Flowers!

Chuck sent me flowers yesterday for my first day on the job. Extra brownie points. :)

Equine

Snowboarding was great last Saturday. Snowboarding was also painful last Saturday. Falls hurt a lot more when you haven't snowboarded in eight years! All in all, it was still fun though. I know I need to get some workouts in before Breckenridge, that's for sure. Quads they were a-burnin'.

LOVE the new job here at Equine. It's a fast-paced 90mph hair-on-fire kind of job and I eat it up. It's great to have a say in something and be able to effect change. The drive's fantastic too, about 12 minutes. In the mornings, I drive right by Turf Paradise where I get to see the riders breezing the ponies.

In Pomona, CA the rest of the week for Equine Affair, a horse trade show. Looking forward to it. Will blog from the road with pics.

Sunrise Ski Resort

Tomorrow night after work, it's off we go to Sunrise Ski Resort for a full day of snowboarding action on Saturday! I'm so excited to get in the snow -- it's about a three and a half hour drive from Phoenix, due east of us in the White Mountains.

Here's a link to their ski cam: Sunrise Ski Cam

We've also been hiking North Mountain at least twice a week to get in shape for our BIG snowboarding trip coming up mid-February at Breckenridge. Three fun-filled days of nothing but snow, snow, snow!

I'm also moving on to a new opportunity at a place called Equine.com. It's a fantastic position as a Senior Web Producer, and I'm looking forward to working with the team, they are a sharp gang. Plus, I get to work indirectly with horses again? ALL over it. :)

Knee Defender

Okay, this is so mean it's cool. For those of us that generally fly coach, there's now a solution for the half-bald dandruff head that you're forced to reckon with when they recline their seat into your lap. It's called the Knee Defender, and it keeps our aforementioned danderhead from being able to recline his chair. Brilliant!

Mean? Definitely. Cool? Definitely. Ring me up one of these. Apparently it's so subtle that even if the patron in front of you reports the "defective chair" to the flight attendant, it's such a tiny item that it is virtually unnoticeable! At the bottom of their site, they have a paragraph about how it isn't in violation of any FAA rules/regulations, and is completely legal. I don't have a height issue, but tall guys like my Dad might be able to put this to good use so they don't get their knees crushed on those cramped seats.

After surfing some more, I think MSN had a travel article about putting the in-flight magazine in that hinge as a knee defender. I am more of a gadget fan though. :)

Green Eggs and Ham!

My wonderful husband was shocked that I've never actually *eaten* green eggs and ham. So, the other night for dinner? You guessed it! Green eggs and ham. :) It was delicious! I was a little leery of my first bite of bright green eggs, but it was just as tasty as the yellow kind. In fact, "I do like them Sam I am, I do enjoy green eggs and ham!" I took a pic, I'll post it later on tonight when I get home.

I've also decided to teach myself Japanese. Why? Because I love the Japanese culture (and of course food), and learning to write in katakana and hiragana looks hard. It's almost like the little secret code language I created with my own symbols when I was a kid. Phoenix Library has every single Rosetta Stone language series all available free and online, so I've been going through those and then supplementing with practicing the kana (Japanese phonetic characters) over and over in a notebook. So far so good vocabulary-wise. I've learned enough to talk about airplanes, horses, and flying elephants. No wait... flying airplanes and running elephants. No wait... never mind. ;)

Of course I'll continue to keep this an English blog. *laugh track*

Happy 2007

Wow. Feels weird writing 2007 on my work notes today. Hope everyone had a great, safe weekend. I chose to stay indoors in my pajamas from about Sunday afternoon until this morning. It was splendid.

Upcoming fun stuff! This Saturday, the Arizona Herpetological Society (that means reptiles) is having a live venomous snakes chat (the snakes don't chat. I hope.) and demo at the Phoenix North Mountain Preserve. Looking forward to it! They've also got some really cool Saturday morning walks where you go on a hike and then go back to the Visitor's Center for coffee and a live band. I just love Arizona. SO much to do.

Weekend after next, we're heading up to Sunrise Ski Resort in the White Tank Mountains -- here in Arizona, about a 2.5 hour drive east of us. Getting in some snowboard time before we hit the President's Day Weekend trip with Tulsa Ski Club -- Breckenridge, oh yeah! Here's a link to the Sunrise Ski Webcam: CLICKIT!

Other goals this month? Clean the house enough to fit that 50" flat screen TV in the living room, and FINALLY get a new memory foam bed.

Resolutions? Get my legs ready for three FULL days of skiing by mid February. Time to bust out the Indoboard and hello quad workouts. :) Other than that, I'm totally happy with life. Only way it could get better is if I could get the first draft of my novel finally finished. Goals. Goals.