Seems like just yesterday that we were suiting up for mountain bike shreds up here in the pines.

Tonight I was sorting out my backcountry skiing gear. Changing the batteries in the beacon, packing the emergency supplies in the pack, getting the snow study kit together, and pulling out the skins.

That, and I picked up my skis from Aspen sports where Brock hooked me up with a quick binding re-mount to fix the ‘little’ issue I had last weekend at Wolf Creek.

The last few days has been a vault into winter, full-force.

It started friday night with a trip to see the Flagstaff Symphony Orchestra perform the Nutcracker. A winter performance if I ever saw one.

Since there is rarely an excuse to actually ‘dress up’ here in flagstaff, I took the opportunity to pull out some of my finer threads, dust them off, and make a decent presentation of myself. I think the top hat really sets off the facial hair.

If you want a closer look at the manscaping progress, click through on the image.

After an evening of culture and dashing good looks, I went to the other end of the closet and pulled out the work clothes. I’ve been talking about replacing windows in my house for a little while now, and this weekend I jumped into that goal full-force. With some guidance from none other than the Sanchez, and some help from the roomies and a couple other friends, the three biggest windows in my house have now been replaced with high-efficiency ones.

Two of them were pretty ‘straightforward’, in that they were (more or less) the same size as the old ones. Some demo work on the old ones, a little ‘creative’ prep work, and some major elbow grease and we got those two installed on saturday.

Sunday was the main event. There were much bigger plans for the third window, as Steve had a window leftover from another job, and we decided that it needed a place at the friedman residence. Here’s the ‘before’ shot of my dining room wall.

And after some work with a concrete saw and about 4 guys to move this thing into place, here is the after shot:

There’s about 4 inches between the bottom of the window and the floor, and we had to extend the width about 5 inches to accommodate it.

I swear, it feels like you’re sitting in some sort of terrarium in my dining room now.

It’s awesome.

It’s almost as if we planned it out perfectly, because as many of you know, we started getting dumped on with pretty massive amounts of snow on monday morning, and ended up with well over 2 feet here in town. It seems like a nice dense snow, so I’m headed up to snowbowl to ‘check the coverage’ tomorrow morning. J-money was already up there today and said it was a bit sticky, but good fun.

The snow tires are on the car.
The woodstove is cranking.
The boot dryer has been moved out of the closet.
And my current nighttime fantasies have switched from flowy singletrack to shoulder deep powder days.

Sounds like winter to me.