Author: Chris

Mud and Snow in Tahoe

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Troy, Resi and Aiden came up to the Tahoe house in mid-April to get a couple of last days in before Homewood and several other Tahoe resorts had their closing weekend.  Definitely spring skiing conditions with slush (and mud) at the bottom and, up top, overnight frozen snow turning too soft mid-way through the day.  But then, as they headed back to the Bay Area, the temperatures dropped and we got another snow storm Sunday night.  Jon joined me at Alpine Meadows and then Squaw Valley to enjoy a last couple of powder days for the season!

Troy got a friendly visit from a bear overnight.  He woke to find all four doors on his truck open and the evidence of a bit of ransacking from a dirty bear – so lucky it was unlocked or the bear might have broken in:

  

A cute little video of Pan falling asleep at the wheel:

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Return to Mammoth Mountain

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I haven’t been skiing at Mammoth since the early nineties, after college, but it’s where I learned to ski in high school from nearby Bishop.  And I had forgotten what a great big and diverse ski mountain it is – though I’m sure I also wasn’t skiing as much of any mountain’s terrain back then either.  Anyway, driving to Mammoth from Santa Cruz/San Jose in the winter isn’t very convenient (given all the Sierra passes are closed) and  you have to essentially drive by many other great ski resorts to do it.  However, with an extended stay at our new place in Tahoe last week, it was easy to hop down to Mammoth for a couple of days (just a three hour drive) and make use of our Mountain Collective passes.

We got some nice, typical spring skiing conditions: overnight frozen snow, following the sun as the slopes softened up from east to west to north.  Plus Mammoth is so high (peaking at 11,000 ft), it was easy to avoid any sticky slush that would develop lower down.

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And Then a Lot More Snow

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March really came through for snow in Tahoe!  We got one storm after another including some nice cold ones for some great light powder days.  I also closed on the purchase of a house in Tahoe Vista and with the help of Darlene, Resi, Troy and Aiden, we were able to put it to great use right away!  Troy’s brother Rick and his son Grayson also joined us for a few days at the… “Moose Haus”? “Moose Lodge”?  Even Pan and Hera came up for a couple of weeks.

Click through for the full gallery of pictures from our five various days of skiing at Homewood over a couple of weeks in mid- to late-March:

      

 

Another Pre-Movie Gaming Day

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Roland, Clay, Mark, Steven, Troy and I gathered for another gaming day and movie night (Blade Runner 2049) this past Sunday:

  • We managed to escape the singularity after many hilariously haphazard gravitational maneuvers in Gravwell.
  • We cleverly dodged almost certain disaster on K2 by decisively turning away from the mountain entirely.
  • We successfully secured pirate booty aplenty in Libertalia despite the efforts of many mutineers among us.
  • Although many boats were violently smashed by whales, many swimmers torn apart by sharks, and several refugee-laden ships utterly destroyed by sea monsters, a handful of survivors made it to shore to tell the tale of Survive: Escape from Atlantis.

It was indeed a day of many adventures.  (And a good movie, too!)  Thanks, guys!

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Home Theater Upgrade: 4K/HDR with the JVC RS640 Projector

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I’ve been waiting to go to 4K/HDR until high-performance, laser source projectors became reasonably affordable, but it looks like that’s going to be a while yet.  (Similar to the wait for high def projectors in the early 2000’s.)  So, here we go, it’s the JVC DLA-RS640U projector (full specs here) and it’s quite the nice jump up from my older JVC RS55U projector, from early 2012.  By the way, I recommend contacting AVScience for a purchase – they offer steep discounts from the retail prices and are great to work with.  I’ve purchased from them multiple times over the years.

Both my old and new projectors are able to display video at 4K (3840 x 2160 pixels), but the RS640 can take 4K input sources while the old RS55 could only take HD content (1920 x 1080) and upscale it.  More importantly though is the ability of the RS640 to display high dynamic range (HDR) content, giving a much wider range of colors and shadow and intensity.  In addition, the RS640 provides even higher contrast ratio, even tighter spacing between pixels, more lumens, better motion enhancements, better 3D display and a low latency mode for gaming (yay!).

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