Variety

     Not a whole lot to say about this past weekend, though technically there was quite a lot that was done.  Friday night was uneventful as Robb and I watched a snowboarding documentary on Netflix in preparation for the next day's activities.  Cale, his sister who was visiting for the week, and myself ventured out to Keystone early Saturday morning and I separated myself from the other two in order to get as many runs in as possible.  The weather was once again fantastic, allowing me to get in nearly 30,000 vertical feet on the day.  That is the equivalent of taking a chairlift from sea level all the way up to the top of Mt Everest and boarding the entire way down (and then some).  This included plenty of runs of varying difficulty that I had never done before.  Saturday night was taken up by watching the replay of the Purdue v Penn St basketball game which we recorded earlier in the day.

                                                     Strapping in for another run at Keystone

     Sunday I awoke early and got in a few errands before watching the AFC Championship game with the others.  By the end of the game the Broncos were headed to the Super Bowl, sending Tom Brady and the Patriots home where they belong.  Not wanting to waste such a glorious mid-60 degree January day, I skipped out on watching the NFC Championship game and hopped into the car.  Twenty minutes later I was at South Valley Park, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite nearby hiking spots, having now been twice.  I hiked for about an hour until sunset and headed back home.  It was still only about six o'clock when I got back so I checked the on-demand movies on the DVR and settled on American History X, which was a well-reviewed movie I had not seen before.  The movie actually exceeded my expectations and by the end there there was still enough time in the day to start a new book.

                                                  View along a trail at South Valley Park at Dusk

     Back when I was probably in middle school I read a book titled "An Island to Oneself."  There wasn't any reason why I read that particular book other than I think I was looking up adventurous non-fiction books online and that one must have caught my eye.  Having been published in 1966, the book was a pretty rare one and I had to get the only copy in the Indianapolis Public Library system shipped over to my local branch in order to read it.  "An Island to Oneself" is a true story written by a New Zealander named Tom Neale (1902-1977) who voluntarily lived on an uninhabited atoll in the Pacific Ocean for many years in in multiple stints.  For quite a while, if asked what my favorite book was I would reply with "An Island to Oneself."  I'm not sure why late Sunday I felt like reading it again, but I did, so I looked it up on the library systems around Denver.  With zero results and Amazon's few copies hovering around $25, I thought I was out of luck until I found a free pdf version I could send to my kindle.  So it was that late Sunday night I began to re-read "An Island to Oneself."

     I figure next week when I update this blog on my activities, I won't bore you with snowboarding stories akin to what I've posted in the past and will instead speak a little more on this book and some of the parts that have had a lasting impression on me over the years between readings.