Slow time

The hectic time of Summer archaeology and Fall hunting seasons is pretty much over. We have entered the slow time of winter. Well that's not totally true - we still have the Holiday season ahead of us. But it does seem like things are finally slowing down - Less stress and hectic schedules to combat. More time in the evening and mornings with nothing to do.

Lately, I've been walking with the dogs and kids to the beach at Abercrombie State Park. Actually, I take the kids in the stroller so they only walk the last bit. I know, I know an almost 3 and a 4 year-old in the stroller looks bad. But I have found that if we try to walk all the way there we never make it, and they seem to dig the stroller ride. I also get a killer glute workout pushing the stroller up the hills. Yesterday, on the way back, we even found some blueberries still hanging on the bushes. I fed the kids like little birdie chicks - dropping berries into open mouths. That way they did not have to remove their gloves and get cold hands. Patrick

Triathlon Trip Photos

Tonight I made it home from California safe and sound-no significant delays, thank heavens!

Just thought I'd share some more photos from the trip. It was such a fun time and I can't wait to do another triathlon here in Kodiak or somewhere nearby this spring!

Zoya

Photos-

Anne and I waiting for the race to start for our wave.

Anne helping Dylan (our brother in law) get his wetsuit funtioning. Dylan borrowed a bike which only had one speed for the race, then forgot his running shoes-so Ella loaned him hers! He did great even with the equipment complications.

Getting ready for the bike portion in the transition area.

The night of the race-Ella, Anne and I went out to dinner with Melissa Dover. Melissa showed us a great Sushi restaurant!

Tears of Joy

Yesterday I completed my first triathlon with Anne & Dylan (brother in law) on Catalina Island in California. It went better than I could've imagined. For Dylan and I, it was our first triathlon and Anne's 3rd one. Surprisingly, I wasn't nervous yesterday before the race! I looked out at the water, saw how calm it was, and how WARM it was and felt excited for it to start. I was just ready to get it over with.

The part I fretted the most over the past 3 months was the swim--and this was the part that was actually the easiest for me. I did the 1/2 mile swim in just over 11 minutes, which I couldn't believe. I was going to be thrilled to pieces if I did it in around 20 or 25 minutes! The work in the pool with swimming lessons paid off, as I felt relaxed and just switched before freestyle and backstroke. The 10 mile bike was OK--and the run finished the race off, 3 miles. My total time as 1hr 42 minutes, which I was thrilled with--for my first triathlon! I learned how the race is orchestrated and how the "transition" time in between events is critical. My transitions were quite slow, but I wasn't trying to be fast. I just wanted to enjoy myself. And I did.

One of the highlights of the race was my interaction with a fellow triathlete during the run. I ran most of it with a lady who was also doing her first triathlon. She is 52 (our numbers were marked on our legs) years old, and her daughter was running the race ahead of her. We ran about the same pace, and during the uphill part, when I felt like I wanted to start walking, I looked at her still jogging up, looked at her leg with "52" on it and thought "if she can do it, I can do it. I'm jogging too.". As I came around the bend and into the finish line area, she was a bit ahead of me--I could see her finishing across the line. I picked up speed and got emotional inside, thinking about how cool it was that she was doing her first triathlon with her daughter. I thought about how someday perhaps I would do a race with Nora and Stuey and how fun that would be.

Most importantly,I felt strong. I want Nora and Stuey to see how I stretch myself beyond comfort zones and strive to do things which I once thought weren't possible. I thought how lucky I am to have a husband who supports me in such endeavors. So tears of joy came down my face as I ran to Ella, Anne and Dylan after the race. A wonderful sense of accomplisment.

And now Ella wants to train to do a triathlon with us next year! Yeah!

Zoya

Pictures: Picking up my rental bike in Catalina.
Anne and I preparing all the details of our "transition" area on the beach before the race.

Halibut Bycatch

I just watched a video where literally tons of halibut were dumped overboard to die - apparently the boat is trawling for flatfish and since halibut are bycatch they can not be kept. So they are discarded, thrown overboard to die and float to the bottom - I noted that a few actually did live and manage to swim away - Hooray! Admittedly, I do not know a lot about this issue, but the video really struck a cord. I found it at the blog address below - check out the October 31rst blog entry titled 'Filthy Halibut Waste'. Watch the linked video, and have patience - it only gets really interesting when they start dumping all the halibut overboard at the end. I gather a fisheries observer made the video and released it illegally.

http://tholepin.blogspot.com/
(I also linked the blog on the 'other blogs of interest' list to the right under Tholepin).

What gets me about the video is that I struggle to catch enough halibut to feed my family. Catching a couple of halibut is a big deal. Our family only needs 2 or 3 a year to feed the family. Two or three halibut is over a 100 pounds of meat - maybe 30 family meals, or halibut for dinner every week or so. What gets dumped over the side in this video would feed the City of Kodiak for an entire winter! And, apparently, it is legal! According to the 'Tholepin blog' draggers in the Gulf of Alaska are allowed to catch up to 12.5 MILLION pounds of halibut every year as bycatch. That's 12.5 MILLION pounds - or at 3 pound a meal, roughly 4 million family meals of halibut wasted. I gather a lot of King Salmon are wasted this way too.

Draggers are just one way to catch fish commercially. Basically they drag a net along the bottom and catch what they can. I gather a lot of the pollack and scallops that we eat are caught this way. But there are other ways to catch scallops, halibut and pollack. Are all the methods as wasteful? I tend to think not. However, at this point I better stop because I am not an expert on the commercial fishing industry, and I got a pretty one sided story about draggers from the Tholepin Blog. But I do want to know more about this issue, and plan on investigating it further. I hope that you do too. I wonder why our local paper has not had more stories on this issue? Patrick

Icing on the cake

Today the skiing on Pyramid was fantastic. Totally unexpected too. While I knew we got a lot of new snow (see yesterday's post) I still expected early season conditions - bumps, thin cover, the occasional rock, exposed bushes. What I did not expect was a good base with powder on the top. It was like getting my cake and eating it too - the icing on the cake! I got to go skiing and it was GOOD skiing. The north bowl had a good base with about 4 to 5 inches of powder on top. Also, it was good skiing all the way back to the 1000 foot level on the way back to the car. Generally, it takes a few storms to build up a base before the skiing gets this good. Now let's pray for more snow and no warm rain.

If you look carefully in the bottom two photos you can see ski tracks in the North Bowl. Steve W beat me to it! I was surprised to see 4 other snowboarders and skiers on the mountan. So it is not just me up there - other people thought it was good too. Patrick

Snow on the Mountain

According to the 'dashboard' when I checked in to write this evening this is our 1,000 post to the blog. How apt that it has to do with skiing and snow. Zoya often complains that my 'snow conditions reports' are serious snoozer posts. I beg to differ, I see them as a benefit to humanity, and as climatological documentation. With all the current uproar about global warming I could probably get NSF funding for the blog if I agreed to do enough 'snow reports'.

Anyway, to get down to business. The snow is great on Pyramid. I was actually shocked at the amount of new snow up high. We have around 2 inches of new snow at the parking lot and more than 2 feet up above 1500 feet. WOW! It was thigh deep up there. It is time to go skiing! Patrick

Leaving for Los Angeles

Tonight I'm leaving for LA to see two of my sisters and do my first triathlon.

I go with excitement, nervousness and eagerness to get the race over with. My swimming has improved significantly in the past two weeks, but I am still quite a weak swimmer. As I swam at the Coast Guard pool earlier this week, I had a moment of "oh my gosh, what if I got totally exhausted and couldn't finish the swimming portion? Or worse yet, what if I drowned?". I'm normally not a "nervous nellie"...(I believe my friends and family can attend to that). But there is something about swimming in the open water, with lots of people and swimming a distance farther than I ever had before that creates a stir of unease inside myself.

This week I did a lot of mental re-affirmations that I could do it, and Patrick re-assured me as well. I think that its good to do things that get you outside your comfort level every once in a while. Thats when you truly grow and believe in yourself. So often people are afraid of failing or not succeeding 100%, so then they don't try. I've learned to enjoy races because it brings a sense of accomplishment afterwards.

Last night I said, "Patrick, there is a good chance I could come in last in this race".

He replied, "Thats ok Zoya! In fact, in some races there are people who sort of compete to be the last person to cross the finish line. Its an honor of sorts."

I felt better about this. And as we talked, we decided that I would probably be in the bottom chunk of finishers...if there are around 800 racers, I"d be thrilled to be around 600 or 700th. Also, at this point my goal is to not get swine flu and not have any mechanical difficulties with my rented bike. If those two things fall into place, the race will be a success by all measures.

I'm appreciative to Patrick for his support during my training time--it has taken quite a bit of coordinating some days to ensure that I got pool time in. He always thinks its so healthy for us to train for races.

Catalina Island Triathlon, here I come! Yeah!

Zoya

Photos are of Nora and Stuey- taken by Amy Johnson, of Colorado. She was in town this summer photographing kids and families.

'Tato Chip Recipe

Yesterday I criticized Zoya for buying pre-made salad dressing in a bottle. It was organic and all that (Annie's Brand) but I pointed out that we could make it ourselves - only better and without all the packaging. She pointed out the bag of Sour Cream and Onion potato chips sitting on the counter that I had recently purchased. Touche! or is that detente?

In any case, in the interest of doing our thing to save the planet I decided it's time to create our own potato chips. Zoya flatly stated that it will not be possible to home-create something as sublime as sour cream and onion potato chips. I set out to prove her wrong.

This evening I took one of the large 'yukon gold like' potatoes that we grew in our garden and used a mandolin to thinly slice it into a pot of water. I then heated up the pot until warm. I wanted to wash off the extra starch and partially cook the chips, but I did not cook them completely for fear they'd start to fall apart. In actuality I barely cooked them - I could put my finger in the water at the end and it was not very hot at all. I poured them into a colander to drain and heated up the wok with about an inch of canola oil in the bottom.

I then dropped a few slices of potato into the hot oil. I waited until the oil was hot enough that they sizzled when added to the oil. I cooked them for a while and then put them onto a dry paper towel. The first batch was all oily and limp - so for the second batch i cooked them longer. I noticed that at a certain point they stopped sizzling and turned light brown. I started to take them out of the oil at this stage and lightly add a pinch of kosher salt immediately after removing them from the oil. They turned out AWESOME. Crunchy and light. Who knew that potato chips would be so easy to make? I was also amazed at how many chips one l could create from one large potato. It made me realize that a big bag of potato chips is really only a few large potatoes.

Nonetheless, Zoya was right. I have not been able to re-create the sour cream and onion flavor. Mine were kosher salt flavor, and I think it should be easy to add a little sesame oil to the wok to get a more oriental flavor. In the next few days I plan on experimenting with potato chip seasonings. I will post what I learn.

November Snow Past

I was looking through all my old photos and came across this one from November 2000. That's Steve W skiing some of the first snow of the year on Sheratin Mountain. It made me realize that any day now the ski season will begin. I can't wait. Patrick