Snow Good

SUMMIT AT SNOQUALMIE: This weekend, we had a guest up from SW Washington. He got here Saturday evening and Sunday morning we were up and at 'em early to head up to a winter wonderland.

Hard to believe in our 6ish years of living here we've not been to the Summat at Snoqualmie before.

We left home at 7:42 Sunday a.m. and pulled into the parking lot at the ski resort at 8:43. One hour door to door - can't be that!

The scenery was just gorgeous. Beautiful snow-dusted evergreens, dramatic mountainsides with jagged edges.

Christian and our friend spent several hour skiing the many, many runs on the mountain  The kids and I had our own style of fun.

 We spent hours playing in the snow, building snow men, doing snow angels and other silly stuff.

And then from 11:15 a.m. to 1:15 p.m., we soared down this inner-tube course.

The course was great fun, but the experience would have been WAY better if the employees 'working' the attraction had been doing their jobs. It was a cluster*&%^ at the top of the hill, trying to get in line for the runs. When there were only X amount of tickets for sale for each 2-hour session, so I didn't understand why it would be so terribly oversold/crowded. Until I started looking around in line. We had tickets for session 2, and I saw MULTIPLE people in line who had session 1 and session 3 tickets. Not surprising since at no point anywhere along the line anyone remotely looked at our tags. I have no doubt could have printed almost anything out at home of the right shape and size and we could have slid to our hearts' content.

The management will be getting an email from me, for sure. But lame ass employees and nightmarish overcrowding aside, I accentuated the positive with the kids and we worked hard to have fun in spite of it. He's a video of CJ after his run and Annabelle coming down the hill behind him.

And here's another photo from Christian's perspective ...

and a quick video of his experience.

We were on the move most all the day, stopping at the fire just twice to warm up.

SATELLITE: This morning we tuned in to NASA TV for breakfast. On today's 'menu' - the launch of the  Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) satellite.

LDCM is a collaboration of the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA. Since 1972, the program has been providing uninterrupted imagery of Earth from on high. Landsat gives Earthlings the chance to observe changes to our globe, for better or for worse.

It was a picture perfect launch. Clear blue skies and a took off at 10:02 a.m., right on time!
 79 minutes after launch, the LDCM spacecraft separated from the rocket and just 3 minutes later, a station in Svalbard, Norway, received its first signal.

Check out these amazing "Earth as Art" images from previous Landsat images:
http://eros.usgs.gov/imagegallery/collection.php?type=earth_as_art