This was the first year that Max entered some artwork into the SB Fair and Expo.  We submitted 1 Lego creation and 9 drawings.  You should have seen the entry form – very funny – ‘Pirate Ship – in blues and browns, Pirate Ship – in browns and blacks, Pirate Ship – in pencil and black pen, etc.’  It was great fun to see that he won NINE First Place ribbons and one Second Place ribbon.  It certainly helps that we don’t live in LA County and have to compete with masses of kids, but still – pretty impressive!

Faithful readers will remember that before our Thanksgiving trip to Kentucky, Toby had spotted a mouse in the kitchen

We had talked about different ways to get rid of the mouse.  Poison was out because of the dogs and the kids.  The sticky traps were considered but Toby didn’t like the idea of the mouse being trapped slowly and had heard some stories of the mouse chewing its leg off to get free (Snopes, anyone?)  So we decided that the best, most humane method to get rid of the mouse was to use the old-fashioned spring trap.  This would kill the mouse right away and if Ginger got her nose snapped while trying to eat the cheese, well then, maybe she won’t forage for food so much.  Toby’s main concern was that she didn’t want the mouse to suffer.

We finally bought the traps and Max was *very* excited to be working the traps.  I kept putting off setting the traps until I went to get the dogs some bones and I found a hole chewed through the plastic bag.  It was time for the mouse to go!

I showed Max how the traps worked and snapped his thumb under the bar (lightly).  We got the cheese out and melted it to the tab and then flamed all the metal to get the human smell off.  We set one behind the microwave and one behind the washer and went to church.

That night, Toby and I turned out all the lights and went to bed.  About 5 minutes after the lights in the kitchen were turned off I heard a **SNAP** .  I knew right away that the trap had been sprung.  I walked towards the kitchen and heard “squeak, squeak”.  The mouse was still alive!  I wanted to go back to bed and deal with it in the morning, but Toby did not want to have it chew its leg off (Snopes, please, somebody).  So we moved the microwave and there was the mouse, still eating the cheese, pinned under the bar across its back.

So I took the mouse filled trap outside and hit it with a shovel.  It stopped squeaking.  I threw the trap away with the mouse still in it.  Yuck!  I can’t wait to have some real walls again.

Today I went snowboarding at Brighton Resort in Utah.  I am attending a 4 day training class at LANDesk corporate HQ in Sandy, UT.  It was a fairly last minute trip (I bought plane tickets on Friday for a flight on Sunday) and I was selected by U.S. Airways to experience some extra security screenings.  Before I left, I found a resort on the internet that listed night skiing and I saw that snow was forecast for the Monday night that I was there, so I took some gloves and heavy clothes and hoped for the best.

When I got to class, I talked to some of the locals about night skiing and they said that I should call first to make sure that the resort was open at night since it was the end of the season.  I called the resort that I had originally looked at and their voice mail said that they were closed for night skiing.  Bummer.  The hotel clerk told me that there was only 1 resort left that had night skiing, and this was the last week of it.  Woo Hoo!

I was planning to go later in the week, but the class today got out a bit early so I put on all my cold weather clothes (sweat pants under jeans, 3 t-shirts, a sweatshirt and a heavy coat) and drove up to Brighton Ski Resort about 30 minutes away.  Since I hadn’t been snowboarding in more than 10 years, I decided to ‘warm up’ on the beginner run.  I am glad I did!  After about 30 minutes, I moved to the intermediate runs and had a blast.

By about 8p I was pretty tired, but since the lifts didn’t stop, I wanted to get my money’s worth.  I decided to try a different run and promptly sunk in 18 inches of powder.  It was hard to get up and once I was up, I struggled in doing the ‘hop’ to get moving.  The area I was in was just too flat.  I had to unbuckle the boot and walk to place closer to the downhill part.  I finally got going, but this was a harder intermediate run and the terrain was not so consistently down hill.  I slowed myself down too much after a steeper section and didn’t have enough momentum to make it up the small incline.  I squatted down and pushed my self up the hill on my snowboard.  But the little hill sloped into the forest and I quickly found myself in among the trees where the snow was very powdery and this made it difficult for me to stand up.  Once I did get up, I would move forward a few feet and have to navigate around a tree, at which point I would fall down again.  Up down Up down Up down.  I was covered in snow and getting very frustrated.  I ended up pulling myself along via the branches of the trees.  As long as I was headed down hill, I figured I was OK.  It took about 15 minutes to get back to the bottom of the hill.

I didn’t want to leave on such a low note, so although my pants were wet and my butt was frozen and the screen on my cell phone had blackened from the cold, I got back onto the lift.  I was more careful this time in starting out, but within 2 seconds of starting I had a huge fall and rolled for quite a ways downhill.  I decided that I was done.

My co-worker didn’t go skiing but took some pictures of the resort and the surrounding mountains.  I’ll post the good ones when I get them.