OhD

BTW - that was embellishment of Corey's excellent advice. Masking tape is your friend!

You could use a notched trowel (such as are used for laying mastic adhesives and tile-setting mortar) to lay on a uniform distribution of whatever thinned goo you choose, then butter it smooth without redistributing it too much. A foam paint mini-roller could be used to give it a consistent matte finish. I've also glued pieces of seatbelt webbing onto the palms of gloves using polyurethane sealant (automotive window adhesive or builders window/door seal). I need to do that to my Level gloves after 1.5 seasons of pretty hard use - the right palm patch is finally fraying a bit and the seam is opening. Good gloves - warm, protective and durable. Only drawback is that the palm wear patches are really grippy on snow - maybe to discourage behaviour that will wear them out! 'Bout spun me clear out the first time I laid down a hand!

No comment. Onesies used to be called "powder suits" and were (still are) great on a deep day. Warm, too (for better or for worse).

Which bolts?

Heavens, did I just let **** slip out?

I own exactly one 20-odd year-old onesy, in a tasteful red and black, I'll have you know. Without a dropseat. That still fits. Sort of... I currently ride in a pair of North Face bibs that have a full leg/seat zipper with four sliders on it. It works as leg zips and as a dropseat, and I can park the middle pair of sliders where my back foot Fintec binding release dongle sticks out or leave it in the center where it will keep me awake on the chairlift.

That knit onesy is brilliant, but you'd have to be going out into something fierce to want to start layering from there! I think I'd spec a dropseat or 180-degree fly in mine. Oh - and merino wool so I could actually get it buttoned up before going berserk scratching. One can pose as anything... Try the rastafanarian coupon-clipper (as in bonds, not groceries) look: grunged-out Arcteryx, lots of wool and duct-tape, felted hair (no plasticy helets, thank you) and omnipresent earbuds (the electro-bubble).

I was taught once upon a time (by Ryan Pinette, an AASI L-III instructor) that a good way to find a starting point for the splay between your binding angles is to jump straight up (on the floor or on snow, in whatever footwear you like), land with a lot of knee flex - even into a squat, and take note of the angles of your feet after landing. Try not to think about controlling your angles, and do it a few times until it feels natural. Try landing in a carving stance and in a "square" (softie) stance and see if the splay is the same. See if you can do a deep squat from either stance without rotating your feet away from the landing splay angles - deep flexure of the knees might require a little bit of rotation of one or both feet (about a vertical axis) from your angles when erect or in an "active crouch". If you have that problem, canting might help, or you may just have some skeletal misalignments that might not be conducive to hardbooting (at least on a narrow board). Doing the jump test on snow is nice because the friction on the ground doesn't inhibit your feet from rotating to a natural position, and you can measure your tracks, tweak your bindings and go test right away. Doing the deep squat to set your angles will help ensure that you aren't wrecking your knees by subjecting them to a bit of twisting every time you compress over a bump or in a turn. You still have to be careful about twisting them with excessive rotation of your hips and torso, but those you can consciously avoid. Getting the splay right so your knees both can flex easily gives you the full available range of motion to work with. Don't fight your own body. One of you will surely lose.

I'm omnivorous. Karen can tolerate a bit of gluten (not afflicted with full-on celiac sprue) but a little too much gives her a variety of gastro-intestinal unpleasantness. Initial symptoms were mostly that - more severe because she didn't know what was setting it off, and it was getting worse. Upchucking a good dinner (often with the sensation that it had been too rich) was fairly common. Low energy (for her) and headachiness too. It took a fairly progressive, holistic doctor who had the wit to have some food allergy screens run to pin it down - this was about 20 years ago. I'll have to look into the gluten content of rye. I think it's still too high (we don't have any specific numerical threshold for symptoms to manifest) and I'll have to find something with the elastic/binding properties of wheat gluten to make a decent bread. There are a lot more good gluten-free products available nowadays, so maybe I can get some better bases of the labels. Fortunately, she's not badly allergic to much else and, while we're both having to watch the cholesterol it isn't imminently life-threatening. Or so the docs say, in dire tones. Someone may have to pry the Gorgonzola from my cold, dead fingers someday.

You're hangin' in one of the more civil corners of the internet, I must say. Talking toys is a big part of this forum, but at least they are really cool toys, eh? It can be pretty hard to switch off a bad actor out there in the ether. Tuning them out or banishing them doesn't always make them stop, but at least you can define your own bubble.

Maybe for a day, or a season, or for some sufficient fraction of every year of your life. Maybe not all the time. That was a question mark, wasn't it? I suppose that if you intend to have fun for some definite period, and can make that happen without doing anything you might feel badly about later, then you can consider that to be a succesful part of your life, a memory to be cherished and an ability you can adapt to many circumstances. If you know how to make yourself happy, chances are you can help others (maybe even some paleo-guys) figure out how to be happy too. Make it count!

Browsing through this thread, I'm reminded that I used to make a chocolate rye bread with whole-wheat flour and brown sugar. It made fabulous toast! That was a happier time - before my wife discovered that she'd become gluten intolerant and before my metabolism finally grew up. Now I rarely bake with wheat (although I still buy bread for my lunches). The chocolate rye bread was derived from a shepherds sourdough Dutch-Oven bread recipe. As best I remember, it worked out with 5c ww flour, 5c rye flour, 2c cocoa powder, a stick of butter, 1/2 c molasses or brown sugar and 1t or so of salt. I'd check that against a few cookbook bread recipes, but you can't go too far wrong with that much cocoa! It made two big loaves or one big Dutch Oven full. BTW - Costco's "Greek" yogurt is pretty good, and it makes excellent starter for homemade yogurt made with non-fat powdered milk. Tasty and very affordable. I'm four generations in from a Costco starter and still getting firmer texture and much less whey than with any other starter I've used. Try using yogurt instead of milk when making chocolate fudge syrup for your ice cream. It also works really well in a tomato-chipotle bisque. I'm basically trying to distract myself from the fact that I'm lunching at my desk while people with higher standards are reveling in 30" of fresh, sub 20F powder at White Pass (closed yesterday due to the storm). In vain...

Better Google her before you throw down, meds or no meds.

Here are the oldest and youngest competitors at the USASA Nationals: Richard Cole (77) and Paisley Flowers (2.5)

I gave up on contacts finally when I found I was having to stop and scrub scratchy slime off them four of five times in a two-hour drive home. I had -10.5 diopters of myopia in my better eye, so the transition between contacts and glasses was too wierd to allow for just popping the infernal little devils out and putting on driving glasses. My optometrist steered me to Lasik when he felt it was mature enough, and sent me to Vancouver BC for the surgery, performed by one of the guys who was in on the development work. It took two visits with a 6-month rest between to let the eyeballs adjust to the thinner cornea. The first evening was kind of freaky, foggy, blurred vision, barely able to read a menu, and wearign fly-eye colanders to bed, but the next morning I could see the branches on the fir trees on the hills on the far side of English Bay! 8 years later I have a little myopia in one eye, a little astigmatism and (at 60) presbyopia, so I have to wear cheaters reading and doing close work, but I can board all day in a storm (in good-fitting Smith goggles) and drive home after with no drops or discomfort. I do use drops when it's dry, bright or allergy season (in Eastern WA) and have some progressive-lens glasses for driving after dusk - not required but certainly prudent. I feel really fortunate to have been born in a cetury of carving boards and computer-controlled ablative lasers - Like Paul Simon says: "These are days of miracles and wonder..."

Could be. Sky light is polarized significantly only in the range of 60 - 120 degrees off the axis of the light ray from the sun. When the sun is high, that band is more nearly parallel to the horizon, so more of the sky in your normal field of view is emitting polarized light at you. When the sun is low in the sky, the polarization band is effective only in 120 degrees out of the 360 degree horizon. Light reflected off the ground is most strongly polarized at about 53 degrees off the incident angle, so when the sun is at 9 degrees, the reflected light is not so highly polarized. Therefore, the polarized lenses aren't doing you much good unless you are facing about 90 degrees from the sun - you are seeing pretty much the same light you'd see with plain filtered lenses, with perhaps a noticeably reduced amount of sparkly glitter off the snow. The slopes there appear to be mostly North-sloping. I imaging riding the lifts you're getting the sun straight in the face in the morning, and lots of light reflected off the snow at a low angle. Even though it's going through a lot of air at that latitude, you're still getting nearly a double dose of the solar UV because of the reflection. I wonder, too, if the ozone layer is a little thinner than normal for this time of year? Might bear looking up. Are you getting more sunburned than normal? Pretty intriguing countryside, based on a brief Google about the premises. Maybe I can get a winter visit there onto the joint bucket list. I haven't managed to get the Alps onto the joint list yet, so I'd say the chances are slim. Maybe enough Doc Martin will do the trick...

Read up on sunglasses standards on Wikipedia, for a good start. Julbo claims no certification that I can find in a cursory browse through their website, nor do they explicitly claim to block any particular wavelengths to any stated degree. Cat. 3 to 4 doesn't seem to map to the EU EN 1836:2005 standard ratings. Julbo glasses may be perfectly fine, but they don't seem to want to say just how fine in any quantifiable terms. A dark lens that doesn't filter UV can cause more harm than good, by causing your pupil to dilate and admit more UV into the eye (and also reduces visual acuity because of the large pupil). I agree that peripheral vision is nice to have. Emphasis on the noun... If you find more technical info on the Julbos, please pass it along. They do have quite a variety of pretty cool and comfortable-looking shades, and I'd be surprised if they don't have reasonably good UV protection, but your eyes feel gritty and sore. Knock-offs, perhaps? Know anyone at the local university who might have a spectrophotometer?

Goggles, and preferably no contact lenses. Soft contacts and frequent drops if you aren't up for Lasik but need correction. I don't think the human eye was evolved to go 30mph in cold, dry air and intense UV while being sprayed with ice crystals. I've never found sunglasses adequate for wind and glare, except for "glacier glasses" with the leather shields, and goggles are way more comfortable unless it's really warm. I know any number of folks who are cultivating pincuegulae - strongly correlated to UV exposure. They are kind of cute at first....

This suggests a version of roshambo: "people cut trees, clothes cover people, trees pierce clothes"

Screw the clothes. I'm going for a barrel of Eagle Oil!

But suppose you provided the beehouse and maintain it, doctor the bees, take out the trash, cart it around to find good foraging, etc..? Wouldn't it be fair to collect honey in return? The bees always have the option to take off and go make their own hive, so it's not like they are imprisoned. Granted, a mature queen can't fly away, but if she's ensconced in a healthy and secure hive, does she want to? In nature, various animals steal honey. Is that not OK? Does anybody know if there more bees now than before apiculture developed, or whether modern industrial bees are more or less happy, long-lived and prosperous than were their benighted ancestors? BTW, did you hear "Cows with Guns" on Prairie Home Companion last weekend?

Having just been on toe and able to see uphill better beforehand, going to heelside is not as big of a rush. Getting smacked in the back a second or two later by the guy who was out of sight uphill when you looked is another matter, but I find it more of a rush to get smacked on toeside when I can see him coming. Maybe I'm just more receptive to visual than to tactile stimulation...

Aren't you glad you aren't on the 'Dig my New Tattoo" forum? Maybe one of the Japanese riders (hard and soft) with the impressive carving vids out (don't have any URLs to share at the moment) could advise you. Cool project - have fun with it.

I was just looking them up individually. Each has several meanings, depending on context I suppose, and the two meanings most suitable to a wise-ass interpretation kind of siezed my imagination (why does that always happen to me?). In Chinese as in English, the meaning of a phrase can be various and indirect, or slangy; "body art", "good ****", "greenback", "half-assed" come to mind, along with "chi kuo" (eat bitterness). They don't often translate literally very well, even in closely related languages. Probably accounts for any number of wars and romances....