For her winter long weekend, Bree takes the train with her friend Shaleen down to Washington, DC. Bree’s grandparents are happy to host, although they’re also preparing to sell their condo and move to Los Angeles.
Bree and Shaleen visit a number of DC museums. Bree has fun in the National Museum of Natural History sketching some of the dinosaur skeletons and other specimens on display.
Moxie watches Mojo walk past.
For Valentine’s Day, Jan presents Angela with a folder of emails we’d exchanged when we first met and began dating back in 1994.
The fact that these emails still exist is a minor miracle. A few years ago, Jan was cleaning out his office and found a box of ancient floppy disks from the 1980s and 90s. Before tossing them out, he bought a little floppy drive to see if any of the disks were still readable. Only two of the disks were, including one labeled “Correspondance”.
That disk had a file on it called “angela.mmf”, which seemed to be some sort of prehistoric email file format used by Microsoft in the 90s and never used again. Nobody makes a program today that can read that format, so Jan thought he’d hit a dead end.
In January Jan thought to ask ChatGPT for help. Its recommendation was to recreate a kind of virtual computer from that era that could run a contemporaneous version of Microsoft Windows that could run some software from that time that could read the file. That took several days of tinkering, much of which only served to remind him that computers were a royal pain to use in those days. But in the end Jan was finally able unlock our 30+ year-old emails and translate them to a modern format.
We enjoy reading through the messages after dinner, laughing (sometimes cringing) over events and stories we’d long ago forgotten about.
Angela’s birthday! We celebrate with a night at The Lodge at St. Edwards on the Eastside and a nice course menu at their restaurant, Cedar and Elm.
Skye and Jared’s gift to Angela is a necklace that they’d ordered months ago for Christmas. It was sent to the wrong place several times, and finally got to our house a few days ago with a message: “Merry Birthday”.
Evan (center) celebrates Lunar New Year with Chen family relations.
We leave for a ski vacation in Whistler, BC. In Vancouver we stop at UBC to pick up Liya, who will joining us for the long weekend.
It’s lunchtime when we pick her up, so on our way through Vancouver we stop for lunch. When Jan gets out of the car, he discovers he’s lost his wallet; it’s not anywhere in the car. This imposes a fair bit of hassle for the rest of the trip. [After we return home, we'll receive a letter from the police department in Lynnwood indicating that someone turned the wallet in. The wallet must have fallen out when we made a stop at a rest area north of there.]
We have a nice sunny drive up the Sea to Sky highway. We came this way last year, but it’s the first time Liya’s been to Whistler since 2015. One nice thing about Whistler is the embarassment of riches when it comes to restaurants; we have a very good dinner at Bearfoot Bistro.
First of four days skiing on Whistler and Blackcomb mountains. The entire western part of North America has received very little snow this year, so the bottom of the mountains are somewhat bare, but the snow up top is okay. We have a nice lunch at Steeps at the top of Whistler. The Latin American dinner at Balam is quite good, although we’re somewhat overwhelmed by the thumping, bass-heavy music.
We spend day two on Blackcomb Mountain, stopping for lunch at Christine’s near the top. It’s another enjoyable day of skiing. Dinner at Wildflower is good, and we enjoy comparing two different port wines after dinner.
Bree now has a rice cooker in her room that her grandparents were happy to give to her when she visited earlier this month. Bree puts a couple of googly eyes on it to give it some character. Jan suggests naming it “Han”, after one of the readings for the Japanese character 飯 for rice. It’s a Zojirushi rice cooker, so we suggest its full name be “Han Zolo”.
It snows! The snow begins early in the morning and continues on and off all day. On the plus side, there’s now fresh snow to enjoy; on the bad side, the snowstorm comes with stiff winds that force the closure of a number of lifts. The limits the territory open for skiing, and also concentrates the large number of people who have come up to enjoy the new snow into half of the ski runs.
We spend the morning on the Big Red chair, and on each ride up have to cover our faces from the onslaught of wind. In the afternoon, we make the discovery that the Garbanzo lift is the hidden gem of the Whistler side — it serves a couple of fun black diamond runs, but doesn’t go all the way to the top of the mountain and so it’s overlooked. Compared to the other lifts, there’s hardly any line.
We finish the day with a nice dinner at Araxi, a restaurant we first visited back in the mid-1990s when we were dating.
Epic powder day. The snow continued all night, so this morning there is deep, fresh powder everywhere. It’s a little hard to reach, though. We emerge from breakfast at Forecast Coffee in the middle of Whistler Village and are surprised to see a line of people backing up into the square. As we walk along the incredibly long line, we realize that it’s the queue for the Whistler Gondola. The gondola appears to be temporarily out of service, as is the adjacent Fitzsimmons Chair. The new snow has brought tons of people from all over the area, and now they have no way to get up Whistler.
We abandon our plans to ski Whistler and decide to go to Blackcomb. Angela asks someone at the hotel holding our skis if there’s a shuttle to the Blackcomb side, and the staffer calls a shuttle that arrives a few minutes later. We queue up for the Blackcomb Gondola, where the line is long but maybe 25% the length of the Whistler line. A half hour later we’re happily skiing in powder. The Blowdown run to the Jersey Cream chair is particularly fun, so we do that a few times before lunch at Glacier Creek Lodge.
After lunch, Liya’s keen to try the Glacier Chair, which we somehow have managed to never try in previous years. Brownlie Basin is nice, as is the Glacier Drive run back down the chairlift. We have so much fun that we do the same thing again, and by the time we’re done with the second run Angela and Jan are exhausted.
Dinner is at Wild Blue, a great seafood restaurant we first tried last year.
We start the day with crepes at Crepe Montagne, then pack up for the drive home. It’s another nice day, so we stop at the Tantalus Viewpoint along the way to Vancouver.
In the city we stop at Stanley Park for a walk, then have a good lunch of pho at Pho In Love. Jan makes the mistake of ordering a large bowl — it’s sufficient food for three people.
We drop Liya off at her apartment on UBC’s campus, then head home. Last year our Nexus cards were expired so we had to wait in an hour-long line at the border. We renewed our cards and were careful to bring them this time, so of course the border plaza is completely empty.