day went really well; he's very excited about the work environment and says that all of the people that work there seem to work together well.

We can now breathe a sigh of relief.

My final was more challenging than expected, but it's done. Malcolm is doing really great - I haven't been taking as many pictures lately. Shame on me! He has his 4-month well-baby appointment next Wednesday. I'm anxious to see how his weight gain has been. He's still a lanky tike, but he does have more pudge and is definitely growing in length.

We might get snow in the city this weekend and the local ski resorts have started opening. It's killing me a bit because I am DYING to go snowboarding but have no clue how to do so while breastfeeding.

The Evil Bloat

Starting on Friday, my belly has been severely bloating and hurting after at least one meal a day. It doesn't happen at breakfast, but can happen at lunch or dinner - mostly dinner. It's extremely uncomfortable and i don't know why it's happening. Hating the Evil Bloat!

We arrived at Whistler around 11pm on Friday. After unloading our stuff, we headed over to the condo where Chris, Julie, Adrianne, Lorian and Douglas were staying to hang out with them for a bit. On Saturday, I wasn't planning on boarding but Tony was. Unfortunately, he was still not feeling well enough to go up on the mountain. Instead, we headed to the Village so he could get one of his bindings repaired. We met up with Julie and then went to visit Jill, William and Zach at their hotel room. Zach (9) was grounded for misbehaving the prior day so they decided to head back to Seattle in the afternoon after Jeremiah (11) got back from his day-long boarding lesson. Before they left, the lot of us grabbed lunch at our favorite Irish pub (minus the 3 that were boarding that day). We offered to have Jeremiah stay with us if he wanted to board for one more day. After lunch, we headed back to our lodge so Tony could rest and I could go swimming and take a bath. I love that I can go swimming outside while it's snowing! After my bath, Jill dropped Jeremiah off and we all got ready for Lorian's birthday dinner at Teppan Village (Japanese steakhouse). Fun times!

We got an early start on Sunday - we didn't want to miss out on the little bit of snow that had fallen the previous day. Towards mid-morning, we noticed written notifications on the lift signs about 99 (the main road to get to/from Whistler) was closed due to a landslide. Oh crap! By this point, it had started raining so we decided to head down the mountain around 1:30pm to figure out a plan. We found that they were working on clearing it out and hoped to have the road opened by 5pm. We hung out for a bit and then headed back to Seattle around 5. Strangely enough, we saw no evidence of the mudslide other than a little bit of traffic. We dropped a very tired Jeremiah off at his parent's house around 11pm and then headed home to lay our own exhausted heads down for the night.

What is it with these delays on getting home from Whistler?

Complaining time

My belly is bloated and it hurts. Hating it!
The lawyer that we met with last week is dragging his feet on sending a letter out to the seller. We are so done with dealing with people who are nonresponsive. My guess is that he's not putting forth the effort since he isn't going to be making much money off of our case.

Oh lookie! Time to go home, feed the kitties lots of food, pack up the car and head to Whistler for the weekend!

Quashed!

My ideas of what to eat today have been very good until this afternoon. For breakfast, a bowl of cereal. Lunch, mushroom barley soup and kale & seaweed salad. Snack, red bartlett pear. And then, the bad idea came into my head. I was craving something salty & crunchy (i.e. chips) but I knew my tummy would regret indulging in a bag of Cheetoes. Then, I remembered. I brought in rice cakes. Rice cakes saved the day! Sure, they lack flavor and they were so dry that they stuck to my lips, but I no longer craved chips. Bad idea QUASHED!

I had to take Tony home this afternoon. He's not feeling well and is running a fever. Poor Tony :(

Still, no new snow in the mountains and no predictions of snow in the upcoming week. We're going up to Whistler this weekend and this was my last hope of snowboarding this season(I'm only comfortable doing it in great conditions right now). The trip is still going to be lots of fun. It's a bigger group going this time: me, Tony, Chris, Julie, William, Jill, her 2 kids, Douglas, Lorian. 10 of us total. I'm kinda bummed that the kids' first Whistler experience is going to be on mediocre snow.

Snowboarding Misadventure

Yesterday, Chris & Tony went snowboarding at Crystal with Ira. Ira used to go boarding with us frequently until about 2 seasons ago when he broke his wrist. After taking some time off, he decided that he was ready to start boarding again. I love Ira, but he did a very stupid thing which put himself and my husband in danger.

Ira isn't very familiar with Crystal - he's a Steven's Pass boarder typically. Chris separated from Tony & Ira to go look for some other friends on a different part of the mountain. Tony & Ira headed up Chair 6 with the intention of doing the bowl over there. Well, Ira jumped off the lift and before Tony knew it, he saw him go under a boundary rope.* At first, Tony thought he might have slipped under the rope by accident. He waited at top expecting Ira to climb back up. After about 10 minutes, Tony decided to go find Ira. He told some people that were there what he was doing and gave him his name and Ira's name. Tony followed Ira's trail (this was easy since the snow was untouched) until he came upon Ira under a tree. Fortunately, he didn't fall into the tree well, but he did run into the tree and hit his head.

So it seems that Ira purposely went under the rope because he wanted to get the fresh lines in the untouched snow. This displeased Tony greatly. To make a long story short, Tony & Ira had to hike many miles to get to Chris who was waiting for them at the road. At one point, they ran into a couple of skiers who had a cell phone that had reception. Tony was able to call Chris to tell him the situation.

They arrived home a few hours later than expected. After Tony recapped the story to me, it seemed apparent that Ira had a slight concussion. Tony thought that he might have had too much to drink but Ira hadn't had that much at all. He was having trouble keeping his balance and was making foolish decisions the whole time Tony was trying to get them out of the situation and to safety. It didn't dawn on Tony that he was acting like that due to his head injury.

Needless to say, Tony & Chris will not be snowboarding with Ira again at Crystal. I also don't think Ira will do something that stupid again. If Tony didn't follow Ira to make sure he was OK, Ira would have gotten lost on that mountain.

*For those who are unfamiliar with ski resorts - they set a boundary of the resort. If you cross the boundary ropes, you head into unpatrolled areas that you aren't meant to be in. If you get hurt, there is no ski patrol to come rescue you. There is also no avalanche control in these areas.

The everlasting headache

It started last night and has yet to subside. I'm done now.

We've been blessed with lots of snow in the mountains this last week so snowboarding was very fun yesterday. Powder! However, not everyone's day was great. Actually, it turned out to be pretty terrible. Sunny & Chrisbee went up to Crystal, too, and were meant to meet us for lunch. We didn't see them at lunch, so we thought they didn't make it. Tony got a call from Sunny at about 4:15pm wondering if we could tow Chrisbee's car that had broken down in Enumclaw. She was on her way to the hospital in his car because, you see, that's where Chrisbee was taken...by an ambulance. Oh dear. Seems like he caught an edge and fell pretty hard. Ended up with a concussion and a couple of bruises on his spine. Yikes. He was taken to the hospital b/c at first, he could not feel his arms and the ski patrol feared the injury to his spine was much worse. This was Chrisbee's second time boarding. Needless to say, he's giving up the sport as is Sunny. We ended up not towing Chrisbee's car - we had no idea how we were going to accomplish this anyway.

Just to reassure all of you - everyone I know who has gotten hurt has hurt themselves when they are beginning. I am way past that point and don't even get bruises any more. I am a very cautious rider, know how to fall correctly and even wear a helmut.

After multiple conversations, i realized that I did not post an update here about the house situation. When Dustin got back from his holiday, he called around to bug some people. Talked to the building company who has the contract on this project. Unfortunately, they will not be doing any more work on this project until they get paid by the seller and the seller ain't payin'. We are the ones who suffer. Windermere will be covering the cost of a consultation with a real estate lawyer and will also be filing an official complaint. If everything is not done by the end of this month, we will be suing the seller. Ugh. I really don't want to have to go there. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that another unit will sell soon so he has money to pay the builders or his investors front him $$. Blech.