December 12, 2003

X-Mas Lights Extravaganza!

Downtown Bend

Are you at a loss for your innovative outdoor Christmas lights display? Does tossing a string of lights over the shrubs not cut it for you, anymore? Want to be the envy of all your neighbors? Have we got a scene for you!

First, gather the necessary materials:

One wireframe, light-up fawn

One light-up animated deer, preferably a type with "feeding" somewhere in its name

One million (or so) strings of red Christmas lights.

One baseball bat

Got it all? Right, then. Clear an ample space in your front yard and set up the animated deer. With the baseball bat, smash the fawn to within a breath of recognition and place it under the deer’s muzzle. Haphazardly scatter red Christmas lights over the entire scene, making sure to concentrate on the space in and around the fawn. For effect, run one string of red lights from the carnage up to the animated deer’s mouth.

And you’re done! With a bit more effort you can enhance the scene with a spray bottle filled with red food coloring, a roll of yellow caution tape, and a whole pack of "feeding" deer.

Anyways…

Snapshots of Life in Farewell Bend

"Hi!"

"Well hello there, little girl!"

"Hi!"

"Your face is covered in chocolate!"

"Hi!"

"…at least, I hope it’s chocolate…"

Standing at the intersection of Wall Street and Franklin this evening, I watched a large fellow in a Chevy Blazer drive by with all his windows down, singing along to country music at the top of his lungs.

Last night we got eight inches of snow at the Mountain, bringing the base up to 61”. It was heavy Cascade Cement snow that gives your legs a real workout, and often causes you to catch an edge and go pinwheeling down the hill (or fall into the trees and end up half-buried in snow). Nevertheless, it softened up things in the terrain park enough for me to 50-50 a few rails, boardslide the funbox, dial in my frontside 180s, try a few backside 180s, attempt a frontside 360, and catch some wicked air off the kickers.

What the hell am I talking about? Transworld Snowboarding has some good video clips of tricks that explain ’em better than I can. The pros will teach you to snowboard with their own eloquent language:

OK, and when you approach the jump, um, just take, ya know, medium speed, umm, just find a jump that you’re comfortable with, that, you know, you can go straight-edge over, just go up like you’re gonna do, you know, just go straight over it, and uhh, just, just twist your shoulders just a little bit when you go off, and it should just float right around, and uhh, just keep your weight centered and, ya know, if you got good hang time, ya know, just keep your eyes on the landing, but you can reach down and grab or, just look for the landing and just ride away clean.

Roight!