P3 Retro - Birthdays and knee deep powder!

Tele skiing the double black diamond run, Headwall at Silver Star Mountain in 2001

Even though I get millions of hits on this blog, only a few of you will know that my International tales of the minutiae of life actually started in 2000 on the now defunct eGroups.com (taken over by Yahoo! groups).

Here's some P3 retro; birthday stuff from the Yahoo! group archives...April 1 2001. Back then, I thought that using capitals at the start of sentences was soooo "off-line". Anyhow, that year I had one of my best birthdays ever at Silver Star Mountain in British Columbia, Canada.

Enjoy.

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"birthdays and knee deep powder"

hi folks.

thanks eveyone for the birthday wishes. i think i replied to all of
you who sent me a message. here's what i did on my birthday...

well slept in a little as we had another(!) keg evening. then got prepared
to go up to paradise camp for the party they were having up there....caught a
snowmobile (like a motorcycle on tracks) up to the place. that was very fun,
it was dark and snowing and the guy hooned up there. paid for one ale
during the night....kept getting drinks bought for me...there was a
funk/reggae/soul band playing and everyone was shaking their thing
like it was 1999, it being near the end of the season and all.

got a ride back part of the way, but instead of riding on the
snowmobile...got towed behind on my skis like water skiing, cept i
couldn't see much because it was dark...it felt kinda fast! met up
with dan the hostel manager, his sister and my roomie, France. they
had "crazy carpets" (no not crazy creeks, Paul D) a crazy carpet is a
thin sheet of plastic with 2 handles cut into it that you sled on.
anyway we all hiked up the mountain. they crazy carpeted down and i
skied by the light of the moon. i skied down the t-bar line next to
the hostel and made tracks down the line.it was so fun! we got back
to the hostel at 4:30am, thus capping off one of the most memorable
birthdays i've ever had.

anyway. remember my message saying the snow was deteriorating? well
in the last few days it has been snowing a lot. today i went out and
skied some trees on the back side...check out the trail map on the
egroup or http://www.silverstarmtn.com/about/maps/trail.html look for
headwall, rusty whistle, aabye rd etc.

there were drifts of knee deep powder in there today. that was so
excellent! i've been developing my tree skiing and also trying to get
a bit of air, since the landings are so soft. i think i'll head tot
he terain park tomorrow and try and get some hits off the jumps.

anyway...that's all for now...catch.

e

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Happy Birthday me

"Fergie" from morganommer's Flickr photostream. Reused under a Creative Commons licence.

Here's a list of folks that Wikipedia tells us were born on this day in history. If I were noteable enough to be added to the list, my name would listed next to Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson, the singer as she was also born in 1975.

Today, I spent my birthday at a ScrumMaster Certification course in London. Here is some more info about what Scrum is.

More excitingly, I went bike shopping as I am thinking of replacing one of my bikes. The name of the model is Fratello which I think means "Brother" in Italian. This means that should I purchase it, my new bike will have to be called Marcus, after my own brother? Perhaps.

Tonight, Kate cooked up a feast accompanied by a nice bottle of Scotchmans Hill chardonnay (tasting notes PDF) from the Scotchmans Hill vineyard, Geelong (which is near Melbourne). Thanks, Kate!!

Arcade Fire - Wake Up

Here's a bit of Arcade Fire's performance of Wake Up, another track from Funeral. Sorry it cuts out but I wanted to enjoy some of the song without having to hold the camera still. It captures the flavour of how much they had the audience in the palm of their hands. You weren't supposed to stand up at all in the circle but there was nothing the bouncers could do about it :)

Arcade Fire - Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)

Here's a flavour of Saturday's show at Brixton Academy, as mentioned in the last post. It's a song called Neighborhood #3 (Power Out) from Arcade Fire's album Funeral.

The other photos are here.

More later.

Arcade Fire!!!

Arcade Fire. Uploaded to Flickr by Platform 3

In another display of my Canuckophilia, I went and saw Montréal based, Arcade Fire perform at the Brixton Academy, last night...and it was frieking great! A great end to a great day.

From Oxford Fire to Arcade Fire in the space of 24 hours...what a convenient segue!

More later...

Oxford Fire!!!

Broad Street in Oxford was bathed with fire last night and tonight (and tomorrow night too) to help celebrate Oxford's Millenium. I went and took some pix. There was a lot of photography going on.

It was a very social occassion too because even though I didn't really make firm plans to meet anyone there, I eneded up running into tons of people. All the cars were cleared out of the wide, broad (ahem) street and lots of braziers, flame pots, small furnaces with chimneys and a big flame chandelier were installed.

The Council should do more of this type of thing in Broad Street, particularly in the warmer months. The piazza-like atmosphere was fantastic, I think.

Here are some things to read about Luminox:
http://luminox.org.uk/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/oxford/content/articles...

Another Monday....another gig

Tonight, I passed up the opportunity to see the wonderful, cycling, animated film Belleville Rendezvous which was playing with a live soundtrack at the cinema in my neighbourhood, in favour of venturing to the Fez Club for my first ever gig in Reading. it was more effort to get the train through the lashing rain to go gigging on a Monday night, but a wise man once told me "Effort = Results".

The gig's protagonists? Howling Bells, who I mentioned in the comments of a previous post. I'm trying to make a point of getting back to my roots and getting into some Australian bands again.

It was a most excellent gig, with good acoustics and crystal clear vocals through the PA, which was edifying. The performance/music was a little theatrical and slightly dark but energetic and very tuneful. The room was quite full considering it is a Monday with miserable weather outside. There were at least 5 photographers doing the "first 3 songs" thing too. I didn't realise that Howling Bells were so renowned as to attract such photographic attention.

The video above is of their new single which, as Juanita from the band pointed out, is "on sale from today, so go buy it".

Their site has their whole album as a stream, so go check it out...I recommend it.

http://www.howlingbells.com