We got a couple more storms in mid-May along with a nice cold snap to bring fresh powder to the slopes… yay! I was able to head up with the cats and hit Squaw the morning after each storm and even just happened to catch Granite Chief moments after it opened on Sunday:
Darlene and Marvin the Martian joined Resi, Troy and Aiden for the closing ski weekend at Homewood in Tahoe this past Easter weekend:
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For Darlene’s birthday we went to see a performance of the musical Hamilton at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco – in costume of course. The smiles are mostly due to the very enthusiastic and zealous person who insisted on taking our picture for us afterwards!
Darlene’s niece, Joslyn, came out from Wisconsin for her spring break from school and I think we managed to fill her time here. We visited Shark Fin Cove, Pigeon Point Lighthouse, the Seymour Marine Discovery Center and saw dolphins while flying the drone from the sea cliffs near Pescadero. We spent one morning to see the redwood trees at Henry Cowell State Park and a deserted Roaring Camp Railroads. We introduced her to the sea otters at Moss Landing and got in a guided walk at Año Nuevo to see the elephant seals (lots of weaned pups at this time of year) and she and Darlene stayed overnight at the Monterey Zoo and fed the elephants. Besides a couple of movie nights and several interesting board games, we also went up to Tahoe for three days so she could learn to ski – and she was careening down the mountain in no time!
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Darlene and I got in another game of Great Western Trail – not withstanding Pan’s attempt to thwart us. That picture was after having just finished setting up the starting game state – the first time. We had to herd him away from the table mid-game a few times after that to avoid disaster.
Later, with my local gaming Meetup group, I tried out the cold war espionage, item-collecting game Covert (and cleaned up like a super-spy! ;-)
At another gaming meetup, I finally got the hidden traitor game Dark Moon back to the table again and incorporated some of the Shadow Corporation expansion into play with six players but it went very strangely. All of our dice rolls were so lucky that we completed all four events in just one round and a half of play – without really any intrigue of trying to suss out the infected players. Lame. Will have to try again. Meanwhile, others were engaged in a multiple-hour, six-player, three-stage bike racing series championship with Flamme Rouge. Darlene and I were introduced to the dice-rolling Space Base game and we introduced others to a quick three rounds of Cheaty Mages.
On a Wednesday night, five of us attempted to summit K2 (via the board game, K2) and alas, one of my climbers and somebody else’s were caught up top in a blizzard and died. Very sad. Kat came through though with maybe just a little frostbite to win the game.
At a Saturday gathering, I introduced the group to Quacks of Quedlinburg, in appropriate costume of course! Several of us managed to max out our potion-brewing cauldrons – but then I did forget a rule about when you’re allowed to use the neutralizing agent. Oops. After that I tried a game of Whistle Stop for the first time – that one was interesting, but a bit slow with five players.
Darlene and I also introduced her niece Joslyn to some board games while she was here for a week visiting from Wisconsin. Besides Quacks of Quedlinburg, Bärenpark and Evo, we made a first run on the new spin on cooperative, crime-solving detective games, Chronicles of Chrime. This game uses an app to allow you to explore a crime scene and related locations in virtual reality and has you prompting characters with the various bits of evidence you find to gather more clues and eventually piece together a solution to the criminal mystery – all while consuming in-game time that allows the situation to evolve. Pretty cool!
I was able to join Jon at Northstar and Bill and Kat at Heavenly for three days of skiing mid-week last week – and we had lots of sun and snow to play in.
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As I detailed earlier (Those Ice Dam Blues), the Tahoe house developed thick ice dams all around to the point where I was getting water intrusion where the dormers meet the roof above the deck. Turning the poorly-installed heat tape/cables back on, and leaving them on 24/7, let the melt water drain off (and re-freeze into a thick layer on the deck). I called around and found Millers Roofing would be able to come out and clear the snow and ice from the roof about a week later. (Boy would that suck if the heat tape hadn’t been able to get the water to drain.)
Well… it would seem that I had some entirely unfounded expectations over what to expect. I was thinking that a service to clear the snow and ice from the roof would leave the roof relatively clear of both (at least until the next snow storm). Though I had no idea how they would safely remove the foot-plus thick ice, I was surprised to discover that they apparently don’t actually remove all of the snow or apparently any of the ice. Six hours of work for three guys (and $2250) and what they do is remove about three-quarters of the snow off the top. Troy sent me a photo of the front of the house two days after the roof snow removal crew finished (and after another storm dropped some more snow). Here’s the before/after shots:
One week before and two days after the clearing work
When I did get to the house about ten days later, I was dismayed to see that while a lot of snow was dumped off the roof, the ice dams remain everywhere around the house except for where the heat tape/cables run beneath the dormers:
And there’s quite the load of snow and ice from the roof on the deck now:
The concern here is how the melt water from the roof continues to fall and refreeze into a slab of ice on the deck – getting up to the door thresholds. We are starting to get a little bit warmer weather so we’ll see how this goes in the coming months but this clearly needs some work to avoid this mess in the future – both the ice dam formation and the ice slab on the deck.
All of this makes me wonder if it was worth hiring that crew to do that partial snow load removal. I can see some more shingles are peeling off the roof eaves but maybe it would be worse. On the other hand, the ice dams remain until they eventually melt away and there’s plenty of snow remaining (and to come) to feed them. Hopefully there won’t be any water intrusion elsewhere on the roof where there are no heat cables installed.
Our annual week of skiing and board gaming didn’t happen last year but we did manage to get together this year in Utah. Bill, Kat, Jon, Stan, Tom and I all hit up Alta, Snowbird and Solitude over five days. We had plenty of snow and a few extra inches here and there over the course of the week. We also got in plenty of gaming: Diamant, Sushi Go Party, Bang!, Slide 5, Decrypto, Cheaty Mages, Codenames: Pictures, Ricochet Robot, Cutthroat Caverns and a partial game of Fury of Dracula.
Click through for the full gallery of pictures from all of us:
We were just about to toss out some old goggles that were in the closet and, on a lark, decided to check their UV protection. Mine were maybe 10+ year old Oakleys (haven’t used in many years) and Darlene’s were her old Smith’s that she had been using up until last month. Both are fitted with orange “high contrast” lenses.
Well, both appear to be failing to provide UV protection now. Not good!
Sunglasses and ski goggles can lose their UV protection over time. So… double-check your old sunglasses and goggles for UV protection!
I tested with a UV flashlight (“black light”) I picked up recently off Amazon when I decided I didn’t want to trust the unknown Chinese manufacturer (“Oho”) of some new camera goggles I bought. As it turns out, those new goggles and my old Liquid Image camera goggles I’ve been using for many years pass the UV flashlight test fine. (As do my and Darlene’s sunglasses.)
You can do a quick and dirty test just using a $20 bill and one of these inexpensive UV flashlights. You can also get a more professional test (with an actual UV blocking measurement) from your local optician.
Here’s a bad result on left (strip is fluorescing due to UV light getting through lens), good result on right – both are orange tint lenses and many years old:
Record loads of snowfall (and occasional bouts of rain) mean lots of snow and ice on the Tahoe house – enough to build up ice dams all the way around the house and to eventually find water streaming down the walls in the dining room.
It looks like the problem spot is where one of the dormers meets the roof. Melting snow collects above the ice dam below the dormers, getting under the shingles until it gets high enough to stream down where the dormer wall joins the roof. There is some heat tape installed under these dormers to create drainage through the ice dams but it’s not installed quite correctly and I had mistakenly understood that it’s not necessary to run it at night when the temperatures get down to the teens outside. Apparently there’s enough heat getting through the roof to melt the snow even when it’s that cold outside. So I ended up with water streaming down the inside walls (past electrical outlets, to boot):
Not good. I’ve got a crew coming from Mills Roofing later this week to remove the snow and ice buildup. There will be more snow and then more melt and more ice dams though. The heat tape that is there now is only on a portion of the rear of the house and it wasn’t installed properly. It doesn’t hang over the edge of the eaves as it should (to let the water drain off the roof) and a good 8-10 feet of it is wasted strung up on the wall coming from the junction box. I was able to rearrange some of it but the roof here is too steep for me to deal with most of it.
I’ve been in contact with Brian from Summit Ice Melt Systems and will be looking into potentially installing their product to prevent these ice dams from forming at all. However, that still leaves the issue of all this melt water collecting and refreezing on the deck below – and potentially leading to further water intrusion into the house:
There’s also still the outstanding damage to the roof from prior seasons. There are several sections of shingles missing from the roof but I wasn’t able to find anyone that wasn’t already booked up to repair the damage over this past year. I did eventually sign up with Jeff’s Roofing Truckee but he also wasn’t able to get to it before the first snows arrived. He did manage to locate a supply of the Tamko shingles in South Lake Tahoe though. Hopefully, he’ll get to my roof later this year once the snow and cold weather is gone:
Three weeks into February and Lake Tahoe ski resorts have already received record snowfall for the month: Squaw Valley got over 21 feet this month so far and nearly 43 feet for the season, and Homewood even more at 23 feet for the month.
Crazy! As in awesome fun! Well, except when the roads are closed due to nasty, accident-prone weather conditions – we spent one Saturday night trying to get back to the house in Tahoe Vista from Homewood. First the lake road was closed due to numerous accidents and when we finally tried to take the long way around via Truckee (and through some crazy whiteout conditions across the meadow below Northstar), they ended up closing Brockway Summit. After taking a break in Truckee for dinner and going back around through Tahoe City, we finally made it back to the house by 10 pm – maybe only barely before the unplowed snow on Regency Way got too deep for us to pass.
Three bountiful feet of snow overnight and many resorts had trouble opening for Sunday morning. (Squaw and Alpine didn’t and Homewood was overwhelmed with people and only one chair lift they could run.) That pattern of three feet of new snow repeated again and again over the month.
Click through for more pictures in the full gallery.
Got in a few more games this month, including a long gaming night with Roland, Clay, Dan and Darlene that began with Fury of Dracula and continued with everyone’s first time play of Terra Mystica. Got to try Inis with four players at the local gaming meetup in Scotts Valley. Darlene and I played many rounds of the new push-your-luck style game of potion brewing in The Quacks of Quedlinburg. We also had our first encounter with the “boss minion” in the gorgeous co-op Mechs vs. Minions and, lastly, we were utterly clobbered and my character driven insane in our first two player campaign attempt of Arkham Horror: The Card Game. So much for “standard difficulty” with even the starter campaign “Night of the Zealot” – we’ll be trying again though, with both the lights and the difficulty turned down!
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Six intrepid gamers (Mark, Stefan, Darlene, Charles, Roland and myself) gathered on a Saturday. We pushed our luck seeking the most treasure in the mines of Diamant, struggled to cross the finish line first in Flamme Rouge, tried to make off with the most loot in Clank! In! Space!, worked to build the strongest foothold at the fringe of the galaxy in Empires of the Void II, screwed each other over with the storms of Category 5, and made and broke mad alliances to establish the most colonies in Cosmic Encounter. Oh, and there was a bit of dice-throwing for good measure.
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Darlene and I also joined the local Scotts Valley gaming group a couple of times this month. Early in January we had our first time run through the lovely fourth edition version of Fury of Dracula. As Dracula, I was eventually tracked down and defeated but surely only because of the fact that I/we misinterpreted a few important rules. Wait until next time… mwahahahahaha!
In late January, we got together again and, as Long John Silver, I tried to keep my treasure hidden from four scheming pirates (Darlene included) in the new Treasure Island. We also got in a game of Sushi Go Party before breaking off into two groups. Darlene tried out Whistle Stop, while I had another go at evading the vampire hunters in Fury of Dracula. Unfortunately, we ran out of time.
I went up to Tahoe last week (Monday through Friday) to catch a series of storms. Monday night delivered a couple of inches on top of the old frozen stuff. That made for some very rough and bumpy rides off of the groomed runs on Tuesday. However, then we got a couple of feet Tuesday night but Wednesday was windy and gusting enough to keep the upper mountain from opening at Squaw or Alpine and eventually even closed the mid-mountain lift by noon at Alpine. It was super wet and heavy snow too and way too tiring after the previous day so I bailed mid-day. Resi, Troy and Aiden came up Wednesday afternoon and we got another couple of feet overnight. Thursday proved to be fantastic and Troy and I spent all day making fresh tracks at Homewood until they started closing all the lifts on us. Sheesh! They stayed for another day but I had to head home to prep for the weekend.
