As a follow up to my post in December, I owe a belated "thank you" to my one purchaser of a copy of my e-book, "May it Please the Court." I apologize for the continued delay in delivery, but I promise I'll get the rest of the book written soon. In the meantime, I have appreciated the $11,000,001 payment.
Having made it to the top 0.01%, C and I quickly realized, "Hey! All of this money isn't going to spend itself!" So we went out to dinner. It turns out, though, that you can't really order enough food to burn through $11 million at one meal. Even adding in an expensive bottle of wine, we hardly made a dent. So we started looking for other alternatives.
It seems if you want to spend a lot of money, the best place to start is by trying to develop private sector manned space flight. But I really have no idea how to start the trip down that road. What do you do? Buy a bunch of old lawnmowers and strap the engines to an old railroad tie? Start yanking the start cords one by one until you have enough thrust to lift off? Strap on a snorkel so you can breathe in the dark cold void of space? You see, space travel was really a non-starter. So we picked the second most expensive things we could think off: alpine skiing.
Which is all to say that we took a weekend break and drove down the road to Alyeska. The plan was to ski lift-served trails on Saturday, spend the night, then wake up and explore the nordic trails in Girdwood on Sunday. Execution started off smoothly enough, but took a left turn on Sunday when we tossed back the drapes and found heavy snowfall. A quick call to the ski hotline: "Ski patrol reports blower powder. Ten inches at the base, fifteen inches at the top." Well, the nordic trails will be there next time. By the time the lifts were operating, snow was knee deep on the upper mountain. Downhill skiing is a once- or twice-a-year activity for me, so I'm mighty pleased to have lucked into deep powder, even if the views were better on the day before.
Pictures from the snow dump and skiing can be found at: http://www.tetongravity.com/blogs/Trams-Helis-And-Cats-T-G-R-Films-The-Dream-Factory-5735726.htm. Not my pictures, mind you. Pictures from the Teton Gravity Crew that has apparently been camped out in Girdwood filming for next years's stoke-inducing pre-season ski movie. We shared elevator space with these guys right after checking into the hotel. Anyone familiar with both the TGR films and my skiing can probably guess that the elevator is the only place we saw them. Well, the elevator and the bar. Anyone unfamiliar with TGR can probably gather all they need to know from the photos linked above (or look for trailers from other films on YouTube). Suffice to say, we weren't sharing terrain.
Of course, as you can imagine, two days of skiing ate through the entirety of the $11 million. How do people afford this sport? If we're going to go again, I really need to sell another e-book.
