Dylan’s roller hockey league started winter season a few weeks ago. He looked pretty rusty at first, but he is getting his skating legs back. Tonight he scored three goals against a tiny goalie. Last week he played goalie. It’s a great sport for kids (and parents): one hour, once a week.

Grace is a very observant little girl. On the way to hockey tonight: “All Dylan thinks about is Playstation, all I think about is candy and watching TV”. So true!

Every morning Grace asks “What’s for dinner, what’s for dessert?” When Shannon was tucking her in tonight she said, “I will love you no matter what, even if y ou die.” Shannon said “I’m not going to die.” Grace said you will someday and Shannon said yeah but probably not for a long time. Grace said “If you do how will we eat dinner?” I guess she doesn’t think I’d be able to cook for some reason.

Happy Birthday, Trace!!

Plan A was to go crabbing near Tillamook, OR. 60 MPH wind quashed that plan.
Plan B was to go skiing. Same story, different elevation, so we went with Plan C: mellow day around the house. I took the kids to Hoodwinked. Sort of a modern, amimated take on Red Riding Hood. We all enjoyed it.

I really wanted to go skiing, but the web talked me out of it. Kinda cool that you can access almost live web cams and wind and temperature readings from the mountain. Hopefully on Monday I’ll be able to make it up to the mountain.

Shannon and I finally saw Harry Potter 4 tonight. Very entertaining, amazing special effects.

Last night we had two of Dylan’s friends and their families over for pizza and games. We played Apples to Apples, Jr…great game., Looking forward to playing the grown up version.

I saw one of these a couple days in a row last fall. Gorgeous! Chris Cornell of Audioslave drives one.

Classic.

600 horsepower, $440k.

My Eurovan on ‘roids. Need one for the next Moab trip.

Need something to pull the boat.

Fastest (250+ mph, 0-60 in 3 seconds) and most expensive ($1 million) production car in the world. Made in France, by a subsidiary of VW.

Carbon fiber frame.

No longer in production

Featured in “The Italian Job”.

I need one of these!!

The current issue of Bicycling magazine lists Portland, Oregon as the overall best cycling city in the US. Portland has 163 miles of bike lanes and 66 miles of bike paths. The guys making all those bike lanes must get bored. They’ve taken to shaking things up with the little bike rider paint strips they put on the road. I’ve seen them changed to a guy on a unicycle juggling, a biker with a knife in his mouth “pirate style” and a biker with a cigarette in his hand. The airport is accessible by bike path and offers free bike parking. Most big outdoor events have free bike corrals. I’ve been commuting by bike since we lived in San Francisco (14 years). So far I haven’t had any problems with cars sharing the road (knock on wood). It’s about 9 miles each way with a 1000 ft climb going in and a 1400 ft climb going home. It’s a nice way to unwind after work. Portland is a cool place to live: one hour to skiing, one hour to the coast and a mild climate year round.

There was a bizarre incident a couple weeks ago between a bus and a bike commuter. The link as a cool video (4 cameras) view of what happened. We’ve had some snow and ice, so some of the roads have some small rocks from when they sanded the roads. A guy was biking across one of the bridges and riding out of the bike lane to stay out of the sand. A bus passed him and squeezed him back into the bike lane. Traffic slows the bus down. The self-righteous biker guy passes the bus and tries to get eye contact with the driver. The driver won’t look at him, so he gets in front of the bus and gets off his bike. The bus driver opens the door and lets a passenger out to beat up on the biker guy and move him out of the way. Bus driver opens the door, guy gets back in and bus goes on its way. Now biker dude is suing for $625 in medical expenses, $15 in property damage, $62 in lost wages and $48,000 in noneconomic damages. This incident may well knock us out of first place. It sounds like the biker, bus driver and bully are all idiots.

With over 6′ feet of fresh snow beckoning and a break in the storms forecasted, we had to go skiing Saturday. We had a great day. It snowed lightly most of the day, but wasn’t too windy or too cold. Dylan (board) and Gavin (ski) took half day lessons, then we met for lunch. We lucked out with Dylan: paid for group lesson and he ended up getting a private lesson. After lunch we skiied together. Gavin didn’t get lost or hurt. He was skiing much more cautiously. Dylan made big improvements. He got the difficult toe-side turn down. Dylan and I went down the last run together while Shannon and Gavin went to get Gracie. We were going through the trees when he spotted a young girl in trouble. An 8 year-old had gotten separated from her group and was stuck in powder, in the trees. I got her out and brought her down to the lodge to her group. Grace went to day care at the ski resort ($80!!! for the day, ouch). After that the kids played in the snow for a while: sledding, snowball fight, snow angels, etc.

The Oregon coast has been pounded by over 20″ of rain in the last two weeks!! It has been pouring for weeks now. Seattle is closing in on their record for rainy days in a row. Today is day 26. The record is 33. There are landslides everywhere closing roads, carrying away houses and crushing cars. At least the water levels at the lakes and reservoirs will stay high and it’s mostly snowing on the mountain.

The Alito confirmation hearings have been entertaining. It’s fun listening to Feinstein, Schumer and Kennedy ask a constitutional question they don’t understand (fed to them by a staffer), have Alito carefully dissect and answer it, then hearing the rare dead silence of a stumped senator that can’t come up with a follow up question.

The local scout council has some nice lodges up on Mt Hood. Each fall our scout troop helps stock the lodge with firewood in exchange for a weekend at the lodge during winter. I was a scout leader for 6-7 years and still get invited to some of the fun adventures (cycling, skiing trips etc). Last year the ski season here was WEAK. We barely got any snow. The one time I took the boys up in Oregon last year was the weekend our scouts had the lodge . It ended up being the first Saturday that there was a decent base of snow. The resort was packed, so it took well over an hour to get from the remote parking lot to the ticket office. We were going up the last set of stairs to get to the ticket office, which was 40 ft from the end of the 20 minute line for lift tickets. I turned around as Gavin tripped up a little on the top stair. He got right back up. The area at the top of the stairs was congested, and apparently in the distraction of tripping he didn’t see where I went. Five minutes went by, then I noticed that Dylan was behind me but Gavin wasn’t. There was a group of about 10-12 people from our troop in the area so I asked them to look for Gavin. No one could see him, so I searched the area then went to security when I couldn’t find him. They got on the radio and told everyone to look for a 6 year-old in red pants and a blue coat. By now 30 minutes had passed and I was starting to panic. I was dreading making the call to Shannon that I had lost Gavin. In the meantime one of the other leaders found Gavin. He was in a clearing between the ticket office and the lift line, sitting on the ground with his head on his knees. He cried and wanted to go straight home. We found the “Radio Disney Kid Club” in the lodge. They had Playstation, so Gavin was OK staying there for the day.

Last Saturday our troop had the lodge. We have had much more snow this year, so I was looking forward to going up with the boys. A series of warm storms had bumped the snow level above the ski resorts, so they had been getting rain at the ski resorts. There isn’t anything worse than skiing in the rain, so I decided we would watch the weather and decide whether or not to go based on that. As of Friday it was still raining on the mountain, so we weren’t planning on going. Saturday came and the snow level dropped, so we went up for a 3-11 PM night ski. I should have started on the bunny runs, but based on how well Gavin was skiing a couple weeks ago I figured he could handle the runs on the main mountain. He made it down the first one OK, but it was steeper than I remembered, so we were trying an easier way down on the second run. Gavin had been falling and bouncing right back up on the first run. About a quarter of the way down Gavin took a nasty fall and tweaked his knee. He was done for the night. I ended up carrying him down on my snowboard. Dylan took his skiis. I looked around for people from our troop, but it turns out they ended up going to a different mountain. They were showing a snowboarding movie in the lodge, so Dylan and Gavin watched that while I watched the Patriots-Jaguars game for about an hour. I brought a sled just in case we got to the mountain and it wasn’t worth skiing. We stopped at a sledding hill on the way home where Dylan and I sledded for a while. Gavin stayed in the car and played Gameboy. After all that, Gavin says that he WILL still go skiing with me.

Shannon and Gracie went to “Cheaper By The Dozen 2″ (liked it) and dinner.

There are lots of references to Mormonism out there in Pop Culture Land. Probably the biggest was this Newsweek cover story in the October 17, 2005 edition. The author of the piece is LDS. I found it paints an overall favorable picture of the Church, many letters to the editor felt it was TOO favorable. Much of this attention is around the 200th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Smith. A couple weeks ago NPR’s Talk of the Nation (a program I listen to daily) was on Jospeph Smith. The author of a new biography (Amazon sales ranking 1/8/06: #1883, 1/7/06 #2367) on Smith was one of the guests. It was only a 20-25 minute topic.

A new series has started on HBO about a current day polygamist family that is religious, but not Mormon (“Wink, wink”). One review said “Think ‘Desperate Housewives’, but they’re all married to the same guy”. Lovely.

I heard an NPR story on This American Life last summer about Julia Sweeney’s (“It’s Pat” from Saturday Night Live) encounter with the Mormon missionaries.

A guy in my high school AP English class wrote a book on Mormonism. It is ranked #193,946 in sales on Amazon today, down from #186,768 yesterday. Go Crop!!

There is even a documentary DVD about Michael Moore’s lecture in Utah Valley before the 2004 election called “A Divided State”. It came out last fall. A review I saw in a Vancouver BC paper last summer said it would do for the Mormons what Farenheit 9/11 did for Bush. So far I haven’t seen it get that much attention. I read somewhere that the next target of that greaseball is the pharmaceutical industry.

Mitt Romney is being talked about as a potential Republican presidential candidate. There is an interesting take on a potential huge hurdle within the Republican party. Then there’s Tom Daschle, Part II: Harry Reid.

As if to prove my point, Yahoo has a headline story this morning related to a Mormon theater owner.

Check out the WOOT website today. There is a link to the right. It’s worth checking out daily for the writing alone. Funny stuff.