Is It Really February Already?

The groundhog says spring is on the way. Good thing, because I am back here at the mothership in Boston, and it looks like the north pole. Before I left the Gorge, it was winter. Here is the view from Panorama Point on a wintery walk early in January.

Here is the view of my parent's house. There have been 4 storm days since I got here 2 weeks ago. Another is due Saturday. I haven't seen snow piled this high since the Blizzard of 78.

I honestly don't know where January went. I figure I'd better post a few things so people don't think I went into a permanent funk after the Patriots lost to the Jets. My biggest excuse is that my 2.5 year old computer suffered a fatal seizure after Lloyd tried to upgrade my OS from Vista to Windows7. Thanks a bunch, Microsoft and HP. Had to wait for a new laptop. Lost my emails and address book, but fortunately I did back up my tunes, pix, and docs. I do not trust anything to work the way it should. Especially with Microsoft.

We had our New Year's Day ski on the Clark Creek Trail, the best snow there in a couple of years. Check the link for some great pictures. Unfortunately, it's rained ever since.

Alina came to visit for a week after a pit stop in Sugar Land to visit her old buddies, and had the pleasure of extensive father-daughter bonding when she and Lloyd went to pick up Conor at the airport. They got stuck for 4.5 hours behind a jack knifed big rig less than halfway to PDX, with no way to exit or reverse direction. Did I mention there was an ice storm in the Gorge at the time? The normally 2 hour round trip became an 8.5 hour odyssey, with their return at 2:30 am. Now anyone who knows me is aware that I am a terrible bad weather passenger. Knowing the forecast, I thoughtfully suggested (during a mother/daughter pedicure) that Alina might want to have a little one on one time with her dad as well. Little did I know, how long that one on one time would be!

We had a good week visiting breweries and brewpubs, including a fantastic tour of Full Sail in Hood River (highly recommended), and at the other end of the spectrum, Doug showed us where he creates the magic elixirs at Everybody's Brewing in White Salmon. Conor and Alina are home brewers, so we also stopped in to taste at Big Horse, Double Mountain, and Thirsty Woman Pub to check out potables not seen in Boston.

One late night, Lloyd, Alina and Conor brewed a batch of After Midnight Porter, now sitting in the secondary fermenter. They forgot to buy ice to cool the wort, and the sight of the three of them running outside to the last remaining snow piles was pretty funny.

The return trip to PDX was mercifully uneventful. We dropped them off and were back in White Salmon by 6 am, before the sun was even up. But my plans for the rest of January were scuttled when Mom fell and hurt her hip. I was able to reschedule my Alaska Air flight for little more than the $75 change fee, and headed to Boston on the 20th. More on that in the next post.