Gone Skiing
We arrived in paradise (as this photo shows) last night and we will be here with our family and friends for the next ten days.
I plan to write daily but maybe not about tech and startups as much as I usually do.
It has been an eventful year and next one is shaping up to be a doozy. So I am looking forward to some time to relax and reflect and recover before things get crazy again.
Comments (Archived):
It’s great that you are relaxed enough to get away during this time period. Although I’ve done the same, generally the last two weeks of the year are jammed with time sensitive things that for some reason my brain thinks I need to do ‘or else’. And it’s to stressful and often not practical to do those things in advance of leaving. [1] My wife even proposed the idea of going away this week for 4 days (yesterday) since my stepkids are with their father and she isn’t working. What did I say to her? ‘Nah to stressful … last minute’ knowing that even in advance I’d probably have said the same exact thing. [2][1] I know I can overcome this but default to the less stressful alternative which is ‘remain at the controls’.[2] One of the by issues with suffering from ‘workaholic’ disease is having to feel as if you are always on top and in control or you get a dystonic reaction. ‘The dr’s’. (I just made that up so don’t bother googling what it really means).
Want some motivation? The hazard ratio of a life changing health issue jumps after age 55. If you count the number of season holiday left on your clock after and subtract out the last 15 years, you might just take your wife up on the offer. Go to Cape May for a few days. You won’t be disappointed. Try the Mainstay bnb. Nature at its finest.
Go to Cape May for a few days.We have a place not that far from there but it is currently being renovated. Was supposed to be done by Jan 1st but of course that didn’t happen. Below is the view. (Picture taken with Samsung s8+ btw..)… https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Cape May is nice. Went there a number of years ago.
Bird Watching and Salt water Marshes!
Delegate and let go.
That looks a bit more refreshing than wacky @jack’s retreat.
It really is a wonderful place – not only at this time, but throughout the year. Enjoy it. Here’s to a great 2019.
Mountain and sea. Both uniquely qualified to inspire and recharge the soul.
Mountain andHave you ever been to Banff? My only issue there was I was tied to my smartphone taking pictures. Just to many interesting things to shoot. (Of course I kind of am the same way no matter where I am. I am surprised my wife is so patient with me). Below is what I could find quickly (google photos) taken with Samsung s8+ which I bought for the trip because Tmobile and making calls in Canada also to teather…. https://uploads.disquscdn.c… https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Of course. Several times, and stayed there, skied there, etc. I lived in Edmonton for a couple of years, and Banff was a frequent ski destination.That first pic you showed is a classic one that everyone takes, off of the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise.
I learned to ski here before actually there was a resort when i was living in Trinity Valley.http://www.skisilverstar.co…Skiing in Canada is just damn cold.
It’s not always very cold in the West. If you want cold skiing, try Mont Tremblant in Quebec 🙂
no thanks!!betting chance that i may make it to my friend’s chalet in Savoie to ski and bet it is plenty chilly there.and completely unconnected, woke up deciding that i need to go back to the N. Okanagan and visit spots where i lived, houses I built and where Asa was born.happy holidays to the both of you!
The Edge.
It’s the time of year when all the New Yorkers get out of the city and all we bridge and tunnel people invade 😉 Enjoy your time with Mother Nature! We just spent two wonderful days in the city with the kids going to see the tree at Rock Center and shopping. So romantic.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
Great one. I used have a good pic of the woods (in autumn, with red leaves), with a similarly evocative quote, as the wallpaper on my desktop PC, for a long time. Later found a similar image and blogged about it – with the same quote:Alley in park, Bucharest, Romania:https://jugad2.blogspot.com…
Enjoy your time with loved ones Fred (and the slopes). The mental space a break like this creates is probably the way you can deal with everything going on in your world during the year. I’m always surprised the more I “get away” the better ideas I have.
Enjoy!!
CONTRIBUTORS:We were unaware that the leisure sport of Skiing dates back to 8000BC in Altay, ChinaEuropean historians will say it arrived much later to attribute it to Sweden which was 4800 years later. The usurping of history as usual.a source: https://www.freethepowder.c…The majority of the group with exception of three (3) are cold weather East Coast born. Can’t understand how a sun loving person was born in cold weather that is disliked as much as the consistent rain in the North West Pacific.Reviewing all the Skiing fatalities by noteworthy people the majority were skiing experts.a source: https://www.ranker.com/list…Fred enjoy your skiing and be safe.Captain Obvious!#UNEQUIVOCALLYUNAPOLOGETICALLYINDEPENDENT
Always wear a helmet. Only go off-piste with a guide – local knowledge is the only knowledge worth knowing. Beware the tree well.
Have a great holiday!
I wish you all powder, good times and a great new year.i get my first time on ski’s in about 3 weeks and so looking forward to it!
good luck!
The mountains provide a spectrum of cleansing attributes, beauty, serenity, activity, excitement, whatever is needed. Living in Colorado, I tend to forget the value of our trips into the hills. Enjoy yours!
+n (** n).I call myself a hillman sometimes (a pahadi – पहाड़ी (Hindi word) – although it’s more used as a term for people from some regions in North India) . I lived in the high hills (mountains, actually) in South India for some years (7000 ft above MSL). It gets quite cold there in winter (and even some in summer), although not as much as more northern latitudes, like parts of the US or Europe.
Fred–not the only but the most interesting winemaker in Utah.His skin macerated white is crushed in Cal, transported to Utah in concrete eggs then stays on the skins till fermentation stops.This is the origin story.Evan Lewandowski: Ruth Lewandowski Wines, Salt Lake City, Utah http://arnoldwaldstein.com/…Enjoy!
have you had them Arnold?
Yup!A snapshot.These are all Mendocino grapes, so that is the terroir.His wines are really well made as he learned to make wine at the hands of some true masters.The wine of his that meets my interesting and delicious and unique test is the skin contact Cortese. That is the only one I put away a few bottles every year.I don’t know your tastes in wine Fred but he is most certainly a cult wine figure in NY. Super small production.https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
So, what are they after? E.g., anything like a Macon Blanc, white, delicate flavors, dry (low sugar), some acid (crisp) with the particular fields, e.g., Montrachet, Meursault ?It appears that there are a lot of fields and Chateaux in the general area of Macon Blanc with some of the lesser known ones darned good instances from the area. E.g., some years ago about 60 miles north of Wall Street at Harrald’s restaurant , they had a just darned good, AFAIK, couldn’t be better, house Chardonnay from that area via Neal Rosenthal’s Mad Rose Group.Or maybe they are looking for something like some of the popular white wines from Italy?The times I tried white wines from California I found high sugar, low acid, and lots of fruit flavors, something like the syrup from fruit cocktail but with lower viscosity, and gave up.The Utah people are getting expertise from the wine group at, IIRC, UC Davis?So, fermenting on the skins of white grapes does something? The usual reason to ferment on the skins is with red grapes so that the alcohol, once developed, can dissolve the tannins in the skins to give the red wine flavor and color, There’s a reason to ferment white grapes on the skins?
The most ancient way of making white wine, like red wine obviously, starting in Rep of Georgia some 8000 years ago.Renewed in popularity in the last decade (ala orange wine) and platform for creativity along with minerality, bouquet and more.This renewal along with PetNats are the most positive trends, both mostly under the banner of Natural Wine to happen in a generation.See buddies book Amber Revolution by Simon Woolf as best resource.
> platform for creativity along with minerality, bouquet and more.Okay, thanks.So, even with white grapes, ferment on the skins and get some additional flavors!! First cut guess: Have to try some number of times varying the wine making steps before get something that tastes good rather than bad!Or, basically wine is some really nice, fresh, cool, sweet grape juice that went bad! Then even when the result is good wine, have to keep the air away from it or will get at best vinegar for salad dressing!So, leave in the skins and get “orange wine”. Okay.Looked up PetNats — gads! Apparently delicate, unpredictable stuff! On a day with pretty skies, when the girl kisses the wine maker on the left cheek while he is crushing the grapes, picked by the girl, and the tomcat is sleeping, can get some cloudy wine that fizzes and tastes good! No kiss, and have to keep the result for vinegar??So, they are “platforms”!! WOW.You are way ahead of me and are pursuing some things that are new, at least partially.When I started to learn about wines, I was so impressed, and intimidated, by how many wines there were, and the variety of tastes, that I rushed to settle on some, red, white, sparkling, that I liked and quit looking!Apparently in many parts of Europe, a lot of people were making and experimenting with wines for your 8000 years and intensely for at least hundreds of years, maybe stimulated by glass bottles and air tight corks. That was a LOT of experimentation, soil, climate, grape varieties, pruning techniques, sugar concentrations, details of the wine making, and to get good results have to get a good combination of all those variables, decades of monks planting, cultivating, picking, crushing, …, drinking and trying again next year.So, such new directions might partially upend the wine market where lots of customers have been making decisions and paying very high prices based on famous Chateaux, the Bordeaux 1855 ranking, etc.
If I’ve encouraged you to think and taste anew, it’s a win!It’s a great world. Not what I do for a living but what I’ve been writing on and enjoying for over a decade now with a huge community cross the globe. A joy for me.The wine world is a misnomer as there is simply not one but many and you can look at aggregate numbers but the markets and the dynamics of each are different.And internalize this one crazy fact.Of all the people who consider themselves wine aficionados, people to whom wine is important to them in some manner and spend the time and money to get to know it, only the tiniest, less than a few percent even know how wine is made.That is why writing about it, talking in general about it, or even putting it online is such a huge challenge.And need to say that of all the communities i am entrenched in, this one though small, has the smallest percent of asses of any other and the highest percent of iconoclastic good people, simply artisans, making something they love.Have a great holiday!
My start of any significance on wines was when I got a copy of Schoonmaker’s Dictionary and took it shopping at the wine shops on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown in DC. Later I read a book on wine making by a guy who was in Maryland trying to be successful with French-American hybrids, i.e., try to get grapes like the favorite ones from Europe but with roots strong enough to withstand phylloxera , resist molds from US high humidity, and have timing that have them go dormant before a fast, hard freeze. So, I did learn a little about wine making. Was never tempted to make any.I just settled on a few wines I liked: I concluded that some of the Chianti had good value in red wine, some more from Italy had good value on white wine, and even Macon could be an okay value. So, I drifted away from Chambertin, etc.My wife was MUCH better at wine tasting than I was: Once we had a Nuit St. George at a restaurant, and even years later she could compare it with other reds we tried.One of our favorites was in grad school, on Saturday night with some Asti Spumante, iced in a plastic mop bucket, to wash down one of (1) pound cake and ice cream covered with thawed frozen raspberries, (2) Sara Lee Orange Cake (amazingly intense orange flavor), or (3) French pastries from the Watergate pastry shop while we watched Sherlock Holmes or Charlie Chan on some local TV station.Shopping at Garfinkel’s for wine glasses, we saw a catalog from West Virginia Glass. So, we called them and ordered two dozen each of glasses for white wine, red wine, water, and Champagne. Later we happened to see an old video of Jackie saying that in looking for wine glasses for the White House she found just what she wanted in West Virginia. There’s a good chance we got the same things.We liked some Italian Barolo before the prices got high. For reds in France, Bordeaux, Burgundy, or Rhone Valley before I concluded that Italian reds were better values.For me, a good Chianti is a good red wine.Thanks for the tutorial: You got me ahead if not up to date.
The only thing you need to know is what you like.My story.http://arnoldwaldstein.com/…I admit I’m privileged.I can write a post, send a tweet and get off a plane anywhere from Tblisi to Bucharest and have someone take me out to dinner and get to know the culture through wine.I’ve tried to start wine businesses and fail.I’m gonna start to write about wine more again this coming year. It’s a dream space for me.I’m a lucky guy!
Try Google reverse image search – paste an image into a Google search box, it tells you what the image is. Might answer your question.