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Happy new year! Okay, I’m 12 days late, but I’ve been doing important things, like sleeping—which is SO UNDERRATED when you have 8AM-EST-but-actually-5AM-PST meetings to attend. I’ve been in D.C. this and last week where it’s a whole two degrees above freezing temperature. For someone who wears a down jacket in 60 degree weather, staying warm saps any creative/writing energy I have after work is done (and when is it ever done?).

I have also neglected to clearly define my new year’s resolutions. Due to the excitement preceding the (now annual?) Tahoe cabin trip, and the subsequent business trips beginning on the first day back to work, I haven’t had the willpower to make those resolutions. I can perhaps resort to the usual “1) Lose weight, 2) Save money” but losing weight is hard to do with a generous per diem in D.C.

I continue to digress. Back to my first point: Happy 2010!

I brought in the new year in Tahoe once again, in a posh cabin with 21 friends over a span of 5 nights.

Many of us are avid snowboarders and carry season passes, so we went riding at Sierra-at-Tahoe for as many as 4 days. There was a bit of a blizzard on the first day, but the powder was perfect for smooth riding. I feel like I finally have a decent grasp on carving moguls, but it takes so much focus that I am entirely spent after one run. The Lower Main run is quite possibly my favorite run at Sierra: steep, smooth, and good powder when groomed; Beaver is very fun for tree runs on the side, except for one particular jump I hesitated on and totally faceplanted. At least my new riding helmet helps keep my brains in!

I’m tired and must sleep for the week’s activities in D.C. now, but Reid, the ever faithful blogger, has captured more cabin moments here. However, I do want to reiterate that the word game Bananagrams was more successful than I could have ever imagined! Best game ever, really!

So I haven’t been cooking lately since it’s no fun cooking for just one person. Also, I recently retired the no-brand mixer that I bought from Walmart in my thrifty college days because the chrome plating on the beaters were flaking off, and I don’t want that stuff ending up in my food. For a couple of weeks, I wrestled with myself, deciding whether I should just get another $10 beater mixer or just splurge on the coveted KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer With Styled Tilting Head And Ergonomically Designed Mixing Bowl Handle. In the end, I picked out the cheapest hand mixer available from the reputable KitchenAid. The Artisan Stand Mixer will just have to wait until I reach Joy the Baker status. Or when I am rich.

Armed with my new mixer on Monday night, I had the brilliant idea of baking/cooking 3 different dessert/snacks at the same time. I would tackle marshmallows, shortbread, and caramel popcorn all at the same time! Never mind that I have neither a candy thermometer, nor do even my regular cookies come out well. I think more sugar ended up on the counter/floor/my hair than in the food itself, and I certainly had bits of liquid marshmallow in my hair. Egads. Well, luckily for the recipients, better that than my hair getting in the marshmallow instead!

Anyway, the following pictures are lacking in quality because 1) my photography skills are lacking, and 2) I don’t have the patience to photograph when both hands are covered in some mix of chocolate, marshmallow, cookie dough (which tasted really good out of the mixing bowl, btw).

Smitten Kitchen’s Toasted Coconut Shortbread turned out pretty well. I’m normally not a fan of coconut, but I think I’m adverse to only the papery texture regularly used in baked goods. I toasted the coconut and then ground it up in a processor pretty well so there wasn’t a texture issue here and were thus delicious! I used regular Safeway butter, but maybe next time I can try something more decadent? :)

Orangette’s Caramel Popcorn with Salted Peanuts turned out delightfully chewy, crunchy, sweet, and salty. Perfect! It was so easy to make, I think this will become a regular snack to make!

Lastly, the Chocolate-dipped Marshmallows turned out way too sweet for my own liking. I was never a huge marshmallow fan (except in s’mores!), but this one seemed like an interesting challenge to tackle. And there it is. At least my sweet-toothed Mom loves them so I gave her most of the batch to share.

Yikes, I wish I could take better pictures! It’s something to work on, I suppose. Wouldn’t it be great if my photography skills developed in a positive linear correlation to my cooking/baking skills? That would be an interesting trend to see :) Fingers crossed.

Anyway, the snow was so great last weekend thaaaaat… we’re doing it again!  Tomorrow, all the college kids are out of finals and it’s going to be a beautiful partly sunny Saturday, so we’ll probably have to deal with the crowds. The more the merrier? Perhaps. Oh well. If all else fails, we still have our 5-day New Year’s Eve cabin trip snow bonanza coming up in 2 weeks!

What possesses people to wake up at 5AM on a Sunday morning and drive 7 hours in cold rain and snow, only to stand out in the snow for 4 hours? I don’t get it. I hate the cold. How can I love snowboarding? Yet I do so much. It was SO WORTH the 18 hour day trip to Northstar. Of course, I didn’t have to drive in the aforementioned rain and snow and just slept in the backseat instead, so I guess my opinions amounts to less. Still though: maximum lift wait time of 3 minutes, beautiful weather (sun shining through overcast clouds, snowing lightly), and powdered snow. Helloooooooooooooo, snowboard season! Plus, Eric’s 4-wheel-drive with snow tires is SUCH A WIN.

Hello again, old friend. It’s gonna be a good 4 months!

There is Eric up to his chest in fresh powder!

The frequency of my blogging seems to have steadily diminished since I first started this site. I suppose I could say that I’ve been spending time away from the computer and have thus abandoned my blog… And for once, I wouldn’t be lying! Summer has bestowed upon me the inability to sit still, and Reid seems to believe that I actually enjoy the sun and being a social being. Whew, is he wrong or what? Just kidding, Reid—I swear. Anyway, I won’t promise to update more frequently—I’ll only set myself up for failure—but I do want to keep tabs onwhat I’ve been up to.

It’s kind of a shame that I’ve spent my entire life no more than 40 miles away from San Francisco, but have spent so little time in the city. I blame my parents who have probably vacationed overseas more times than they’ve visited San Francisco! (Dad will probably email me right after I post this blog to correct me on my exaggeration here.)

1980's: Check out Ma's awesome vintage sweater!

However, it does seem like I’m making up for lost time lately. Two weekends ago, Char set up a crab fishing trip at Municipal Pier. What blows my mind about this is that you can walk away with free crabs! If we were in China, I don’t think there’d be a single crab left at the pier if you could do this, regardless of legal restrictions on type and size of crabs caught. However, the cost of crabbing manifested in different forms; we battled cold weather for four hours and ended up with only four crabs that were barely 4-inches across their back (the legal size of crabs). FOUR CRABS.

Despite the frustration of having to throw back 2 deliciously large Dungeness crabs and many others little crabs, and being unable to stop a sea lion from ripping a tightly-secured chicken drumstick from our net, the subsequent meal of boiled crab dipped in garlic butter was well worth all the trouble.

Tips for next time: Use KFC chicken for 1) eating and 2) delicious oil and fat to attract crabs. Bring a book or some form of entertainment. Leave the net out longer to let the chicken fat smell travel in the water (we were impatient and pulled up the net every 5 minutes).

Last weekend, a trip to Half Dome at Yosemite was cancelled due to forest fires, so instead we went to San Francisco yet again. This time, we took a ferry out of the SF Ferry Building and headed out to Angel Island where “my people” came through back in the 19th century. There was none of the usual overcast weather that’s so typica of SF, but it was instead beautiful, blue, and extremely warm. The hike around the perimeter of the island offered some pretty awesome views of the SF skyline, Bay Bridge, and the Golden Gate Bridge—makes me wonder how it took me more than 20 years to get out to the city!

Not to worry though, I’ll be back this weekend when Kim visits and we go to Aziza. Have I mentioned how much I like this place?

This picture is fairly representative of the entire trip.

Okay, the brevity of this post is not indicative of our overnight backpacking trip to Young Lakes, Yosemite. But, since I’m in a hurry to blog about Sonoma and I don’t like my blog posts to be out of sequence, I am now trying to capture the essence of the trip—which, as the blog title suggests, is death.

I exaggerate. But you know how I usually say that the worst mishaps make the best stories? Yeah, I regret it now, because each time it seems to get worse.

On the 14-mile Rancheria Trail in Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite last year, we ran out of water and it was 95-degrees F, with forest fires; on the 34-mile Skyline-to-the-Sea Trail from Saratoga to Santa Cruz last October, it rained unrelentlessly overnight and our tent flooded. And it was totally worth it.

Every time I do one of these overnight backcountry hiking-camping trips, I swear I’m never going to do them again. Yet, I have somehow gone on 3 of them in the past year and accumulated way too much backcountry gear that it only makes economical sense to keep going. (Right.)

At 10,000 feet above sea level, we ran into a lot of snow patches on the trail (in JUNE), while most of us were wearing shorts; we didn’t pack enough warm clothes since we had anticipated extremely warm weather like last year’s forest fires; and we all experienced altitude sickness to some degree, some worse than others.

Altitude sickness aside, the 6-mile trek wouldn’t have been bad at all and the trip was worth the view—a beautiful lake in a basin surrounded by rocky and snowy peaks—once we got to our campsite, even if I didn’t get to spend much time enjoying it while hyperventilating in my tent.

I didn’t get many good pictures at the lake, but head on over to Reid’s and Nelson’s for more blogging fun and pictures.

Some meadow. Gorgeous!

Good trip, but can’t say I’m not glad to have a month or so off before the next hiking trip! Half dome? Oy.

Well, I still was over Nancy’s bowtie tanlines, but then I remembered my own tanlines from last summer’s rafting trip and the SF Oyster & Beer Festival. And then I stopped laughing, since I still have those tanlines, one year later.

Hopefully this June’s Yosemite Young Lakes backpacking trip and 4th of July Sonoma/Point Reyes trip will be much kinder on my skin. Woohoo! Excited for the summer!

The last snowboarding trip on April 4th marked the end of winter for me. I couldn’t have asked for more at Northstar: there were literally no lines for the ski lifts, we virtually had the black-diamond slopes to ourselves at Lookout Mountain, the weather was gorgeous, and the snow was pretty decent for the time of year. It was all kinds of awesome!

The season had started off shaky for me, as I had only gone on two snowboarding trips from 2004 through 2008. This is how the first one ended up:

   At least it looks likeI’m having fun

The second trip last in January’08 yielded a similar experience. But last October’08, I VOWED TO SNOWBOARD. I splurged on pre-season deals (I’m frugal so I need good foresight for these things) and bought all my discounted gear, snow apparel, and the Double Whammy season pass to Northstar and Sierra. Thanks to the encouragement and tips from Arden and Justin, I was carving by my second trip in December!

My skills require some fine-tuning

The Asparaguys

   The Googlers - once “the Others”, now our friends