Ooo, a Cthulhu costume! This costume is on display at the Nova Express Cafe in Hollywood. This would take me years to make.

What a crazy film. I have to say the ending was very understated and wasn’t that great, but the acting and the mood of the film kept me interested. I’ve just added Platoon to my Netflix queue to continue with the Vietnam theme.

I guess I should look at my apache logs, since I just got some comment spam. I wonder how the robots found my page. I hope they find my honeypot.

In my thirteen years of skate skiing, I had never competed in a race. I skied a lot on weekends and over Christmas breaks, but was always either involved with curling or felt that I needed to train and actually try hard in order to compete in skiing. I guess I always took competition too seriously. My casual skiing days finally ended this past weekend, however, when I competed in the Badger State Games.

The weather was fairly good early in the week. I participated in the MadNorSki Tuesday Night Race the on the 1st and, though the snow was a little icy, it was good skiing. I skied at 9-mile the weekend before Badger State and the snow was great. The weather became very different just before the games as the state fell under a large warm spell.

I had registered for the 10k and the 21k freestyle races. Because I had never raced before, I decided to register in the novice division. This division is open to anyone who has never won a medal in Badger State nordic skiing before, and allows the skier to ski in the last wave, with the older age groups. The snow was very wet and the only high florocarbon wax I have is Swix HF8, though the race conditions warranted HF10, a much softer warm weather wax.

During the race I pushed myself pretty hard. On Main St. I found that I could double-pole down the portion with a slight decline. The next portion was all hills and I wound up taxing myself a lot. The first water stop was at the 5k mark and I was feeling pretty tired, so I took a short rest and talked with a volunteer while a couple skiers passed. After another kilometer and a half there was another water stop where I let a few more skiers pass. Over the rest of the race I held this position with one other novice skier, a woman, directly in front of me. In the last half kilometer, I passed her and another skier and raced into the finish line. My time was 43:28 or so and I discovered later that I was the first novice skier to the finish line. I actually received a gold medal for my half-hearted attempt at skiing 10k without stopping. The sad part is that, had I registered for the regular 10k instead of the novice, I’d have still received a medal, placing second in my age group, and would have pushed an old High School friend, Josh Dietche, to third place. I guess I should train a lot next year and try the Berkie.