Nice, slow day.   I woke up at 7.. figured that was too early .. so went back to sleep until 9. Diane headed out to the store…. while I hung out at home and tried to wake up. Our friend Dwayne came over for a nice visit  at around 9: 30. Dwayne’s son Jarred died on Thanksgiving  in 2001 / We sat around talking about our kids, our families and our jobs for about an hour.   He’s so easy to talk to .

Diane showed up around 10:30,. We took advantage of the warm weather and melting snow to try and finish up Gabe’s snowboarding rail. When I built it, I forgot about the part of us not having any hills in our yard.. Ooops. So.. the only thing left to do was to build a hill. Our idea was to use the giant raft that Max made last summer as a movable mountain. We had a couple of strong friends around so we went outside and pried the huge plywood raft out of the wood pile. We dragged it over and leaned it into the wood pile.

Then we all grabbed the rail out of the garage and started to walk it out into the yard. I seem to have managed to design the legs to make it impossible to carry and walk with it at the same time.

Diane had the great idea to turn the thing over.. and that made all the difference. It was so easy to carry upside down.

We shuffled the rail out tot the ramp… now.. what’s missing ? …. Oh yeah,  SNOW !… The idea is to pile the whole thing with snow, make a jump .. and pasta fazoole … It’ll be cool to try and get it  to work.   Now we just have to wait for snow !

It was a beautiful day for a barrel roll.. Mason managed to stay up there.

The day was so beautiful that we decided to go for a walk.. Deb came by so Diane, Deb, Elizabeth, Chai and I headed out to the lower gorge.

As we walked down to the river, we found that there was still  a quite a bit of  snow back int the woods.

The river was very high and runnign fast. it was really nice with the rocks still covered with snow

The running water was too much of a temptation for me.. I had to go in for a dip. Deb and Elizabeth graciously averted their eyes due to my.. errrr…. lack of porper bathing attire…

They didn’t have to look away long.. The water was quite refreshing… so refreshing that I was in and out in less than a minute.. It felt SO good. When you jump in a rushing river that’s just about freezing.. it really makes you feel alive .. that is unless it kills you. The cold water seemed to completely washed away the rummy mood I’d been in for about 3 days.

I stayed in even longer than Chai !

We had this great slanty sun as we walked home. It was nice.. ( though I still couldn’t feel my feet. )

When all my parts thawed I took Chai out for a late afternoon run.. The snow was mostly gone on the rivershore trail.. except for where it had been packed on the trail.. It was tough running on the snow.. but it felt good to run rather than snowshoe for a change.

I made it to the turn around point where I always talk to Sam.. it has a great view of Robbin’s Mountain..

I got a jump on my springtime ritual of writing Sam’s name in the snow there.

OK.. I’m going to go help cook.. or at least help eat.   Tomorrow  I take Max back to Pratt… gotta get some sleep before that. Tallk to you then.. Nite all. Nite Sam.
-me