When we were young!

Getting old is a funny thing.  Necessary thing, but funny. Sleep funny and your neck hurts for a whole week. For someone like me who's worked on my feet for decades, put me at my dinner table talking into my laptop for a year for work, and my leg nerves act up.

For a different aspect of work, I went digging up old pictures from the Italian village of Pisa back when we visited in 2005. I started looking through the various other folders when I eventually found them (since I have too many laptops):

Three are not shown; that makes 8

What I found that I'd like to share today were some pics of me and Corrie getting dressed up (for a couple of heads on month two of backpacking through Europe), and heading to dinner in Paris:

In my one button up shirt, but it seemed like it had warmed up finally on the trip.

And Corrie, looking smashing in a shirt she bought in Venice:

I'm not one to wistfully pine for my youth. On some days I feel like that trip, now seventeen (!!!) years back, was no more than just a few spots ago, whatever "spots" may mean.

Paris is one of the places, man, one of the special cities in the world. And you're never too old to experience it, or again for some of us. 

Getting old doesn't have to be a fight. Sometimes it's nice to reminisce. Just to take stock of where we've been. Maybe appreciate it all someday

Happy Two-sday!

As a math nerd I couldn't miss the opportunity to mention the rarity that today brings us from the world of numerical observation.

I understand that it is just a random confluence of things, but it's kinda cool anyway: in this country we'll write the date as 2/22/22 or 2/22/2022, depending on your preferences on the year.

In most other countries (that regularly use the Gregorian calendar like us), the date is written as day.month.year, and as so, with full dd.mm.yyyy format, today's date would be written as: 22.02.2022.

That's a palindrome and an octuple like this may be never be seen again. Even switching to the MHs calendar wouldn't make it any easier (this is 22.07.5203 MHs).

And it's the day of the week that in English makes the sound of the number. Definitely better than a few years back when Cinco de Mayo was on Taco Tuesday but everything was shut down because of  a corona virus pandemic.

Birthday Snow Trip (With Little Snow)

With my February girls' birthdays on consecutive days, we decided to head to the snow. As much as people may not like being freezing cold, we get a little too bored with (looks over shoulder) our very pretty weather...?

Cassius had wanted to go to the snow over Winter Break, but that morphed into a rainy hike last December because of noncompliant weather. We decided to take a drive to Big Bear during the birthday weekend of my February girls. We figured there would be more snow, or at least some snow.

We rented a VRBO place, a large-ish 3 bedroom cabin on a steeply raked piece of mountain side, and were joined by Cass's friend and his mom, so there were six of us. From the bottom of the backyard looking up at the place:

The bank of windows on what looks like an upper floor was the living room, and it was actually below the street level. The driveway was a terrifying nearly vertical drop from the roadway that eventually evened up to horizontal. With no room to turn around, backing out was always an adventure since you were 1) ass up, feeling like you were about to smack your forehead on the windshield; and 2) couldn't see if anyone was zooming up the residential street (which was more often than you'd ever like).

Instead of heading to a bank or ATM to get a few hundred bucks in cash for a snow/inner-tube experience, we opted for the less-than twenty-buck plastic toboggan and opted to drive and look for some mild hills.

We found a little road that was blocked by a gate and signs that said "DO NOT BLOCK FIRE ROAD." We parked there, only blocking half of the drive, but everything on the other side was covered in ice or snow, so we felt comfortable to leave our cars there for nearly an hour.

And while neither Corrie nor I brought out phones on the caper, we don't have the photographic evidence of the excitement, I will attest to excitement being had. I think Cass went down the most times, taking at least six runs with the biggest shard of the plastic toboggan after it splintered and came apart (as these essentially disposable toys tend to do).

We went to Lake Arrowhead a number of times i the three days we were there, to either eat at restaurants in the village or do some grocery shopping:

The view from along the ridge on the roads between these alpine villages are spectacular, but I'm not sure this picture can do justice, or is from the best spot.

From some positions, one can actually see the Pacific Ocean. Remarkable.

The evenings were spent watching Encanto or the Olympics, or. both, and hanging out by the fire. It may have only been a few days worth of time, but it was a nice little Winter Vacation, with capital letters and everything.