The Hedstroms

I called it, mid-October, and while I didn’t think resorts would ever open that early, both A-Basin and Loveland are open for business! A-Basin only has a blue run open, while Loveland has a green, but that’s not the point is it? The point is that we can actually go snowboarding in Colorado now, and the season runs through May or June usually. WOOHOO!!!

A-Basin apparently was the first resort in all of North American to open too.

While we won’t be able to go this weekend, that’s fine since we have season passes to Loveland and I’ll go during the week while Leif is working.

Link about A-Basin opening.

Captured this morning from the Loveland Basin Cam. The snowmaking has started, and they’re due to get real snow this weekend. Soon my plan to snowboard during the week while regular people work will come to fruition.

I’ve been taking the Library of Memories class over at Big Picture Scrapbooking recently, taught by Stacy Julian. We’re at the end of week 3, and it’s definitely a whole new way of thinking about how to organize my photos for scrapbooking. I’ve had to go through my photos, sort them *all* chronologically, put them in easy-to-pull-out albums, pull photos for categories from the ones I just sorted, find random connections between photos that otherwise didn’t exist, and finally go through all my existing scrapbooking layouts and determine what type they are from an existing list given to us. Phew. All in 3 weeks.

I’m having a blast so far though since I’ve seen some photos I completely forgot I had. My parasailing pictures from the one time when I went. I called my parents after the fact. Pictures of Leif dyeing his hair blue and then getting a call the same day saying he had to go meet a client for work RIGHT NOW.

Besides that, I finished reading The Dam Book, and have decided to rename and reorganize all my digital photos using that method. Oh I can still do my Library of Memories stuff, but first I have to rename all the digital pictures, then sort them by year, and then I can bring them into a program like Bridge and start tagging them. This is going to take months, but I feel like I definitely have a process for this.

With our weekend days spent at the RC track, Leif was getting increasingly frustrated because I always wanted to drive his car. My mini LST batteries didn’t last that long, he never could get the LST2 to work properly, so that left his buggy. We took turns driving it, but obviously that wasn’t a good solution, so he hit upon the bright idea to just build me another one!

So it was a project we started working on together. The directions were in Japanese translated to English, and I think the translators just didn’t get the concept. It would point to a part and then list “Bag F” as the place to find the part. Well huh, Bag F doesn’t even exist on the parts list, and it would turn out to be in Bag J. I think it took us roughly about 3 days on and off to finish the car, but we eventually did! The problem with that was that I still wasn’t able to drive it immediately since I was going to some scrapbooking things for 2 weekends in a row, and then we flew to Denver for Memorial Day weekend. While I was at the scrapbook things, Leif broke in the engine so at least I didn’t have to do that, and finally on Memorial Day, I was able to drive it. It was everything I hoped it would be - fast, sleek, and I didn’t break it.

Check out Leif’s amazing paint job - before I drove it through the dirt and mud!

I just got back from a full scrapbook weekend, courtesy of Scrapbook Dreams. The dream camp was held at the Carmel Mission Inn in Carmel, CA. Cropping started at 2pm on Friday, and ended roughly at 3pm on Sunday. It was a flurry of activity from the beginning. I brought only my regular crop bag and my Cricut, but other people literally brought small stores. I shouldn’t necessarily complain about that though since I ended up borrowing correctly-colored paper from a few people (thanks Mary!).

All meals except for dinner on Saturday night were provided, so we could crop to our heart’s content, and eat to our heart’s content with all the junk food around. Saturday night we went to the Rio Grill (right across the street from the hotel), and had the most amazing dinner. I had herb-crusted chicken stuffed with goat cheese in a tomato basil cream sauce. I highly recommend this place to anyone going to Carmel.

I got a bunch of layouts done, here’s one of my favorites:

The layout actually came about from playing Iron Scrapbooker.  The same concept as Iron Chef, but with scrapbook supplies.  On this layout, the 2 quotes, and the little tags are leftover from the contest.  They had given us this weird green paper, some mesh, a snowflake frame, and 2 shamrocks as well which I used at the time, but as soon as judging was done I ripped those pieces off and fixed my layout.

Second weekend in a row it hasn’t rained, and today it was bright and sunny out. I’m hoping the crappy weather is finally gone, and now we have the 100 degree heat of the summer to look forward to. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the weather as it is now - mid 70’s and sunny since that’s my favorite.

We headed up to the RC track again today, and drove for a few hours. I definitely need to get a nitro car, since my little mini flips over too easily, and I only get a certain amount of driving time because it runs on battery. I was going to drive Leif’s monster truck but he was having major issues with it, so I got bored and decided to do some geocaching. First cache I found pretty easily, the second one definitely took me awhile. It was a camo cache, and I think I walked by it about 20 times. It was one of those little electric boxes on the side of a building, and it looked very very authentic so I didn’t want to mess with it. I was finally ready to give up, when I started walking by it again, and this time decided to just poke it with my foot to see what would happen…and the faceplate fell off revealing the cache.

Once I got back, Bryan had shown up so he drove his Jato for awhile while Leif finally got the monster truck working so I could try it. It worked, but would hit the higher gears so I could never get it up to full speed.

As is the case with the first nice sunny day of the season where we’re outside…we forgot the sunblock. Sigh. Back of neck, back of knees, and lower arms. Fortunately both of us were wearing hats, and he was out longer than I was, but both of us are definitely burned. I don’t get why we forget this every year…we go out in the sun after the winter, get burned, *then* remember we had to bring the sunblock, and we don’t forget it for the rest of the summer.

Ah well, at least it was nice enough to be outside today.

Hopefully the Sharks will win tomorrow too so they can make it to the next playoff round!

Both of us were in utter shock on Saturday morning when we woke up and it wasn’t raining. For awhile we weren’t sure what to do, and then we reacted.

I decided that even though it wasn’t sunny out, but it was nice, I was going to go geocaching. Leif decided since it hadn’t rained in 5 days he could drive down to Morgan Hill and check out the RC track down there.

2 DNF’s (did not find) and 1 Find later, I was in the park next to the Santa Clara Library so popped in and got a few books out. The day was just too good and the air too fresh to go home, so I decided to hit 3 more around the house. A Hard One was easily my favorite of the day since the container was pretty cool.

Leif returned later in the day mentioning that the track was ok, but it was horribly kept up, and other track users had brought out their lawn mowers to get rid of all the overgrown grass! Kind of sad since everyone had to pay a $100 membership fee to use it, and there were no bathrooms or tables of any sort there. Live and learn I guess - always check the track out first.

Today we both drove up to the track in Fremont (run by the Baysider RC Club), which ended up being a 15 minute drive. This track doesn’t just have an RC track, but an area for helicopters, and an area for planes. After watching this one helicopter pilot do these unbelievable acrobatics in the air, we ended up having to go back home to get AMA Insurance in order to be able to drive. (side note, websites which check to see which browser the user is running, and lock out everything else must die. I could easily have done this with my Windows Mobile phone, but because of the check, we had to go home) There and back in less than an hour, and we were up and driving.

I drove the Mini-LSTs while Leif drove his big Mugen. The track was pretty cool with some nice jumps and turns. The mini did fine on it, although I was sliding a lot. Once I blew through both batteries (must get a nitro car), Leif let me drive his.

Conveniently there was a geocache at this site, so I had to get it, of course.

After a long afternoon we drove home.