Tina, just to prove that Joey is alive and well I have provided (at great expense, mind you) a picture. If you click on the picture you can zoom in and see many interesting things including both Joey and a screen shot of my e-mail program showing today’s date!
So there – I’m taking much better care of him than you were!
Jim
Joey can be found on the upper-right corner of the monitor – next to the Gargoyle.
Tags: Where is Joey?
I did very little today – got a good night’s rest and got up at the crack of 11:00 am. However, I did get hungry and eventually went out on a quest for food. What I found managed to about halfway ruin my appetite.
I present for your viewing displeasure the “Godawful Ugly House” (sorry – couldn’t come up with anything more witty than that).
You have my most abject apologies…
I was in a small town near Plainfield where there were a lot of restored homes dating from somewhere around the early 1900’s. This “find” was in the midst of an otherwise very nice group of old homes. You have to wonder what the neighbors think.
So, if it’s not the neighborhood, it must be the “owner” of the house, right? Just what would posess somebody to paint a house this color? I could see a yellow Ferrari or a yellow Canary, but this????
What the hell???
That is all.
I’m breaking this up into two pages to help those of you who are working with a dialup connection – apparently the really long pages with lots of photos were timing out when you tried to download them.
The second half of the trip was the drive back from Vermont. In the course of 24 hourse we spent 7.5 hours driving and 5 skiing – a fine tradeoff if you ask me (but then again, I’m crazy – remember?).
So, here we go again…
To amuse myself on long trips I like to take random photos from the car. Sometimes you get a great shot of something that you never really noticed. Sometimes you get a shot of some random, frozen earth moving machinery behind a large mound of snow/sand. This is the second “sometimes.”
Aren’t you thrilled?
A slightly more picturesque “car shot”…
Notice the extra-cold-looking horses in the foreground? Boy, would it ever suck to be a horse…
I like road signs. Mostly they are boring and provide little or no entertainment, but sometimes you get a good one. Say “Moose Crossing” a few times – it will make you smile (or at least confuse the hell out of anybody near you)!
I also like bumper stickers (on anybody’s car but my own). Actually, the funny thing about this car was not the bumper sticker – it was the driver and passenger. You see, this is one of the hotter Subarus – turbocharged and intercooled to within an inch of it’s life and capable of ridiculously high speeds. The driver and passenger were both well into their 70’s!
I want to drive a fast car when I’m 75 – at 50 mph in the fast lane!
There is a semi-valuable prize awaiting the first person who can tell me what this sign and the preceding one mean. If you can tell me which state “owns” each one of the signs I’ll even double the winnings!
Winner to be announced Real Soon!
Click here to take/view survey.
And here is the final photo of the day (and my favorite sign).
Let this be a lesson to you…
Saturday was to be spent skiing at SugarBush in Vermont. Fortunately, we picked what I believe was the coldest day in recorded history, so I got to try out all of my ski gear including the portable 50,000 BTU furnace. Oh, wait – scratch the furnace – that was just wishful thinking.
It was really cold, however – colder than I have been since one of my trips to Poland (and it can get damn cold there). When we got to Montpelier the tempurature was hanging around -12f without the wind chill. That’s right – 40 degrees below the freezing temperature of water! The weather for today is supposed to be about the same – but with no wind, thank the gods.
So, we packed up and headed for the ski slope…
Your typical ski lift has a sign posted right before you get on. This sign has useful information – activities, messages for people, jokes, the temperature, etc. This is the first and, hopefully, only sign I will ever see that has a Frostbite Warning on it. Also, notice the temperatures in the lower-right corner: -12 at the base and -18 at the summit. This is at roughly 10 am!
The Skiing Mugger (Ross) in his natural (?) element. At this point I think he’s looking for somebody to roll for some hand warmers.
Nothing special in this shot – just the nice, warm garage where they store the snow-cats. I just took this to prove that I can still hold the camera steady while freezing to death.
This is taken from about half way up the mountain. It doesn’t really look that cold does it?
This photo, on the other hand, can lower your temperature just by looking at it! Do you see the “fuzzy” stuff in the background of the photo? That’s a whole mountainside full of snow covered trees.
This is taken at the top of the mountain. You can really see how the snow has been blown onto the trees – very cool!
The inside of the nice, warm ski lodge. In fact, this is the cashier station – if you give the guys that are sitting down “money” they will let you take a cup of “hot chocolate” – nectar of the gods at this point.
It’s probably only about 60 degrees inside the lodge, but that’s a temperature differential of about 75 degrees!
Here’s another shot from the top of the mountain – at the edge of a nice black diamond slope (which I did NOT go down! Yes, I know you can’t see the slope itself, but that’s becuase it was mostly vertical and broken only by the occasional patch of several million icy moguls.
(Ok, I may be exaggerating a tiny bit here – but it was steep!)
This is the last skiing shot of the day. At this point my camera froze and refused to extend it’s lens or zoom in/out any more. Also, I got tired of opening my coat to get to said camera.
Can you spot Ross?
The Ski Patrol apparently built a snow fort at the top of the mountain (it’s a bit hard to see, but the red cross is inside the snow fort. I’m not sure if it was used as protection or as a place to store the frozen dead bodies that they must find frequently…
Today’s task: drive something like 350 miles in less than 5 hours (I consider this a “reasonable” task – then again, I’m crazy…). I have to go from Boston to Plainfield, Connecticut and then back up to Montpelier, Vermont. The things I’ll do just to go skiing…
However, I have CD’s (Eels, Highwaymen, Pogues and, most importantly, Elvis), company (Ross) and a fifth of whiskey (Knob Creek – for after the trip) – so I’m set. Oh – and I also have yet another crappy rental car from Avis – how could I forget that!
Only one photo for the day – the obligatory shot of Boston Traffic. Sorry for the quality – I was talking to either John or Tina at this point and trying to drive, laugh, talk and take a photo. Apparently my multi-tasking is not so good anymore.
I was NOT drinking the aforementioned whiskey!
