Leap Day. Leap Year. Whatever you want to call it, it's here. It's a bonus day. An extra 24 hours to earn money to pay rent, to ski, or to do nothing. A Leap Year always signifies a good year for me because it's always both an Olympic year and an election year. Definitely some things to look forward to.
I don't think it ever stopped snowing last night. The flurries tailed off to a trickle of tiny flakes, but it just kept on coming down. Now it's dumping again which means a another rough day for photography but a great day for skiing.
I woke up this morning to a world of white. The snow is coming down in massive dumps and the whole valley is blanketed with white stuff. This means a few things. One is that portrait photographers are going to have a misserable day. No one wants to sit for a portrait when it's bucketing snow. Two Vail is getting a massive infusion of snow right when it needs it. We've had some very warm afternoons, turning the snow to mush and leaving puddles all over town. A nice dump of 1-2 feet will rejuvenate the place. Three. I'm going to freeze my ass trying to take action photos of people over on Lost Boy. Maybe people will buy. Maybe they won't. It's tough to say. Four, the kittens are housebound. There's no way I'm going to let them fall into a snow drift.
There's a story on the wire today about how the U.S. has already , but the Bush administration is holding him to trot out right before the general election. Is it true? Who knows. Maybe. Maybe not. But the story has legs because this administration has no credibility and it's very easy to believe that if they could, they would pull off the exact thing that the story is alleging.
In a related story, I had a dream last night that I was at picnic fund raiser where Dick Cheney had picked his running mate for the 2008 election. I talked to Bill Press (where have you gone, Bill Press?) about whether or not there was a precedent for and running mate in one undecided election to have already picked his own running mate for a future contest, and of, course, he said no, The precedent is for the arrogance of this administration. It's either pretty funny or pretty damn scary.
The other night, on a whim, I drove 45 minutes or so to do something that I've wanted to do as long as I can remember, ski at night. Night skiing has been around for a long time. I can recall Park City installing lights when I was a kid and there was at least one local place in Southern California that had lights, but for some reason I never went, until last Wednesday.
As far as I know, Keystone is the only ski resort in Colorado with lights. It's definitely the only place within driving distance. The session runs from 6 to 8. I left Vail at about 5:15 thinking I had an hour drive ahead of me, but I cruised down there in about 45 minutes, got my gear together and hit the mountain.
I didn't know If I was going to be able to ski at Keystone. My ski pass is only good for Vail and Beaver Creek, but the little credit card like thing with a bar code looks like same pass that's good for Keystone. I didn't want to pay the 39 bucks for 2 hours of skiing.
So I went to the gondola. They scanned my pass and the got a message that said "Resort Charge" which means there's a problem with the credit card I have associated with the pass. The funny thing is, I don't have a credit card associated with the pass.
The lift operator said he'd let me up, but I had to ski down and take care of the problem. Instead I skied down to the other running lift, the Peru Express, where they weren't checking passes a skied it until 8.
I was expecting the slopes to be icy, because it had been a warm afternoon, but it wasn't too bad and there weren't many skiers around so I felt like I had the mountain to myself. It was probably in the high 20s with no clouds in the sky at all, just tons of stars and a sliver of a crescent moon.
I don't know if I'm going to rush back to do it again, mostly because the drive back west on I-70 is horrifying at night, but it was fun thing to do a whim and nice to know that it's there if I need it.
Hey, everybody, it's Ash Wednesday (as if you didn't know with the celebrated release of the Mel Gibson opus "The Passion of the Christ"). This means that it's the first day of Lent and time to give something up until Easter. (Isn't that right? I'm Jewish and I'm confused in the wake of my murderous rampage against your lord and savior). Anyway, I suggest you follow my lead and give up organized religion. You'll be happy you did. I know you will. Honest.
Columbine
JonBenet
Kobe Bryant
CU Football
And now U.S. Representative Marilyn Musgrave from Colorado is on the forefront of legislators trying to introduce a Constitutional amendment that will ban same-sex marriage.
Here is my question: Since when did we amend the Constitution, a document set out to protect the rights of our citizens, to deny rights to a certain group? Are we really going to institutionalize bigotry? I know we're not, but the suggestion that some segment of population including our jackass president think it's a great idea is scary as hell.
People of intelligence understand that there is not a snowflake's chance in hell of amending the Constitution on this issue. It's just insane pandering to the base of the right wing Republican party. And the "defense of marriage" is such a joke. Maybe if Bush and the GOP ass holes want to defend marriage they should deal with straight folks (like me) first who can't seem to get it right. I'd be awful curious to see what the divorce rate is amongst same sex couples some time like ten years from now. I'd bet good money that a far greater percentage of the gay couple that married on Valentine's Day in SF are together than their straight counterparts.
So last night Marilyn "Manson" Musgrave was on Larry King debating Gavin Newsome which is like a village idiot duking it out with Winston Churchill. Newsome sounds reasonable and is letting the courts decide the issue. Meanwhile Musgrave kept saying things like, well if you're going to open up marriage to same-sex couples, why not polygamists or three people who decide to get married, as if there thousands of menage a trois betrothals in the offing.
Thank you, Colorado.
This is a fucked up state.
I'm going skiing.
Lilla and Roy have put the house on the market. The asking price is 380,000 furnished. I have no idea if this is a good deal or not. I'm hoping it's not going to sell, because I don't want to deal with finding a new place, despite the toxic atmosphere here.
Lilla is pushing hard for me to buy the place. I don't even know if I would if I could afford it, which is debatable. The place is nice, there's no doubt about that and the location is excellent. I could probably rent it for a few months during the ski season and pay the mortgage. The cheapest, grottiest hotels around here go for 300 bucks a night, so I suppose I could 2 grand a week for this joint. I do want to get into real estate speculation and this FSBO could be my entree.
Lilla has given me the card of her mortgage broker, a guy by the name of Jack Bergey. She seems to be of the opinion that Jack can work some magic and make it happen. I'm skeptical, especially since the my job is not only 100% commission, but is ending in April when the mountain shuts down.
Also, if I'm going to buy a place, I really want a duplex or a lock off so that I can live in one unit and rent out the other. That makes more sense, right? Plus, do I really want to put down roots in Colorado? This is a fucked up state.
It's a lovely day in the Vail Valley. It's snowed a few inches last night and I'm off to Vail's neighboring ski resort, Beaver Creek, self-proclaimed as "America's Grand Resort." If being "Grand" means charging $4.25 for a Sobe at a mid-mountain lodge, then Beaver Creek is a grand as it gets.
I usually ski there at least one day of my "weekend" just for some variety, but I truly love the place and prefer it over most of Vail. There are no crowds. The slopes are as well maintained as any place I have ever been. The vistas are incredible. It's just an amazing place. I will post some pictures when I get back tonight.
My latest obsession is to get my hands on one of these beautiful Dale of Norway sweaters. However they are slightly out of my price range. It's shocking when you are in a store, see something you like, such as a Dale of Norway sweater, for example, and then turn over a price tag that reads "$268". Of course, I'm not going to pay that kind of cash for a pullover no matter how nice it is. I don't care if they use Scandinavian wool hand dyed by maidens with long braided blond hair and ice blue eyes.
I do want one though. It signals to me something frightening which is that every last bit of materialism that I thought had leeched out of my body during my year in the Peace Corps has come back with a raging vengeance.
Ski Patrol has a hard enough job without people acting like complete unconscious idiots on the slopes, but that's what I see every day. People fall over, that's going to happen, but all collisions are avoidable. People just need to have an once of self-awareness or caring in their bodies, but they don't.
Just yesterday, I saw two skiers collide about 20 yards above from where I was shooting. A guy wearing an orange jacket was skiing way too fast and out of control and he hit another skier, who smashed his head against the ground was so concussed he didn't know where he was. He didn't even know what day it was. And this happened right below two huge yellow signs that say "SLOW". The amazing thing is that it doesn't happen more often.
The day before I was coming down from a shoot on the same run and there was a patrolman with a sled skiing down beside me. Close to the end of the run, there's a bottleneck where two trails merge into a smaller one and there were more patrolmen on the run trying to get people to stop. I was the only one who stopped. I was praised for it, but I shouldn't have been. People are such fucking idiots. They need to start treating a patrolman with a sled like he would an ambulance. It's even more important be cognizant and to get out of the way on the slopes because the patrolman doesn't have a siren or lights or anything to alert other people to his presence other than his red jacket. It's really insane.
I found something even more disturbing the other day. While I was shooting, an older patrolman named Walt stopped to talk to me. He was trying to recruit me into the patrol, which would be a great life. However, when I asked him how much they make, I was shocked to find out that the patrol staff start at 9 bucks an hour and are lucky to make 11 after two or three years on the job. 5 years is usually the longest any of them last because of the stress. Amazingly, Walt has been on the job for 30 years.
I don't think I'm a strong enough skier yet to qualify for the patrol even if I could manage to live off 9 bucks an hour, which I can't. It's amazing that people with so much responsibility are paid so poorly. It's another example of our misguided priorities in this country.
Skiing is a great pleasure for me, but I'm growing weary of skiing by myself. For whatever reason, it has always been more pleasurable to ski with someone I know than to ski alone. Probably something about sharing the moment or having someone to talk to on the lifts.
My skiing life has been very unusual. I started, thanks to my dad, at the age of 3, for which I'm very thankful. I skied every year, at least one week a year until 1989, when there was a divergence between the cost of lift tickets and my finances. Between 1989 and when I moved to Vail eariler this year, I had skied exactly two days, one day in Turkey and one day in Bulgaria, both in 1999.
I had plenty of opportunities to ski when I lived in Bay Area. Friends were constantly going on weekend and day trips to Tahoe, but I never went. I could have gone on ski trips in the intervening years, but I always chose to travel overseas, usually to hot places instead. I did try to make a few trips overseas, but I had my plans quashed, once when my visa for Iran was denied and once when Clinton decided to bomb Iraq as a distraction from the Monica Lewinsky thing which made it difficult for me to go Lebanon as planned (I had visas for Lebanon and Syria).
Hopefully my brother will come out to Colorado soon and I have someone good to ski with for at least a week or so.
After weeks of struggling with my old Dell notebook, I finally succumbed and picked up a new pc. It's really nothing special. It's a Compaq Presario 2500, not state of the art or anything. It doesn’t have a few things that I really needed. First of all, it only cost 800 bucks including shipping (I bought it on Ubid). Second it has an integrated firewire port so that I can easily use my external hard drive. Third, it has 512 MB of RAM and it handles massive Photoshop documents with ease. It doesn't have a floppy drive which makes it difficult to get files off my notebook onto Lilla's computer which has Internet access. All in all I'm happy to have it and be up and running again.
Every once in while, ok , a few times a week, my housemate Roy, a 40+ year old South African, will come home shit-faced and start yelling all sorts of crazy stuff. His latest bit of fun is to burst into my room and tell me that I have to leave. That always makes me feel really good despite the fact that he forgets about it in the morning.
Roy tends to be argumentative at the best of times and a complete ass hole at the worst. And he knows it too. He's classic example of what the Aussies call a "shit-stirrer". Roy told me that several times that he has come out of the bar to find that his tires have been slashed or someone has poured crazy glue in his door locks. Once, he said, someone broke into his car and poured crazy glue down the ignition. Now he uses a screwdriver to start his Nissan Pathfinder.
It's no fun dealing with belligerent drunks anywhere, but especially in your own home. It came as no surprise to me when Lilla, Roy's erstwhile wife, told me that they were getting divorced and the only thing preventing it was that they still owned this condo we live in. It's not on the market yet, but clearly it will be soon, so I need to get out of here. The problem is that it continues to be hard to find a place where I can live with the kittens.
Ok. So some people really enjoy skiing and snowboarding. Who can blame them? Skiing is damn fun. But rarely are people as outwardly expressive of their enjoyment as this woman who came by yesterday.
Her boyfriend came in and bought a 8x10 for her.
I've been skiing for years (since 1973) and not once during that time have I seen what I look like on the slopes, that is until earlier this week when my buddy Adam took a few shots of me on my day off.
This is probably the best of the lot. It actually looks like I might know what I'm doing, at least for the split second that he hit the shutter release.
So much has been going on here and I've just been lazy about writing. I promise I will have lots of new content tonight with some great pictures including shots of the snowboarder faceplanting on the rail. It's worth the wait.
Andrew
Yesterday, on Valentine's Day, I fell in love. With a pair of skis.
Sales reps from Nordica, famous for their boots, were out demoing their latest skis. (for those not familiar with the sport, demoing skis is like test driving a car). So in the morning before I went out to shoot, I demoed a pair Nordica's most expensive skis, fat black things dubbed "The Beast".
I skied only a few runs, but it obvious the difference in performance between these monsters and my little Rossignols. Because of their width, they would plow through the crustiest snow. The edges were so responsive and when I would carve a turn, I would pick up speed. They glided across flatter terrain like nothing I've ever been on.
I had a chat with Zack, the sales rep, and he said that because I was a "ski professional" (that made me laugh) he could sell them to me for $395 instead of the $975 retail tag. If I had the money, I'd plunk it right down, but it's not just a matter of the skis to consider, there's also the bindings and you can't buy cheap bindings to go with the top of the line skis, can you? So all-in-all, the whole package will run closer to $700 than $400, but can you put a price on love?
Most mornings and many days here in Vail, it's so cold you can see your breath. It's not such a big deal. In fact, it isn't a deal at all except that you can see how far away from people their breath carries. What's really disturbing about it is knowing that on worm days when you can't see your breath, it's still carrying that far. And your breath is intermingling with other people's breath and you breath it again. It's disgusting. It's enough to make me want to live in a bubble.
It could possibly be a great day today because:
A) The sun is shining
B) It's the first day of a three day weekend
C) It's the first day in a long time that I haven't had to run for the bus in the morning
If you thought you were in good shape, try running 200 yards for the bus carrying all your ski gear and wearing inflexible clothing at over 8,000 feet. You'll soon realize that you're badly out of shape.
Sometimes you see some odd things on the slopes at Vail. Sometimes those odd things inlcude a 6 foot rodent on a snowboard.
Last Friday I was shooting on Lost Boy, which is furthest we ever shoot from our store. The run is the furthest east on the entire mountain, but it's a good place to shoot because on a clear day, you have a great view of the spectacular Holy Cross Mountain.
I was out on the slopes early, about 9:30 because it was a beautiful day. After about 3 memory cards, I was getting a error message and realized the battery was dead. Then when I put in my spare, I found out it was dead too. I was pissed because it was going to take me at least an hour to get back down to Lionshead where the store is, pick up some new batteries, and get back. I was going miss a prime earning hour on a great day, but I had no choice. I put on my skis and headed down to Chair 7, and then skied all the way back down to the village.
While I was in the store, someone called and said they wanted to do private shoot. Cecilia, who took the call, asked me if I wanted to do it. I said what the hell. I grabbed my gear and went up to Mid-Vail to meet this guy Dalton.
I was worried he a) wasn't going to show up or b) wasn't going to be able to find me, but we found each other and we headed straight up into the Vail's famous Back Bowls. The Back Bowls have been skied by locals for years but were only recently made accessible to the general public with the addition of few lifts to ferry skiers out of the steep and bumpy terrain back there.
I was a little nervous. One because even though I can ski most of the expert runs on the mountain, it's a little different when you're carrying over 3 grand in camera equipment that doesn't belong to you. Also I'm still not that comfortable with the Canon 10D that we use. I was concerned that we would spend all this time back there and the exposures would turn out to be complete crap.
As it turned out, I shouldn't have worried at all. I started down the run to get in position to shoot Dalton, his girlfriend Christina and their business associate Dave, who had no business skiing a black diamond run. Dalton was a pretty hot skier so it was easy to make him look good. It was a bit more work with Christina and all but impossible with Dave.
I took about 100 shots of them on various parts of the run and then I had to head back to Lost Boy, but the lifts lines were so long, that the by the time I got back it well after 2 o'clock and most of the skiers had headed home. Oh well, it was a fun day. Dalton and Christina were really cool. They even asked me to shoot them again on Saturday morning, another beautiful day at Vail.
My computer is on and off again working. It's driving me nuts. There are so many things that I need to use it for, not the least of which is adding images to this website.
At least I have the main hard drive partitioned so that I can install my applications on the 'D' drive and when the OS crashes, I can just reformat the 'C' drive. It's a pain in the ass, but as long as it saves me from shelling out about a grand for a new notebook, I can live with it, at least until I get a real job.
So I'm standing in the back office at the Mountain Sharpshooters shop in Lionshead Village and I'm catching a bit of a conversation between Kurt, the manager, and Pepa, a cute, but very spoiled Argentinian girl, about proper attire for the store. Pepa is wearing a pair of red cords and we're supposed to wear black pants in the shop.
Kurt comes fuming into the back where I'm standing, his face red like something you'd see in a Popeye cartoon and proceeds to smash the shit out of the drywall, making a fist-sized hole about shoulder high. This would be bad enough but there are 3 or 4 other fist-sized holes in the dry wall in the back office.
This is just one more indication that Kurt does not exactly have the right mentality to manage a group of J-1 foreign student photographers, even in a low stress environment (at least it would be low stress without Kurt around) like ours.
As I work on the mountain, I am constantly reminded of the dangers of my chosen sport. During the two hours that I shoot on Born Free, I usually see in the neighborhood of 3-5 people being ferried down the mountain in Ski Patrol sleds. The odd thing is I just see the sleds. I have no idea what happened to them or how badly they were injured.
When I see the sleds I always thing about how lucky I am never to have been in one. I started skiing at the age of 3. The worst injury I can remember suffering is falling and biting my lip. I recall the incident vividly. I was skiing along at the end of the day under chair 1 at Mammoth Mountain in California. I was making nice little turns when I caught and edge and did a massive face plant. When I recovered, everything was where it should be expect I had that coppery taste of blood in my mouth.
That's the worst that has ever happened to me and I hope it stays that way. As I get older I feel curesed by my luck, because I think I'm due, so instead of taking risks and improving as a skier, I lean towards being cautious, which is probably the smart move since I one of millions of Americans without health insurance.
Born Free is one of the runs on the Lionshead side of Vail that I usually shoot. This guy came flying by as I was setting up my signs in the morning. He, like many riders on this section of Born Free, completely ignored the two giant yellow "SLOW" signs that are set up on this part of the run by the Vail Ski Patrol and went flying off the little lip at the top.
Yesterday , the main competitor of my former employer, Electronic Arts, and a huge component, not coincidentally, of my portfolio, surged almost 5 percent, returning my net worth to levels not seen since before 9/11.
The big question is what to do know. I think all the improvements in the economy are superficial. With jobs moving overseas, enormous levels of bankruptcy filings, foreclosures, repos and credit card defaults, eventually reality is going to come out from behind the smoke and mirrors of the Bush administration slap the American people upside the head.
What I would love to do is sell out and buy and house, maybe even here in Vail where real estate prices go up about 10% a year. If I cash out of the stock market I will have enough for a nice down payment, but my paycheck is so unsteady (I work on commission and am beholden to the weather) that I fear I could not sustain a mortgage from month to month. On the other had I don't want to see my hard earned go up in smoke when the stock market does a little reversal, say, after the next terrorist attack on our soil, which I have no doubt is coming some time before the election.
This is earliest I have ever finished my return (thank you Turbo Tax online). Ironically, for the first time since I was a teenager, I didn't even need to file. According to my W-2, I made $2,302.50 last year. That's two thousand three hundred two dollars and fifty cents.
There are three ways to look at this:
1) I made less last year than in any year since I was 15 years old
2) I was Peace Corps volunteer and was lucky to make anything
3) I'm going to look like one seriously poor muthafucka when I apply for financial aid for grad school (assuming I get in)
There's really nothing like floating down the mountain in ribbons of soft, light, fresh powder. It's like flying. You can't see your skis. You can barely see ahead of you because so much snow is blasting all over the place. You just glide down in gently arcing turns. It's glorious.
This morning, after a foot of snow dumped all night here in the Vail valley, there was fresh powder all over the mountain. I was in heaven. I skied from about 8:45 to 11 when I had to start working, by which time I was exhausted from powering down so hard on my thighs.
It was snowing and it could have been warmer, but I don't think I've ever had a nicer morning of skiing anywhere. It is supposed to dump all week so the snow should get even better in the up coming days.
I woke up Wednesday morning to massive snowflakes and world of pure whiteness outside my bedroom window. It was a day off, and I would have loved to sleep in, but the kittens simply won't allow me to sleep past 7 o'clock, which is great on workdays, because I will never be late for work, but on the "weekends", it sort of sucks.
I ran errands in the morning, driving down to Edwards to Pet Stop to buy new tags for the little beats. I went to Gart Sports to return one of the ski jackets I bought in San Diego (don't need it). I went to Carniceria Tepic, a honest to goodness Mexican grocery in the neighboring hamlet of Avon, to get a real burrito (very good, but nothing like Jalapenos in Santa Cruz, still the best in the world). And I went to Walmart, because, well, I'm feeling very poor and they are selling Campbell's Chunky Soup for 1.50 a can (at the cost of the integrity of the American workplace, but I can pay that price for another few weeks).
I took the bus into Vail at 2:14 and didn't get on the mountain until about 2:30 (a mere 90 minutes before the last lift stopped ferrying skiers up the hill), but it was the best day I've had skiing since I moved to Colorado (Holy shit, I live in Colorado - I can't believe it).
The snow was still falling very hard, snowflakes like nickels dumping out of the sky, forcing the fair weather skiers early into the warming huts and leaving the runs mostly empty. I took the gondola up and stayed in the same area riding up lift 26 about 15 times. I found my little patches of powder (which is glorious now that my thighs can handle it). I found my little jumps. There were no lift lines. I found a little slice of heaven. I found my form. It was great. It was fantastic. It was stupendous. It couldn't believe it had to end.
It dumped snow all last night and as I look out again from my bedroom window I see Vail blanketed in white. I don't have to shoot until 11, so I will be crashing through fields of fresh powder for 2 hours this morning. Can't wait. Adios
So I thought I had everything working with the Dell, more or less. I had XP on there which is a memory hog and runs slow on my notebook, but at least it runs. I could access my external hard drive. I could read my CF card to get my pictures. There were some program issues, like Photoshop not wanting to install, but for the most part, everything was hunky dory.
Then it all came unraveled in the most peculiar way.
I was trying to solve the Photoshop issue and I started by running an error check. It wouldn't run while the OS was working, so it "scheduled" an error check for the next time the PC started up. I never saw XP after that. The error check would run, and right when it was about to finish, the notebook would crash and it would start all over. This went on for at least a day and half.
Then, I said, fuck this, I'm just going to reinstall XP. I reformatted the drive (again) and before XP could go through the setup process, it tells me that some of the sectors are corrupt and unrepairable and the OS cannot be installed. How could that happen after a simple error check?
I restarted the notebook yesterday morning. It went through the error check thing again and actually finished right when I was going to bed last night (a miracle). Then it allowed me to reformat and reinstall, except the reformat is still going on. I know it shouldn't take this long. The drive is only 5 GB. I know something is seriously wrong, but what to do?
The simple answer is to buy a new computer. This would make me happy. I wouldn't have any serious problems for at least a few years and I'm already in debt up to my eyeballs with my car and all these new expenses so what's another grand?
Or I could go on eBay and buy myself a new hard drive for my crappy old notebook and probably have running like a champ for less than 150 bucks. It's a tough decision, because of that "probably." I don't want to be throwing good money away. I can't afford it these days. But I need a computer, at the very least so I can share my photography with you good people.
Yesterday I was heading up the Eagle Bahn Gondola in Lionshead for the last run of the day at about 3:50. There were two other guys in the gondola. This one guy, maybe about 60, wearing a read and white jumpsuit with stars all over it, green North Face hat under a yellow helmet, full head of gray hair, square jaw, looked like a combination of a doctor and Evil Knievel. He was telling the other guy a story that started with the mention of some medical thing called Glycol which I didn't really hear because I wasn't paying much attention to them until he said that when he was in college he fell off a third story balcony and broke his back, then he was rock climbing in Wyoming and the rope broke and he fell into boulder field and broke his back, then he was driving a car across Canada and some dude who stole a blue car in Ottawa fell asleep at the wheel and hit him head on, the other guy was killed, he but his chin and didn't his back a bit a good, the he was skiing in Aspen and somehow slid down the side of the mountain something like 800 feet and broke his back again. I'm thinking I need to get the fuck out of this gondola, but fortunately nothing happened.
So, this is not most exciting Super Bowl matchup ever, but I'd still like to watch the game. It is, after all, America's great sporting event. All the other major sports have playoff series which can be long and drawn out over more than a week. But the Super Bowl is a discreet, decisive and (sometimes) exciting moment. Plus, I love the commericals.
So I'm going to be missing out on this great treasure of American culture, not because we can't get reception in the Rockies, nor because I have better things to do, but because I'm going to be trapped in the store selling damn photographs from 3-7 (mountain time).
Wherever you are, enjoy the game and don't spend a second thinking of my plight while you suck down another beer and dig deep into the guacamole.
