I love winter and love to Telemark ski. I also spend a lot of my time backpacking, climbing mountains, hiking, swimming,learning about native plants, gardening and playing guitar. I have a lot of Paphiopedilum orchids in my living room. I enjoy their incredible blossoms, especially in wintertime. I like to cook--particularly Thai food, Japanese food and hearty soups. I like to gather edible wild mushrooms too. I've been spending time working on environmental issues here in the Tahoe Basin. There is so much to fight--it's just one thing after another up here--from the powers that be wanting to put a golf course in the middle of a pristine meadow, to the proposal that hundreds more docks be installed on the shores of Lake Tahoe, to the old growth forests of Monument Peak being sliced up into little pieces by Heavenly ski resort... My home is also a full-time job. I often think, "What's going to fall apart today?" :)
I wish I'd met the man who said this: "One reason (why people climb) is never given openly, rather is disguised and hidden and never even allowed in suggestion, and I venture to think it is because it is really the inmost moving impulse in all true mountain-lovers, a feeling so deep and so pure and so personal as to be almost sacred, too intimate for ordinary mention. That is, the ideal joy that only mountains give--the unreasoned, uncovetous, unworldly love of them we know not why, we care not why, only because they are what they are; because they move us in some way which nothing else does...and we feel a world that can give such rapture must be a good world, a life capable of such feeling must be worth the living." --F.W. Bourdillon
I like a wide range of stuff. Here's a sampling: Joni Mitchell, Richard Thompson, Michael Hedges, Pierre Bensusan, Martin Simpson, John Renbourn, Fairport Convention, Cat Power, Modest Mouse, Rush, Voivod, Soundgarden, Audioslave, Nine Inch Nails, Kings X, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Shakti, Eric Clapton, Blondie, Norah Jones, Stevie Wonder, Allan Holdsworth, King Crimson, Robert Fripp and the League of Crafty Guitarists, Bill Bruford, Jeff Beck, Joe Satriani, Smashing Pumpkins, Metallica, Beck, Pat Metheny, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, George Harrison, Yes, Foo Fighters, Moby, Primus, Jimi Hendrix, Thin Lizzy, Brian Eno and The Police. I also love my sister's band, Hello Stranger.
Brazil is my all-time favorite movie. Bowfinger and Orange County crack me up. They remind me of my earlier years in LA and Orange County. Pathfinder, Best in Show, Clockwise and Sideways are also movies I love. I recently saw The Fast Runner, which was beautiful. What a great story!
I'm not much of a TV watcher but I do enjoy sitting with friends and checking out certain Jackass reruns or South Park. I guess it's the ten-year-old in me. I'm also enjoying the Trailer Park Boys. You can't see them on TV in the United States so I ordered DVDs of the third season. What got me hooked was the episode with Alex Lifeson. I almost suffocated from laughing so hard. "Play that Diane Sawyer song. Play anything. That's why you're here!"Click here for a link to an unrelated but funny video. I suppose the main reason I find this video funny is I have worked at both a spa and a ski resort and have sometimes fantasized about something like this happening to rude customers.
I love reading books by Derrick Jensen, Paul Shepard, Susan Griffin, Richard Adams, Joseph LeConte, Doug Robinson. I like to spend evenings poring over climbing and hiking guides and dreaming of the trips to come. I'm currently reading Endgame, Volume II.