Airborne Debunked

This winter it seemed like everyone was taking Airborne, an alka-seltzer style dietary health supplement that's supposed to boost your immune system. Even my wife, who's usually extremely leery of medication, tried them out a few times based on recommendations from her father.

Personally, I had my doubts, and it looks like my suspicions were right: the makers of Airborne just settled a class-action lawsuit for false advertising. The most interesting part? As part of their settlement they are offering a refund to anyone who has ever bought their product.

French Laundry

After trying to get a reservation for more than a year, we finally made it to the French Laundry last Saturday for lunch, where we spent five hours working our way through nine courses of oh-so-delicious food. I won't go into detail about the individual dishes; sufficed to say that they were all very good. My only complaint is that I liked C's dishes more than mine!

One of the biggest surprises for me was the water they served. It's local water, but they're using Nordaq Fresh, a relatively new super-duper water filtration system that removes everything you don't want (impurities, VOCs, bacteria, etc.) but leaves everything you do (minerals, salts). And while you normally wouldn't think twice about water, the stuff they served made us all sit up and pay attention, because it was really, really good - clean, fresh and invigorating. Even better, it's local water, so there's no need to ship it from halfway around the world. I hope more restaurants start using this system soon.

When we were done with the meal, we even got a chance to check out the kitchen where all the magic happens. C. kept mentioning that it was smaller than she expected. One cool touch they had was a big LCD hooked up to a camera into the kitchen at Per Se in NYC.

Construction Day 44

It doesn't look like much has changed since my last update 19 days ago, but that's because most of the work's been happening either in the walls, the attic, or the crawl space as the electrician, plumber and heating guys has been doing their thing. The only major visible change is the patio doors and the new landing in the garage:

The good news is that we've finally got all the approvals we need from the city. In the process, we've had to (a) add two strong-walls in the living room, (b) convert the wall between the patio doors into the family room into a shear wall, and (c) convert two walls in the master bedroom into shear walls. While the first two were relatively straightforward, the last one required us to re-do some work.

Pleasure and Pain

We ended up spending Friday and Sunday at Snowbird and Saturday at Solitude.

Honestly, I was/am so out of shape that day two at Snowbird wasn't as fun as it should have been. By mid-day, my feet and legs were hurting and I was more than happy to call it quits when 4pm rolled around. While I had a few good runs here and there, and I definitely appreciated the fact that almost all their chairs were fast and had foot rests, I can't say I was too impressed with Snowbird.

Even their most interesting feature -- the $1.4M tunnel they built to connect the front of the mountain with Mineral Basin on the back -- was nothing more than a novelty since you have to stand on a conveyor belt the whole way (I would much rather just sit on a chair). Although now that I think about it, you have to stand no matter how you get to Mineral Basin since the only other option requires you to be packed liked sardines into a tram.

After the troubles I was having on Friday, I almost took Saturday off, but I decided to persevere since I really wanted to check out Solitude. And I am so glad I did. Saturday turned out to be my best day on the slopes. I'm sure the ibuprofen helped, but my body must have rallied because the aches and pains seemed to just recede into the background.

Despite the fact that there was only one high speed chair, and most of the lifts were doubles, I found Solitude so much more enjoyable because of the terrain. Specifically, the sheer abundance of opportunities to go into the trees and pretty much play in powder. And did I mention that it more or less snowed the whole day? I could easily have spent all day on just the Eagle Express and Honeycomb Return chairs. I only went off the summit into Honeycomb Canyon a couple times because you have to cut across the entire front half of the mountain to get to the summit again from either of these chairs.

I also had a bit of fun at their "family friendly" terrain park. I've been trying to work on my jumps for a while now but a few nasty falls early on has made me overly cautious. The kid-sized jumps here really helped me build up my confidence so that I'm more willing to hit the jumps faster, and knowing that I can land them will hopefully enable me to keep trying to get more height and distance.

For our last day, we had to decided between Snowbird and Solitude, and I decided to vote for Snowbird because I really wanted to give it another chance. It was Bryan's favorite resort, and I wanted to make sure Friday's pain wasn't coloring my judgment. And it turns out it really didn't. After Solitude, Snowbird just seemed dull. I ended up closing out the day in the terrain park, and I found myself a lot more relaxed after Saturday's "practice" at Solitude. My last few runs down Mid-Gad was definitely my best of the day.

All in all, this was a great trip. It was my first time in Utah, and all thanks goes to Bryan for organizing the whole thing. I think I'm going to have to make snowboarding in Utah a more regular thing. After all, it's almost as fast to fly out here (2 hours) as it is to drive to Tahoe (4 hours), the snow is supposedly more reliable, and it is much, much less crowded.

Park City

We're in Salt Lake City, Utah for four days of snowboarding and we kicked it off today at Park City. This place is big, with some great runs, and there was even some powder! Definitely the best bit of snowboarding I've had in the past couple years.

Time to crash now. Gotta get up early to go to Snowbird tomorrow.