Ups and downs in Mountain-biking

We love mountain biking, but we're picky. We don't use chairlifts to get to the top of the mountain and just ride downhill. It simply isn't fun.

We earn our descents by first climbing, we don't go on trails that are too steep, too rugged or too rocky and we keep our outings to around an hour.

This said, we love the workout we get, we muster the patience to climb at snail pace, we get a blast when we descend and we are blessed to be able to practice our favorite summer sport just half a mile away from home!

Starting over; a new veggie garden...

As a rather cold month June is coming to a close, we finally got ready to organize and start our new veggie garden.

Since it's a new garden, in a new place, we had to begin from scratch and we're now a good month behind compared to previous years, but experience has told us that it's never too late and can only hope that July will be “toasty” so that our beloved salad crop will grow fast, tender and tasty!

Projects are never what they seem to be...

A few days ago, my daughter sent me this pair of little sketches and they hit me right away. I think no matter who you are; a CEO, an entrepreneur, an innovator, a do-it-yourself handy guy, or a chef, when you plan something new, it's always simple and looks quite easy and linear at first.

 

Reality soon makes it look much more complicated, deviant and difficult, with lots of ups and down, peppered will all kinds of obstacles and setbacks. So what's the take-away? Pretty clear to me... Begin with the gnarly and tortured path in mind, build your plan around it, no less, and chances are that the end result will exceed your wildest dreams.

As the British writer Lee Child said it so well: “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

A perfect neighborhood...

Twenty nine years and four houses later, we still live in the Park Meadows neighborhood. Sunny, facing the mountains, conveniently located to town and ideally situated for walking and biking, this area of Park City is really hard to beat. So hard, that it appears as it has become our final destination!

Aah! Summer concerts are back!

Last Wednesday was supposed to be Deer Valley's first outdoors concert of season. It was canceled because of snow and snowed out event only happen in Park City during summer; in winter there's never such a thing, even for the local schools. Snow is the economic fuel of the community!

So, last night was finally a chance for thousands of spectators to welcome summer and the return of its glorious concerts. The weather was absolutely perfect, not too cold, not too warm, the “usual suspects” (I mean the loyal audience) had returned for another season.

All the ones we could recognize were a good one year older but the enthusiasm seemed stronger than ever. It's true that Alicia Stockman and her band, Bonanza Town, were absolutely stunning. Thanks to them, we're successfully re-set into summer concert mode!

File cabinets, hard-drives, cloud...

Some time ago, I was lamenting the disappearance of mini-cassettes, VHS tapes and even CDs. Today, I'm reporting the imminent death of the venerable file cabinet. Remember the days when we had lots of physical files, manila folders and the like to keep all of the information that we deemed useful to us.

Yesterday, I tried to give away, to no avail, these information dinosaurs to charity; they headed to the scrap metal bin instead. Well, in the 90s, all of that material has turned into PDFs and begun to sit in our disk drives, our company servers and our back-up hard-drives.

For a while, we liked to have our information in two places: inside the computer and inside our file cabinets, just like we liked to print everything, as we harbored suspicion towards computers.

Today, everything seems to be moving up to the “cloud.” Farewell large size file cabinets; another few years and you'll go the way rotary dial phones went not so long ago...

Olympic diet plan

Last night, as I was watching “Ready to fly”, a documentary about a female Park City Nordic jumper that was at the center of the fight to get women jumping in the Olympics, I was reminded that what's choking the current Olympics is the growing number of events, and this reminded me of a policy we follow in our home.

Since we have began to live in smaller houses with limited living space, we've enacted a rule against bloating that goes pretty much like this: If we want a new object, an existing one as to get out! On that basis, here is what we ought to go with managing the number of Olympics events:

1. Cut down on the number of Winter Olympics events, from 98 in Sochi, to 50 (see my recent blog). This might have to be done gradually to prevent a paralyzing revolution

2. I there's pressure to add a new event, get rid of an existing one.

3. Apply the same treatment for the Summer Games

4. Enjoy a simpler program that is much easier to understand and follow!